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Backgrounds to modern literature /

[compiled by] John Oliver Perry. San
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publications in backgrounds to

literature )

Bibliography: p [305]-323.
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1* American literature — 20th century
--History and criticism. 2. English
literature — 20th century — History and
criticism. I. Perry, John Gliver.

25 MAT S3

401574 NE¥ICxc

68-12797

Backgrounds

Modern

Literature

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Chandler Publications in
Backgrounds to Literature
Richard A. Levine, Editor

Backgrounds

Modern

Literature

JOHN OLIVER PERRY

Tufts University

CHANDLER PUBLISHING COMPANY

124 Spear Street, San Francisco, California 94122

Science Research Associates. Inc . 259 East Erie Street. Chicago. Illinois 60611
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Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-12797

Printed in the United States of America

Previously published and copyrighted materials are reprinted with the per-
mission of authors, publishers, or copyright owners as listed below:

Richard Ellmann, "Two Faces of Edward." Reprinted by permission of
Columbia University Press from Edwardians and Late Victorians (pp. 188-
210, footnotes pp. 230-233) , ed. Richard Ellmann (English Institute Essays
for 1959) . Copyright © 1960 by Columbia University Press.

"Sound and Fury" from The Georgian Revolt, Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal,
1910-1922 by Robert H. Ross. Copyright © 1965, by Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press. Reprinted by Permission of the Southern Illinois University
Press.

Ezra Pound, Personae. Copyright 1926, 1954 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Frederick J. Hoffman, "The Temper of the Twenties." Reprinted from The
Minnesota Review, Vol. I, No. I (1960) , pp. 36-45, by permission of the
publisher and Frederick J. Hoffman.

Julian Symons, "Heresy, Guilt, Munich" (selections) . Reprinted from The
Thirties: A Dream Revolved by permission of The Cresset Press, Limited.
Copyright © 1960 by Julian Symons.

Selections from "Autumn Journal" in The Collected Poems of Louis Mac-
Neice. Copyright © The Estate of Louis MacNeice 1966. Reprinted by per-
mission of Oxford University Press and Faber and Faber Ltd.

G. J. Warnock, "First Retrospect." From English Philosophy Since 1900 by
G. J. Warnock. Copyright © 1958 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted
by permission.

William Van O'Connor, "Toward a History of Bloomsbury." From Southwest
Review, Winter 1955. © 1954 by Southern Methodist University Press. Re-
printed by permission of the publisher.

Shiv K. Kumar, "Introduction," from Bergson and the Stream of Conscious-
ness Novel, reprinted by permission of Blackie and Son Limited. Copyright
© 1962 by Shiv K. Kumar.

Frederick J. Hoffman, "Influences." Reprinted by permission of Louisiana
State University Press from Freudianism and the Literary Mind, 2nd ed.
Copyright © 1945, 1957 by Louisiana State University Press.

J. M. Cohen, "Le Frisson Nouveau." Reprinted by permission of Dufour
Editions, Inc. from Poetry of This Age, 1908-195S (pp. 11-24). Copyright
© 1960 by J. M. Cohen.

[The following facing page is a continuation of this page.]

[Continuation of preceding facing page.]

From "The Waste Land," "Burnt Norton," "Preludes," "The Hollow Men"
in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright, 193G, by Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc.; copyright, © 1963, 1964, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted
by permission of the publishers.

From The Cocktail Party, copyright, 1950, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Wylie Sypher, "The Cubist Perspective." From Rococo to Cubism in Art and
Literature, by AVylie Sypher. © Copyright 1960 by Wylie Sypher. Reprinted
by permission of Random House, Inc.

Graham Hough, "Imagism and Its Consequences." Reprinted by permission
of The Catholic University of America Press from Reflections on a Literary
Revolution. © Copyright 1960 by The Catholic University of America
Press.

"The Cult of Experience in American Writing" from Philip Rahv, Image
and Idea. CopyTight 1949 by Philip Rahv. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corporation.

Stephen Spender, "The Modern as Vision of a Whole Situation." Reprinted
from Partisan Review, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer 1962) , pp. 350-365, by per-
mission of the publisher and Stephen Spender. © 1962 by Partisan Review.

From pp. 17-46, "The Ideology of Modernism" by Georg Lukacs, from
Realism in Our Time translated from the German by John and Necke
Mander. First published in an English translation under the title The
Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Copyright © 1962 by Merlin Press, Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, and Merlin Press,
Ltd. Deletions arc indicated by ellipses.

J. Hillis Miller, "The Poetry of Reality." Reprinted by permission of the
publishers from J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, Copyright, 1965, by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College.

For Lucy, absolutely

Contents

Introduction: The Uses of Backgrounds to

Modern Literature 1

I. Literary Movements and Forces in the Four Decades:
Some Cults, -isms, Feelings, and Facts 17

RICHARD ELLMANN, Two Faces of Edward [Polite Re-
ligious Rebellion and the Secular Cult of Life] 19

ROBERT H. ROSS, Souud and Fury [Realism, Futurism,
Vorticism, Imagism Early in the Second Decade] 38

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, The Temper of the Twenties
[Secularization and Innocence in the Literary
Cosmopolis] 59

JULIAN SYMONS, Heresy, Guilt, Munich [The Collapse
of Popular Front Poetics in the Late Thirties] 70

II. The Pressure of Other Ideas in the Philosophical and

Cultural Milieu 83

G. J. WARNOCK, First Retrospect [of English Philosophy
since 1900: Absolute Idealism, Analysis, Logical
Atomism, Logical Positivism] 85

WILLIAM VAN o'coNNOR, Toward a History of Blooms-
bury [Group Attitudes of an Intellectual Elite] 92

SHiv K. KUMAR, Introduction to Bergson and the Stream
of Consciousness Novel [and Connections with Wil-
liam James and Proust] 117

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, The Problem of Influence [of
Freudianism on the Literary Mind] 131

J. M. COHEN, Le Frisson Nouveau [Baudelaire and the

Symbolist Movement] 111

WYLiE SYPHER, The Cubist Perspective — The New
World of Relationships: Camera and Cinema

[Philosophy, Science, and the Arts] 157

III. Views and Theories of the Modernist Movement 187

GRAHAM HOUGH, Imagism and Its Consequences 189
PHILIP RAHV, The Cult of Experience in American

Writing 215
STEPHEN SPENDER, The Modem as Vision of a Whole

Situation 232

GEORG LUKAcs, The Ideology of Modernism 248

J. HiLLis MILLER, The Poetry of Reality 272

IV. A Modern Chronology, 1900-1941 285
V. A Selected Bibliography 305

Acknowledgments

Beyond the acknowledgments listed on the copyright page,
which must of necessity come first, I wish to indicate my indebted-
ness to a number of people who helped in preparing this book.
Most of my colleagues at Tufts offered suggestions in some way
or other, but I should particularly name Sylvan Barnet, Lee
Elioseff, Martin Friedman, and Rudolph Storch. An old Berkeley
friend, George Wickes, now at the Clarement Colleges, pointed
out one of the selections; and Theodora Kalikow, recently at
M. I. T., led me to another. The Chronology would lack many
interesting items without the special skills of the dedicatee,
whose willing and specific editorial advice throughout — not to
mention her secretarial help — was indispensable to completing
all the tasks required. Thanks also are due to Dick Levine,
general editor of this series, for accepting my format for a modern
backgrounds book (anomaly though it may seem) and for further
help with the manuscript. Errors that remain are unquestionably
mine, but all these people saved me from many more.

John Oliver Perry

Tufts University
June 24, 1967

Backgrounds

Modern

Literature

INTRODUCTION

The Uses of Backgrounds to Modern

Literature

"Only connect" • E. M. Forster's epigraph to Howard's End (1910)

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" • W. B. Yeats, "The Sec-
ond Coming" (1920)

"O harp and altar, of the fury fused" • Hart Crane, Proem to The
Bridge (1930)

"All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie" • W. H. Auden, "Sep-
tember 1, 1939" (1940)

Backgrounds to Modern Literature is a selection of recent
essays about forces and ideas at work in modern British and
American writing. A basic rationale for the collection is that the
experience of modern literature is something we can look at; that
our involvement in it is likely to be of a different sort from our
involvement in immediately contemporary literature. This state-
ment certainly describes the initial position for most present-day
reading of such long-dead moderns as Lawrence, Yeats, and
Joyce, besides a number of others who completed their major
work almost a generation ago. Most of us nowadays read modern
literature as we do the older classics, and it has presentness or
relevance for us in much the same way. Indeed, such a way of
reading is itself a modern idea, implying that all literature takes
on a timeless classic order as we look at it from our own immedi-
ate point of view and with our own needs formulate it into a
coherent and ongoing tradition. Though the order of a tradition
is timeless, the works of literature that make it up are not

2 INTRODUCTION

wrenched out of the time which they create and inhabit. When
we recognize that the red-brick suburban blight in Forster is
accompanied by the swish of ladies' long dresses through the hay,
past and present are shockingly dissociated, and a humanizing
realignment and deepening of feelings result. One might select
from modern literature its many existentialist, absurdist, or vi-
olently brutal aspects and emphasize these in order to make the
experience more surely our own. On the other hand, the great
continuing value of literature is that it can throw light on, can
help to shape, our ordinary experiences precisely by not being
quite those, by its relevant differences from our present life. The
paradox about aesthetic distance is that it brings us closer to
experiencing the work of art, both immediately for ourselves and
directly in its own terms. And it is a paradox that we understand
clearly every time we labor creatively and critically to know a
novel or a poem.

In an effort, therefore, to stimulate this kind of aesthetic dis-
tance, modern literature is here defined chronologically as the
particular literary phenomena that occurred between 1900 and
about 1940. Each of the four decades can be seen with its own
special focus and characteristics, as explained in the essays in Part
I. Throughout this collection, most of the essays chosen have
been written in the last ten years; they thus provide the best
available understanding for us now of what happened in the
modern period. The essays in Part II discuss the most important
continuing strands of thought and style found in modern litera-
ture. However, because of the present-day emphasis on the
mythic or pseudoreligious in literature, it did not seem necessary
to set aside a special and separate essay for that almost over-
whelmingly obvious element in the modern style. Part III,
"Views and Theories of the Modernist Movement," presents five
different summary ideas about what was modernism. The collec-
tion thus is designed to work toward a comprehensive and infor-
mal judgment of the period's major literary achievement and
distinction.

A prime function of these essays, especially those in Part II, is
to clarify concepts and conventions frequently occurring in mod-
ern literature. Such important notions as stream of consciousness
and psychological time, cubist multiple perspective, surrealist or

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 3

expressionist distortion, and the condensation and displacement
of dream imagery — each of these modern literary conventions
could perhaps be found in some form or other in the work of
much earlier artists and thinkers like Augustine, El Greco, or
Goethe. But as the terms themselves now indicate, to the twen-
tieth-century^ mind they are not fundamentally literary ideas or
techniques; they are associated with philosophy, psychology,
physics, painting — the manifold arts and sciences of the whole
modem cultural milieu. Though each writer's use of these con-
ventions must finally be understood in its own precise literary
terms, still any convention as a whole or its use in particular cases
cannot be fully understood in literary terms alone. From the
background of associated meanings which it selects and carries
with it arises much of its significance and effectiveness.

Furthermore, when we attempt to express and describe our
experiences of reading modern literature, we naturally look for
generally analogous experiences in the other arts, and we also use
clearly limited and well-defined concepts derived from more
strictly controlled or scientific ways of knowing and describing
other experiences and events. For a properly responsible literary
criticism, such analogies from other arts and borrowings from
various sciences have to be taken in a flexible, even metaphorical
sense, and indeed they never give a sufficient explanation or
account of literary effects; still, they are nearly indispensable in
providing a starting point for concrete and precise analysis, de-
scription, and interpretation. This is not the place to consider
the possibilities of a scientific or self-sufficient literary criticism,
though that indeed has been one of the major interests of literary
men in the twentieth century. But in explaining how a selection
of background readings can increase our understanding and
appreciation of modern literature, it is necessary to recognize that
literary experience is not created simply and entirely out of and
for an isolated literary imagination, whatever that might be.
More important, analysis of a work of literature in its own terms
demands a precise vocabulary of more widely applicable ideas;
such a terminology is indeed a prerequisite to placing and know-
ing for ourselves any particular literarv' experience. It is to pro-
mote both intelligent reading and critical analysis of modern
literature that this collection of essays is presented.

4 INTRODUCTION

The collection is not, however, a source book for modern
literature. Those who wish to find the seminal ideas of twen-
tieth-century culture in the diaries, letters, essays, speeches, and
other writings of the speculative thinkers, the scientists, and the
artists themselves may consult an extensive, nearly 1,000-page-long
collection by Professors Ellmann and Feidelson, The Modern
Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature} In the present
book, both "background" and "modern" are defined considerably
more narrowly than in The Modern Tradition, which presents
excerpts from Romantics like Goethe and Coleridge to "postmod-
ern" existentialists and absurdists like Sartre, Camus, and
Robbe-Grillet. In searching out the origins and provenance of an
ongoing, modern tradition, Ellmann and Feidelson naturally
include much continental nineteenth-century symbolist and
postmodern existentialist material. The French symbolist roots of
twentieth-century art are fully discussed in the present collection,
most directly in J. M. Cohen's essay centering on Baudelaire; and
the implicit existentialism in the modern is significantly pre-
sented in the selection by Miller in Part III. The general aim
here, however, is to focus on American and British literature of
1900-1940, and to advance no definite conception of modernism,
merely as broad a range of views and issues as is possible in fifteen
essays.

In accord with many critics, Graham Hough, in "Imagism and
Its Consequences," looks at the earlier twentieth century as fun-
damentally a time of extreme experimentation. These experi-
ments were necessary and valuable historically for the expansion
of consciousness and language prerequisite to literary art; but.
Hough feels, they produced few works of lasting literary merit
and no usable forms to develop: altogether the modern style has
been quite misleading to present-day artists and readers as a
model of what literature can and should be. Philip Rahv is also
not entirely sanguine about modern literature. The characteristic
faults he finds are those of impetuosity, confusion of focus, and
naive individualism. Rahv traces these faults not so much to a

lA full bibliographical entry and further suggestions for background
reading appear in "A Selected Bibliography," p. 305 below.

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS

supposedly mistaken extension of the symbolist aesthetics into
imagism and its consequences, as to older and deeper strains in
American history, particularly to a set of cultural ideals culminat-
ing in "the cult of experience," a primitive faith that marks the
work of even so formally civilized a writer as Henry James.

Though Rahv develops a full case for the modern movement as
inherently American, Richard Ellmann's essay introducing this
volume sees a very similar "secular cult of life" as characterizing
one of the two faces of Edwardian England. Seeing the connec-
tion between these two cults suggests two points about this collec-
tion. First, along with the writers in Part III, each of the writers
in the first two parts also presents or implies his own interpreta-
tion of what was central to modernism while discussing either a
briefer period or a particular set of ideas and attitudes. Second,
one of the more interesting issues in describing modern American
and British literature is how and to what extent is it predomi-
nantly American or British as well as to what extent thoroughly
revolutionary.- On this last issue, Ellmann's description agrees
with Rahv's earlier view: both see modernism as beginning long
before World War I and as looking backward as well as forward,
whereas Hough emphasizes the eccentricity and dead-end nature
of the modern revolt.

Stephen Spender, though himself an important figure in the
fourth modernist decade,^ writes of the whole period from our
own later perspective; it is a nostalgic backward look, though not
so personal as his autobiography, nor as political as Julian Sy-
mons' reminiscent piece from The Thirties. Spender's nostalgia
stems from a sense of a promise in the modernist movement
throughout the arts, a promise that was not perhaps ever quite
realized or realizable: the noble aim of seeing the whole situa-

2Cf. the estimate of a British critic. A. Alvarez, that modernism in Pound
and Eliot is a predominantly Amcricin search for a distinctive idiom, since we
supposedly lack a firm native tradition. But, one might rrply, isn't Faulkner
modernistic, yet his style draws on traditions of Southern rhetoric; and Frost
and Robinson, not idiomatically very modern, also sliow that a distinctly
American use of the common English style could proceed without extreme
experimentation.

3 See "A Modern Chronology" at the end of this book.

b INTRODUCTION

tion. This visionary aim is a way to make life whole, and it seems
to have been swept aside in the postmodern rush towards what
we might call an extremely loose ideal of "polymorphous perver-
sity" in the second half of the twentieth century. This is not to
deny that modernism itself is a phenomenon rife with both
polymorphism and perversity; both are exactly what Georg Lu-
kacs attacks in the movement as he looks at it from a Marxist
critical position.

Lukacs' attack is along a broad front, encompassing "formal-
ism" (the analysis of literature in terms of sylistic effects without
seeing their ideological assumptions and implications) , "historic-
ism" (the denial of human or social development in significant
relations with past and future circumstances) , and "alienation."
This last key Marxist term is to be connected with "subjectiv-
ism"— fruitless concentration on the unlimited abstract possibili-
ties of each isolated individual consciousness. Indeed, language of
this sort describes the existential human condition for many
twentieth-century writers, and they react to it with grim despair,
cool acceptance, or a leap into self-generated myths and apocalyp-
tic visions. It is, Lukacs says, precisely because of the bourgeois
emphasis on the individual and his unrealistic "angst-ridden
vision of the world" that concrete, contextually actualizable qual-
ities of personality dissolve into a perverse wilderness of mirrors;
significant action, protest, and thought is paralyzed by the anti-
humane arbitrariness of existence seen from only private points
of view. A dynamic historical perspective shows individuals their
actual representative identity as social types, and such a realistic
perspective, Lukacs asserts, can alone give meaning to life and
art.

Lukacs' argument that modernism is "the negation of art"
involves a multiplicity of intertwined ideas and attitudes that are
not broadly familiar to American readers, but especially for that
reason they repay the close study they require. Of further interest
is the tracing of connections between his antiformalist diatribe
against the modern and Hough's explicitly nonsocial critique.
Another enlightening comparison is that between Lukacs' views
and those of Rahv, who, with a similarly Marxist orientation,
also relates modern ways of thinking to the bourgeois spirit of

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 7

individualism (and to the peculiar success of the American capi-
talist order) , but who does so only peripherally and without
rancor at the end of his analysis; the more crucial criterion for
Rahv is the degree and quality of "felt life" in modern
literature.

The last of the generalizing essays about modernism presents a
more positive, existentially oriented evaluation of the literature.
J. Hillis Miller makes a case for the poetry of sheer, undifferenti-
ated "reality" as a twentieth-century answer to the problems of
solipsism, nihilism, and the death of God that issued from the
previous era. Put another way, modernism can be defined as the
most recent response to the post-Cartesian sense of an irreconcil-
able split between mind and body, subject and object, a dichot-
omy that is not merely epistemological, yet need not be seen as
ontologically necessary (thougli Lukacs says modernists mistak-
enly see it thus) . Romantic and Victorian assertions of faith in
the commonness or communicability or at least potentiality of
total insight and comprehension could not long prevail without a
more broadly viable metaphysic than the nineteenth century
could provide. The views that evolve through the modern era are
thus varying ways of trying to undercut the metaphysical or
ontological question, to go behind it or to avoid it completely,
even to go inside it, perhaps, through an analysis of the meaning
of the question of meaning.

Miller, however, sees an especially valuable and to him valid
strain in modernism which dramatically reverses the terms of the
question: all that is subjective is turned inside out and presented
as objective, existing in an infinite space where all minds, words,
and things are copresent and equally real. Again to suggest a
comparison with significant contrastive emphases, we can look at
Spender's conception of the modern as an attempt at a vision of
the whole situation. That view reflects something of the symbolist
faith in a special, nonrational coherence in life or in experi-
ence— or at least a coherence of consciousness. Miller, on the
other hand, assumes in as nearly Victorian a writer as Conrad, as
well as in \V. C. Williams, Stevens, and Eliot, the breakdown of
this faith — a breakdown clearly connected with the modern phe-
nomena of dissociation of sensibility, dissolution of a reliable

g. INTRODUCTION

personal and moral guide, and alienation of individuals from an
effectively functioning social character. In its place Miller sees
artists creating versions of a new kind of belief, often unstruc-
tured, tentative, and undirected — a belief in reality here and
now. Furthermore, along with Hough but on different grounds,
Miller is critical of the blurring together of Romanticism, Sym-
bolism, and the peculiarly modern mode of grasping isolated bits
of phenomenological reality, though clearly Miller praises the
experiential vitality of this style rather than objecting to its
fragmentariness.

In the face of this wide range of articulate opinion, it would
seem presumptuous, as well as contradictory to the general pur-
poses of this collection, to take sides. Still, it would be irresponsi-
ble to ignore editorial predilections and possible biases. A posi-
tive view of modernism as radically existentialist in style and
attitude seems to this editor the best basis for a reasonable and
comprehensive description of modern literature. Thus the above
summary of Miller's essay has been extended to suggest how such
a view can connect many qualities of our experience of modern
poems and novels, and also to imply how in that view the
far-reaching objections of Hough and Lukacs can be taken into
account. Surely we do not wish to deny what we have learned and
experienced by surviving this far through the twentieth century;
a generation of reading and living has revealed what the artists
earlier in the century created: forms of thought and modes of
feeling that confront the complexity of experience in open, re-
sponsive, and ultimately life-enhancing ways. Detailed explana-
tion of how and where this achievement occurred must remain
the prerogative of the present-day reader whose own total experi-
ence will provide the basis for understanding and judgment.

Part of that experience may include extensive reading in the
discursive writing of the whole modern tradition, as in Ellmann
and Feidelson's anthology cited above. Carefully used, such wide
reading can lend substantial support to the process of distinguish-
ing the intermediate existentialist style between the Symbolist
and the postmodern Absurdist, as well as their concurrent var-
iants, the Romantic transcendentalist and the post-Freudian or
idealist mythopoeic. But readers of the literature itself will want

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 9

to know what is the value of such generalizing, whether there are
common or dominant characteristics of any period, and (the
basic question) whether it is possible to describe a period style in
any useful way. The present aniliology takes a fairly direct ap-
proach to the enormous problems involved; it is assumed that
formulating general concepts is necessary in apprehending, de-
scribing, and judging modern literature, and that direct consider-
ation of a variety of prior formulations and analyses can lead to a
more flexible, complex, and subtle set of concepts than any other
available method. Unless one is as widely read as Ren^ VVellek,
Leo Spitzer, or Erich Auerbach, basing one's ideas about a period
and its writers on a thorough knowledge of all the great monu-
ments and lesser imitations throughout European literature re-
mains a remote scholarly ideal. On the other hand, even if a
person knows only a few of the spectacular literary works in the
period from 1900 to 1940, he soon becomes aware of many signifi-
cant and suggestive connections among the marvelously diverse
styles and concerns.

Probably one of the most striking characteristics of much mod-
ern writing is its use of a multiplicity of techniques and tones
within a single poem or novel. The consequent problem for
readers is well known: to discover the complex organization of
the whole — its logic of images, structure of ideas, archetypal or
mythic pattern, organic development, curve or movement of feel-
ing, ironic tensions and unresolved paradoxes, teleology or "prin-
cipal pleasure," inner symbolic form or gesture, or some other
such abstraction pointing to a communicable total conception of
the work. So also we see great differences in style within the work
of individual authors, and we rightly pursue in Eliot, Yeats,
Joyce, Faulkner, or Lawrence a notion of how the parts of his
work are connected, taking them as developments, or permuta-
tions or related aspects of a central moving mind. One need not,
however, posit a Zeitgeist, a peculiar mind of the period, in order
to look for similar or related operations of thought and feeling
and technique. No peculiar set of modern forces is necessarily at
work in any individual or collective mind of the artist; rather it
is a requirement of our critical intelligence to perceive resem-
blances as well as differences, ^\'ith a large enough and flexible

10 INTRODUCTION

enough set of characteristics with which to define modernism, we
can perceive significant selections, variations, and connections of
that set in the creative activity of particular authors. To make
generalizations is to expand, not constrict, consciousness of vari-
ety.

An obvious danger in generalizing about the modern period is
that those writers and traits which form a distinctive pattern
dominate one's attention. But that hazard is implicit in perceiv-
ing all experiences. Still, in searching out the special character of
modernism we need not totally ignore the more traditional yet
important writers like E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, John Crowe
Ransom in America; Forster, Graves, and Housman in Britain.
The challenge they present is in testing what is included, what
excluded, in our descriptive definition of the modern mode.
Given an accurate sense of what these men achieve, we can note
not only how they contribute to our larger sense of the major
achievement of the period, but also how their work raises ques-
tions about both the nature and the value of the more experi-
mental moderns. We would not be making all we want and can
make of our literary experiences if we merely described each of
them as totally discrete; even if we identified several major classes
of style, we would make further discoveries in connecting them
by another set of general ideas.

A kind of atomistic analysis is indeed necessary in order to deal
concretely with each part of modern literature, but it is not
sufficient to account for the intensity of our interest in any single
part. Given this great and widespread interest, we will want both
to sharpen and to expand its meaning. We look then for specific
points of reference and general definitions, for we need these in
order to communicate, and thus to arrive at, a surer knowledge of
our personal literary experiences. By relating these experiences
both to our established literary knowledge and to our private
system or sense of values in all parts of life, we can begin to
account for and place the interest that the works of modem
literature have for us. The point has already been made that with
respect to our critical and personal needs a general vocabulary of
ideas is prerequisite to placing and knowing the particular ex-
perience of a literary work apprehended in its own specific terms.

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 11

That point can now be restated in language with a larger appeal
to our humanity: the best reason for attempting to develop a
broad and complex notion of what was modernism is that the
attempt leads us to make fundamental connections between the
different parts of our lives, to seek out continuities between the
more and the less recent past, to see ideas and forms in significant
relations with each other, and thus to give each of our experi-
ences its peculiar relevance for the whole of us.

Even though in listing the major works of modern literary art
one tends to select those which came into prominence in the
twenties — R. P. Blackmur's list makes 1921-1925 the anni mira-
hiles of this century's distinctive "expressionist" literature — a
definition of modernism in their terms does not necessarily imply
a hierarchy or historical flow chart which leads up to and away
from those great literary achievements. However, it has not been
possible in this limited collection to provide materials that would
serve as background for all the different kinds of writers from
1900-1940, and indeed almost inevitably the selection is biased
toward explaining and evaluating the successful experimenters,
not the writers who were more traditional, therefore more easily
understood, but not necessarily less powerfid, relevant, and inter-
esting. The essays in Part I, by dealing with each decade sep-
arately, make it possible for somewhat different literary values
and achievements to be emphasized in the various stages of the
developing modernist style. Nevertheless, an early group of Geor-
gian "war poets" (mostly antiwar) now receiving much atten-
tion*— Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Brooke — is necessarily slighted
in deference to the more striking and influential literary experi-
ments in the first part of the decade. Yet those writers, as much
perhaps as the dominant figures, acted and saw themselves as
innovators, creating their own appropriate style and idiom for a
peculiarly new set of conditions and a new consciousness. If we
now think all good writers are innovators, that conclusion too is
an achievement of the modernist writers and the poetics they
developed.

* See, for example, Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Txrilifiht: and the later
chapters in Robert H. Ross. The Georgian Revolt: 1910-1922.

12 INTRODUCTION

Despite many problems of inclusion and exclusion, it seems
clear to most critics that at least the outstanding events of early
twentieth-century Hterary history can now be meaningfully con-
nected. Most standard surveys of the literature trace the early
struggles of the major experimenters through to their crowning
glories in the difi&cult, closely packed, fiercely personal poetry and
fiction of the 1920's. The assorted disguises of personality and the
dodge of traditionalism in these writers no longer mislead us to
overemphasize their aesthetic of formal isolation and cool impas-
sivity, for the intense social and moral criticism in the experimen-
tal style was broadened and consolidated in the 1930's. Moreover,
not only did many of the most important writers die around
1940 — Yeats, Joyce, Ford, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Vir-
ginia Woolf — but also, perhaps because of political as well as
literary developments, most of the remainder became less radi-
cally revolutionary as artists and thinkers. The young experi-
menters of the 1940's operate in a quite different manner and
context from the manner of those who developed and established
themselves in the preceding four decades; and by the 1950's the
leading edge of controversy devolved to the Beat generation
while more self-controlled writers retreated to the academies and
to a consciously restrained style. This is the standard outline of
twentieth-century literary history — useful and true only as far as
such a bare sketch can be. This common view has good sense and
wide critical experience to commend it; what needs to be done is
to refine and test and amend it with concrete applications.

There is a good deal of subtle but general critical talk about
alienation as a mark of the modern artist's sensibility;^ to make
the idea concrete and vital, one can try to embed it in objective
events. But obviously to give "alienation" a specific meaning
involves more than pointing to the large number of literary exiles
in the period. Virginia Woolf's puzzling comment that the mind
of Europe changed in about 1910 may suggest a more profound
and accurate idea about literature than the more common notion

5 See the extensive discussion at the Michigan State University Conference
of M. L. Rosenthal's "Alienation of Sensibility and 'Modernity' " in Ap-
proaches to the Study of Twentieth Century Literature, 1963.

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 13

that World War I, in killing off the liowcr of European nian-
hood, effected a radical social change with cataclysmic results for
high literary culture. In short, the use of objective events as a test
and refinement of vague and general critical language has ex-
tremely uncertain value.

Admittedly, the experience of the First World War and its
successor had considerable impact on the literature as on the life
of modern times. Peter Laslett points out, however, that for
England, in the period from 1901 to 1940, most social changes
were slow, fairly even, and moderate; the period was neither one
of greatly increasing industrialization and urbanization — already
in 1901 the standard figure was reached: only one fifth of the
population was agricultural" — nor a period of rapid bourgeoisifi-
cation of the working class. Indeed, over one quarter of the
population (about 40 per cent of all children) were living in
profound poverty in 1901, mostly because of wages insufficient to
provide the necessities of life; and although the reform legisla-
tion from this time forward reduced the nature and the causes of
poverty (in 1936 the prime cause was unemployment; in 1951,
old age) , the proportion of poor families diminished only
slightly. It was not until 1940 to 1947 that any great change in the
shape of English society took place: "From being a pyramid, lofty
and slender, society began to look something more like a pear, a
pear tending to become an apple."^ Rather than declining, the
solid middle class had been slowly expanding: in Edwardian
times there Avas about one truly genteel person to seventeen
others (including many pretenders to the higher status) ; in 1951
the middle class accounted for perhaps 30 per cent of the elector-
ate. And by that recent time the electorate was the general
population and included women, whose emancipation from ser-
vantdom (in 1900 the largest occupation for both sexes) or from
a life spent in childbearing is, Laslett notes, the most emphatic
social change in the period.

Facts such as these give an interesting perspective to our read-

8 In the United States in 1900, 40 per cent of the population lived in towns
over 2,500; the nnmbcr was only around 50 per cent in 1940.
^ Peter Laslett, "Social Change in England, 1901-1951," p. 53.

14 INTRODUCTION

ing, for usually they are not overtly recognized in the literature.
By and large, lacking a dramatic social revolution, Anglo-
American literary culture seems to reflect the fairly narrow con-
cerns of a very small middle-and-upper class as well as long-
established myths about its relative size and social importance.
How are such statistics and suppositions to be analyzed by the
student of literature? Because Arnold Bennett and Virginia
Woolf both had exaggerated ideas about the middle class, are
their novels less perceptive, less useful to us? Are they to be
evaluated and understood as if they were relatively similar writ-
ers for this reason? Clearly social and economic history cannot be
the center of our study; but there are a good many philosophical
and cultural strands running through the intellectual life of the
twentieth century which, because of their more immediate rele-
vance to the reading of modern literature, one is disposed to
identify, connect, and understand more clearly. To attempt fully
understanding even these, however, would result in a life-long
study; modern political ideologies, especially, are extremely diffi-
cult to chart, so much so that the only direct references to them
here are in Julian Symons' essay in Part I, and in a brief attack
on the Nazi sympathies of certain existential philosophers in
Georg Lukacs' essay.

The selections in Part II were chosen, therefore, because the
ideas they discuss — those of Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud, and
Moore, to mention some names — are immediately useful in de-
scribing modern literature, and because they suggest important
implications and analogies for similar ideas at work in the poems,
novels, and plays themselves. Most of these selections also provide
useful ways of conceiving, understanding, and apprehending
many formal qualities in the literature — Wylie Sypher's long
essay connecting camera, painting, literature, science, and general
philosophy being the most outstanding example of this kind of
suggestiveness by analogy. Here, too, it should be apparent that
Sypher's emphasis on the Cubist perspective presents as compre-
hensive and useful a notion of what modernism was as any in the
summarizing essays of Part III. In this part also it will be possible
to connect disparate ideas — Sypher's ideas of Cubism, for exam-
ple, with both the stream-of-consciousness and Bergsonian no-

THE USES OF BACKGROUNDS 15

tions of time, and these with the symbohst techniques analyzed
by Cohen, with the related thrust of Freudian thinking about
imagery, and even with the cooler analytical philosophy of
Moore and the formal yet intuitional aesthetics of the Blooms-
bury group. And we can again try to see how far each of these
ideas contributes to the specific qualities and attitudes in our
complex and continually expanding general notions of modern-
ism.

The ultimate justification of all these selections rests finally on
what they can do to make our experience of modern literature
less diffuse, obscure, and vague. Some support for that basic goal
will come from critically examining and comparing the materials
here assembled; but the goal will be achieved only by continually
referring these conceptions to direct experiences of poems, novels,
plays, and stories. If the reader is sufficiently interested in modem
literature and has not read this far merely to search out some
simple and easily repeated truths about it, then he can be confi-
dent that his study of the succeeding pages will give these experi-
ences the focal points of reference he wants for making the
literature more truly and surely his own. He will know that the
study of literature gives questions a vital form, substance, and
value; that it does not provide answers.

Literary Movements and Forces

in the Four Decades:

Some Cults, -isms. Feelings, and Facts

RICHARD ELLMANN

Two Faces of Edward

ROBERT H. ROSS

Sound and Fury

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

The Temper of the Twenties

JULIAN SYMONS

Heresy, Guilt, Munich

Two Faces of Edward

Polite Religious Rebellion
and the Secular Cult of Life

RICHARD ELLMANN

Victoria stayed too long, Edward arrived too late. By the time
the superannuated Prince of Wales became king, it was evident
that a change would take place in literature; it took place, but
Edward has somehow never received credit for it, and the phrase
Edwardian literature is not often heard. We have to fall back on
it, though, because there is no neat phrase in English, like "the
nineties," to describe the first ten years of a century. The word
Edwardian has taken its connotations from social rather than
literary history. Just what it means is not certain, beyond the
high collars and tight trousers which flouted Victorian dowdiness
then, and which now have become the pedantic signs of juvenile
delinquency. Perhaps "pre-war courtliness" is the closest we can
come to the meaning of Edwardian outside literature, sedate
Victorianism in better dress. The meaning was present enough to
Virginia Woolf for her to declare that "on or about December
1910," that is, in the year of Edward's death, "human character
changed."^ Edward "the Peacemaker" had to die before the world
could become modern, and she pushed the dead Edwardians
aside to make room for the lively Georgians. The distinction was
more relevant, however, for describing Virginia Woolf's own
accession to purposiveness than George's accession to rule.

1 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London, The Hogarth
Essays, 1924) , p. 4.

From Richard Ellmann, ed., Edwardians and Late Victorians (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1960) .

20 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

While the late Victorians seem to have relished the idea that
they were the last, the Edwardians at once declined to consider
themselves as stragglers, ghostly remains of those Englishmen
who had stretched the empire so far. The Edwardians had, in
fact, a good deal of contempt for the previous reign, and an odd
admiration for their own doughtiness. In the midst of the general
melancholy over Victoria's death, her son said sturdily, "The
King lives. "^ To Virginia Woolf the hated Edwardian writers
were Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, yet even these writers
labored under the apprehension or misapprehension that they
were trying something new. Lascelles Abercrombie, in one of the
few essays on Edwardian literature, finds the period to be only
the decorous extension of tradition, and in his essay is detectable
that faintly patronizing note which occurs also in biographies of
Edward that prove the king was a worthy man.^ So for Abercrom-
bie the writers of this time were engagingly discreet; they drew in
literature, as Edward in life, upon an ample wardrobe, and
perhaps dared to go so far as to leave unbuttoned the lowest
button on their literary waistcoats.

That the Edwardians have been discounted is understandable,
I think, because of the prevalence of a sociological assumption. If
the birth of modern literature is dated back to the century's first
decade, what happens to our conviction that it was the Great
War which turned the tables? At any cost we have to confine the
beginning of the century to the infancy or adolescence of modern
writers, so that only when the guns boomed did they become old
enough to discern the nature of the world. The admonitory fact,
however, is that most of the writers whom we are accustomed to
call modern were already in their twenties or older when King
Edward died. In 1910 Eliot was twenty-two, Lawrence and Pound
were twenty-five, Joyce and Virginia Woolf were twenty-eight,
Forster was thirty-one. Ford Madox Ford thirty-seven, Conrad
fifty-three, Shaw fifty-four, Henry James sixty-seven. Bennett,

2Esm^ Wingfield-Stratford, The Victorian Aftermath (New York, 1934) , p.
2.

3 Lascelles Abercrombie, "Literature," in Edwardian England, ed. by F. J. C.
Hearnshaw (London, 1933) , pp. 185-203.

Tvvo FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 21

Galsworthy, and Wells were in their forties. To dismiss most of
the writers I have named as either too young or too old to be
Edwardians, as if only men of middle age counted in literary
fashion, is one of those historical simplicities like denying that
the twenties were the twenties because so many people didn't
know the twenties were going on. Neither age nor self-
consciousness determines the private character of a period; if
anything does, it is the existence of a community between young
and old experimental writers. Such a community existed in the
Edwardian period. It was a community which extended not only
across the Irish Sea but, spottily at least, across the Channel and
the Atlantic; so, if I extend Edward's dominions occasionally to
countries he did not rule, it is only to recover the imperial word
Edwardian from an enforced limitation.

If a moment must be found for human character to have
changed, I should suggest that 1900 is both more convenient and
more accurate than Virginia Woolf's 1910. In 1900, Yeats said
with good-humored exaggeration, "everybody got down off his
stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee;
nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the
Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten."* That there
was pressure upon them to change was something that the writers
of this time were distinctly aware of; it is not only Yeats, whose
attitudes, as Mr. Whitaker has shown, take a new turn; it is also
lesser writers. Even John Masefield was once asked how it had
happened that his poetry had moved from the nostalgic rhythms
of his early work to the more athletic ones of "The Everlasting
Mercy," and he replied simply, "Everybody changed his style
then." The Edwardians came like Dryden after Sir Thomas
Browne, anxious to develop a more wiry speech. Their sentences
grew more vigorous and concentrated. I will not claim for the
Edwardians' work total novelty — that can never be found in any
period, and many of their most individual traits had origin in the
nineties or earlier. But in all that they do they are freshly
self-conscious. What can be claimed is that there was a gathering

*W. B. Yeats, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford,
1936) , p. xi.

22 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

of different talents towards common devices, themes, and atti-
tudes, and King Edward at least did nothing to impede it.

What strikes us at once about Edwardian literature is that it is
thoroughly secular, yet so earnest that secularism does not de-
scribe it. It is generally assumed that in this period religion was
something to ignore and not to practice. Edwardian writers were
not in fact religious, but they were not ostentatiously irreligious.
In the Victorian period people had fumed and left the churches;
in the Edwardian period, becalmed, they published memoirs or
novels describing how strongly they had once felt about the
subject. This is the point of Gosse's Father and Son (1907) as
well as of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (written earlier,
but published in 1903) . It was also part of the subject of Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, much of it written in
1907-8, as it is of Yeats's first autobiographical book. Reveries
over Childhood and Youth, written just before the war. In all
these books the intensity of rebellion is past, an incident of an
unhappy childhood (and the vogue of having had an unhappy
childhood may well have begun with the Edwardians) succeeded
by confident maturity.

Because they outlived their passionate revolt, writers as differ-
ent as Yeats and Joyce are sometimes suspected nowadays of
having been reverted Christians or at least demi-Christians. Cer-
tainly they no longer make a fuss about being infidels. And they
are suspected of belief for another reason, too. Almost to a man,
Edwardian writers rejected Christianity, and having done so,
they felt free to use it, for while they did not need religion they
did need religious metaphors. It is no accident that the Catholic
modernists, with their emphasis upon the metaphorical rather
than the literal truth of Catholic doctrines, became powerful
enough in the first years of the century to be worth excommuni-
cating in 1907. There were other signs of a changed attitude
toward religion: the comparative mythologists tolerantly ac-
cepted Easter as one of many spring vegetation rites; William
James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in
1902, made all varieties equally valid.

In creative writers, this new temper appears not in discussion
of religion, which does not interest them, but in vocabulary.

"nvo FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 23

Religious terms are suddenly in vogue among unbelievers. Yeats
calls up God to be a symbol of the most complete thought. Joyce
allows the infidel Stephen to cry out "Heavenly God!" when,
seeing a girl wading, he experiences "an outburst of profane
joy."^ Elsewhere, as in Ulysses, he asks what difference it makes
whether God's name be Christus or Bloom, and Jesus is allowed
into Finnegans Wake as one of Finnegan's many avatars. Ezra
Pound, newly arrived in London in 1908, immediately writes a
canzone to celebrate "The Yearly Slain," a pagan god, and then
a ballad to celebrate the "Goodly Fere," who turns out to be
Christ made into a Scottish chap. All deaths of all gods roused
Pound to the same fervor. There was no need to attack with
Swinburne the "pale Galilean," or to say with Nietzsche that
"God is dead"; as a metaphor God was not dead but distinctly
alive, so much so that a character in Granville Barker's play
Waste (1906-7) asks sardonically, "What is the prose for God?"^
T. S. Eliot, if for a moment he may be regarded as an Edwardian
rather than as a Rooseveltian, used John the Baptist and Lazarus
in "Prufrock" (written in 1910), as if they were characters like
Hamlet, and even in his later life, after becoming consciously,
even self-consciously Christian, he used the words "God " and
"Christ" with the greatest circumspection, while unbelievers used
the words much more casually, their individual talents more at
ease in his tradition than he himself. D. H. Lawrence, the same
age as Pound, writes his "Hymn to Priapus" in 1912, yet remains
attracted by images of Christ and is willing enough, in spite of his
preference for older and darker gods, to revise Christianity and
use its metaphors. In The Rainbow (begun the same year) , Tom
Brangwen and his wife, when their physical relationship im-
proves, experience what Lawrence variously calls "baptism to
another life," "transfiguration," and "glorification."' In later life
Lawrence would give Christ a new resurrection so he could learn
to behave like the god Pan, and in poems such as "Last Words to

^ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable
James Joyce, ed. by Harry l.evin (New York, 1949) , p. 432.
6 H. Granville-Barker, Three Plays CNew York. 1909) , p. 271.
^ D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York, Modem Library) , p. 87.

24 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

Miriam" the cross becomes emblematic of the failure to cohabit
properly, an interpretation which I should like to think of as
Edwardian or at least post-Edwardian. Even H. G. Wells played
for a time with the notion of a "finite God," "the king of man's
adventures in space and time," though in the end he granted, too
unimaginatively, that he had been guilty of "terminological dis-
ingenuousness."^

To accept Christianity as one of a group of what Gottfried
Benn calls "regional moods," or to rewrite it for a new, pagan
purpose, seemed to the Edwardians equally cogent directions. For
the first time writers can take for granted that a large part of
their audience will be irreligious, and paradoxically this fact
gives them confidence to use religious imagery. They neither wish
to shock nor fear to shock. There is precision, not impiety, in
Joyce's use of religious words for secular processes. About 1900,
when he was eighteen, be began to describe his prose sketches not
as poems in prose, the fashionable term, but as "epiphanies,"
showings-forth of essences comparable to the showing-forth of
Christ. Dubliners he first conceived of in 1904 as a series of ten
epicleseis, that is, invocations to the Holy Spirit to transmute
bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, a sacramental
way of saying that he wished to fix in their eternal significance
the commonplace incidents he found about him. To moments of
fullness he applied the term "eucharistic." When Stephen Deda-
lus leaves the Catholic priesthood behind him, it is to become "a
priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of
experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."^ One did
not have to be a defected Irish Catholic to use terms this way.
Granville Barker's hero in Waste wants to buy the Christian
tradition and transmute it.^° Proust, searching for an adjective to
express his sense of basic experiences, calls them "celestial.""

^H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York, 1934) , pp. 573-78.
^ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable
James Joyce, p. 488.

10 Granville-Barker, Three Plays, p. 252.

11 Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouve, p. 16 (Volume VII in Oeuvres
Completes; Paris, 1932) ; cf. Remembrance of Things Past (New York,
Modern Library Giant) , II, 996.

TWO FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 25

Yeats, a defected Protestant, wTOte in 1903, as Mr. Whitaker
reminds us, that his early work was directed toward the transfig-
uration on the mountain, and his new work toward incarnation.
The artist, he held, must make a Sacred Book, which would not
be Christian or anti-Christian, but would revive old pieties and
rituals in the universal colors of art instead of in the hue of a
single creed.

The reestablishment of Christianity, this time as oiucr panoply
for an inner creed, was not limited to a few writers. In the
Edwardian novels of Henry James the words he is fondest of are
"save" and "sacrifice," and these are secular equivalents for reli-
gious concepts to which in their own terms he is indifferent. In
the novels of E. M. Forster, mostly written before Edward died,
there is exhibited this same propensity. Forster usually reserves
his religious imagery for the end of his novels. In the last pages of
Where Angels Fear to Tread, his first novel (1905), Forster
writes of Philip, "Quietly, without hysterical prayers or banging
of drums, he underwent conversion. He was saved. "^^ The Long-
est Journey (1907) concludes with Stephen Wanham undergoing
"salvation."" In A Room with a View (1908) , there is a "Sacred
Lake," immersion in which, we are told, is "a call to the blood
and to the relaxed will, a passing benediction whose influence
did not pass, a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice for youth. "^*
At the end the heroine derives from Mr. Emerson, who has "the
face of a saint who understood," "a sense of deities reconciled, a
feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain some-
thing for the whole world. "^^

Even allowing that writers always incline to inflated language
for their perorations, Forster obviously intends his words momen-
tously, almost portentously. He is not for Christ or Pan, but with
profoundly Edwardian zeal, for the deities reconciled. Some of
the same images appear with much the same meaning in his
contemporaries. A character in Granville Barker calls for "A

'2 P.. ^f. Forstrr, Where Arif^els Fear to Tread (New York. lO.'iO) , p. 267.
"Forster, The Longest Journey (Norfolk, Conn., n.d.) , p. 327.
1* Forster, A Room with a View (Norfolk, Conn., n.d.) , p. 201.
•^^Ibid.. p. .SIO.

26 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

secular Church. "^^ Shaw's Major Barbara (1905) makes similar
use of the theme of salvation with its earnest fun about the
Salvation Army. Let us be saved, Shaw says, but with less Chris-
tian noise and more Roman efficiency. Forster's "chalice" is like
the chalice in Joyce's Araby (written in 1905) , which is a symbol
of the boy's love for his sweetheart. The "Sacred Lake" with its
subverting of Christian implication is like The Lake in George
Moore's novel (1905) , in which the priest-hero immerses himself
in the lake not in order to become Christian, but to become
pagan. Forster's deflection of familiar Christian phrasing in hav-
ing his heroine feel that, in gaining the man she loves she gains
something for the whole world, is cognate with Joyce's heroine in
"The Dead" (written in 1907) , who says of her pagan lover, "I
think he died for me,"^^ a statement which helps to justify the
ending of that story in a mood of secular sacrifice for which the
imagery of barren thorns and spears is Christian yet paganized. I
do not think it would be useful to discriminate closely the
slightly varying attitudes towards Christianity in these examples:
the mood is the same, a secular one.

Yet to express secularism in such images is to give it a special
inflection. The Edwardians were looking for ways to express their
conviction that we can be religious about life itself, and they
naturally adopted metaphors offered by the religion they knew
best. The capitalized word for the Edwardians is not God but
life: "What I'm really trying to render is nothing more nor less
than Life," says George Ponderevo, when Wells is f or ty- three ;^^
"Live," says Strether to Little Bilham, when Henry James is
sixty;^^ "O life," cries Stephen Dedalus to no one in particular
when Joyce is about thirty-four;^° "I am going to begin a book
about Life," announces D. H. Lawrence, when he is thirty.^^ It

16 Granville-Barker, Three Plays, p. 250.

17 Joyce, "The Dead," in The Portable James Joyce, p. 238.

18 H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (London, Penguin Books, 1946) , p. 10.

19 Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York, Harper, 1948) , p. 150.

20 Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, p. 525.

21 Quoted by Harry T. Moore in The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1954) ,
p. 191.

TWO FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 27

does not much matter whether life is exciting or dull, though
Conrad is a little exceptional in choosing extraordinary inci-
dents. Arnold Bennett is more usual in his assurance that two old
women are worth writing The Old Wives' Tale (1908) about.
The Edwardians vied with each other in finding more and more
commonplace life to write about, and in giving the impression of
AvTiting about it in more and more common speech. In Ireland
there is the most distinct return to simple men for revelation, in
the peasant drama, in Lady Gregory's collection of folklore, in
Moore's and Joyce's short stories; but there is a good deal of it in
England too, in Arthur Morrison for example. It is connected
with an increasing physicality in writers like Lawrence and Joyce,
as if they must discuss the forbidden as well as the allowed
commonplace. In Lawrence and in Yeats there is the exaltation
of spontaneous ignorance, the gamekeeper in the one and the
fisherman in the other held up as models to those who suppose
that wisdom is something that comes with higher education. In
1911 Ford Madox Ford calls upon poets to write about ash-
buckets at dawn rather than about the song of birds or moon-
light.^^ While Henry James could not bring himself to joy in
ash-buckets, he too believed that by uninhibited scrutiny the
artist might attract life's secrets.

The Edwardian writer granted that the world was secular, but
saw no reason to add that it was irrational or meaningless. A kind
of inner belief pervades their writings, that the transcendent is
immanent in the earthy, that to go down far enough is to go up.
They felt free to introduce startling coincidences quite flagrantly,
as in A Room with a View and The Ambassadors, to hint that
life is much more than it appears to be, although none of them
would have offered that admission openly. While Biblical mira-
cles aroused their incredulity, they were singularly credulous of
miracles of their own. As Conrad said in The Shadow-Line, "The
world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it
is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelli-
gence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the

22 Ford Madox Ford, Collected Poems (London, 1914) , p. 17.

28 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

conception of life as an enchanted state."-^ The central miracle
for the Edwardians is the sudden alteration of the self; around it
much of their literature pivots. In 1907 Yeats began work on The
Player Queen, a dramatic statement of his conviction that, if we
pretend hard enough to be someone else, we can become that
other self or mask. That was the year, too, when Joyce planned
out the miraculous birth of his hero's mature soul as the conclu-
sion of A Portrait of the Artist, and when John Synge, in The
Playboy of the Western World, represented dramatically the
battle for selfhood. At the end of Synge's play, Christy Mahon is
the true playboy he has up to now only pretended to be, and his
swagger is replaced by inner confidence. In The Voysey Inherit-
ance (1905) Granville Barker brings Edward Voysey to sudden
maturity when, like the hero of that neo-Edwardian novel By
Love Possessed, he discovers the world is contaminated and that
he may nonetheless act in it. Lawrence's heroes must always shed
old skins for new ones. In Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) , the struggle
for selfhood is the hero's quest, a quest achieved only with his
death. In Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), the miracles
among which Strether moves at first are phantasmagoric, but
there is no phantasmagory about the miracle which finally occurs,
the release of Strether from ignorance to total understanding.
Though the dove dies in another of James's novels of this time
(1902) , her wings mysteriously extend beyond death into the
minds of the living, to alter their conduct miraculously. Th^
golden bowl (1904) is cracked and finally broken, but by miracle
is re-created in the mind.

Miracles of this sort occur in surprising places, even in H. G.
Wells. In Kipps the hero is transformed from a small person
named Kipps into a bloated person named Cuyps and finally into
a considerable person named Kipps. He is himself at last. Less
obviously, such a change takes place in George Ponderevo in
Tono-Bungay. It is part of Wells's favorite myth of human
achievement, and trying to express that George Ponderevo says,
"How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and

23 Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Prefaces, ed. by Edward Garnett (London,
1937) , p. 173.

"nvo FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 29

so immaterial?"-' To do so he falls back upon the words "Sci-
ence" or "Truth," words as reverberant for Wells as "chalice" for
Forster or "eucharist" for Joyce. Selfhood — the crown of life,
attained by a mysterious grace — forced the Edwardians into their
grandest metaphors. It will not seem strange that Bernard Shaw's
mind hovers continually about it, as in Man and Superman
(1901-3) and Pygmalion (1912) , where miracles as striking and
as secular as those in Synge, Joyce, or Yeats, take place. Perhaps
we could distinguish two kinds of such miracles: the kind of
Shaw and \Vells, in which a victory in the spirit is accompanied
usually by some material victory, and the kind of James, Law-
rence, Conrad, Yeats, and Joyce, in which a victory in the spirit is
usually accompanied by some material defeat. Shaw complained
vigorously to Henry James that James's kind of miracle was not
"scientific."-^

If the secular miracle is usually the climax of Edwardian
writings, there is also a thematic center, usually some single uni-
fying event or object, some external symbol which the Edward-
ians bear down upon very hard until, to use Conrad's unprepos-
sessing phrase, they "squeeze the guts out of it."*" So Forster's A
Room, with a View is organized around the title; Lucy Honey-
church, viewless at first, must learn to see; Forster plays upon the
word "view" at strategic points in the novel, and at the end Lucy
attains sight. In Conrad's Nostromo (1904) the central motif is
silver, established, by Conrad's custom, in the first chapter: silver
civilizes and silver obsesses, a two-edged sword, and the difTerent
attitudes that silver inspires control the action of the book. The
meaning of the hero's name, Nostromo, becomes as ambiguous as
silver; a lifetime of virtue is balanced against an ineradicable
moral fault, and Nostromo dies an example of Conrad's fallen
man, partially at least saved by misery and death. In The Man of
Property (1906), John Galsworthy, somewhat under Conrad's
influence, developed the very name of Forsyte into a symbol, and

24 Wells. Tono-Dunsray, p. 377.

25 Letter from G. Bernard Shaw to James, Jan. 17, 1909 in Henry James,
The Complete Plays, ed. by Leon Edel (New York. 1949) , p. 643.

28 Quoted by Ford Madox Ford in The English Novel (Philadelphia, 1929) ,
p. 147.

30 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

as if fearful we might miss it, he keeps reminding us that the
Forsytes were not only a family but a class, a state of mind, a
social disease. The use of a symbolic nucleus in these books seems
to justify itself by its public quality, a whole society being meas-
ured in terms of it. In The Golden Bowl, one of those demonstra-
tions of method which Forster found too extreme, Henry James
not only invokes the bowl itself several times in the novel, but
keeps invoking its atmosphere by repeating the words "gold" and
"golden." Verbal iteration is a means by which Edwardian novel-
ists make up for the obliquity of their method, the complexity of
their theme, and give away some of their hand. So Conrad in
Lord Jim speaks of his hero's clothing, on the first page, as
"immaculate," and at the last he is "a white speck," all the
incongruities of the book pointed up by the overemphasis on
stainlessness. Joyce plays on a group of words in A Portrait,
"apologise," "admit," "fall," "fly," and the like, expanding their
meaning gradually through the book. The pressure of this Ed-
wardian conception of novel-writing is felt even in the work of
Lawrence. In his first book, written in 1910, Lawrence is still
rather primitive in his use of key words. He changed his title
from Nethermere to The White Peacock, and then laboriously
emphasized his heroine's whiteness and introduced discussion of
the pride of peacocks. By the time he started The Rainbow two
years later, he had developed this technique so far as to use the
words "light" and "dark," and the image of the rainbow itself,
obsessively, and he does not relax this method in Women in Love
or his later books. He even does what most Edwardians do not
do, writes his essay "The Crown" to explain what light, dark, and
rainbow signify.

A good example, too, is Joyce's transformation of Stephen
Hero (1904-5) into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(chiefly 1907-8) . Between writing the two books he read a good
deal of Henry James, George Moore, and others, and quite pos-
sibly caught up Edwardian habits from them. Stephen Hero was
to a large extent a Victorian novel, with an interest in incident for
its own sake; so Joyce was particularly pleased when he composed
the scene in which Stephen asks Emma Clery to spend the night
with him. But two or three years later he expunged that scene: it

TWO facp:s of edward • FJlmayin 31

had become irrelevant to his central image. For by then he had
decided to make A Portrait an account of the gestation of a soul,
and in this metaphor of the soul's growth as like an embryo's he
found his principle of order and exclusion. It gave him an
opportunity to be passionately meticulous. In the new version the
book begins ^vith Stephen's father and, just before the ending, it
depicts the hero's severance from his mother. From the start the
soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic
tides, "drops of water" (as Joyce says at the end of the first
chapter) "falling softly in the brimming bowl." The atmosphere
of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the
light of life is glimpsed. In the first chapter the fetal soul is for
a few pages only slightly individualized, the organism responds
only to the most primitive sensory impressions, then the heart
forms and musters its affections, the being struggles towards some
unspecified, vmcomprehended culmination, it is flooded in ways
it cannot understand or control, it gropes wordlessly toward sex-
ual differentiation. In the third chapter shame floods Stephen's
whole body as conscience develops; the lower bestial nature is put
by. Then, at the end of the penultimate chapter, the soul discovers
the goal towards which it has been mysteriously proceeding — the
goal of life. It must swim no more but emerge into air, the new
metaphor being flight. The last chapter shows the soul, already
fully developed, fattening itself for its journey until at last it is
ready to leave. In the final pages of the book, Stephen's diary, the
style shifts with savage abruptness to signalize birth. The soul is
ready now, it throws off its sense of imprisonment, its melan-
choly, its no longer tolerable conditions of lower existence, to be
born.

By making his book the matrix for the ontogeny of the soul,
Joyce achieved a unity as perfect as any of the Edwardians could
achieve, and justified literally his description of the artist as like
a motlier brooding over her creation imtil it assumes independ-
ent life. The aspiration towards imity in the novel seems related
to the search for imity elsewhere, in psychology for example,
where the major effort is to bring the day-world and the night-
world together. Edwardian writers who commented on history
demonstrated the same desire to see human life in a synthesis. In

$2 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

1900 Joyce announced in his paper on "Drama and Life" that
"human society is the embodiment of changeless laws,"^^ laws
which he would picture in operation in Finnegans Wake. H. G.
Wells insisted later that "History is one,"^^ and proceeded to
outline it. Yeats said, "All forms are one form," and made clear
in A Vision that the same cyclical laws bind the lifetime of a
person, a civilization, or an idea; and this perception of unity
enabled him, he said, to hold "in a single thought reality and
justice."-^

When they came to state their aesthetic theories, the Edwar-
dians bore down hard on the importance of unity. To choose one
among a multitude of their sources, they were to some extent
making English the tradition of the symbolistes of whom Arthur
Symons had written in 1899. Aggressively and ostentatiously, the
Edwardians point to their works as microcosms characterized by
the intense apprehension of the organic unity of all things. They
felt justified in subordinating all other elements to this node of
unity. Events of the plot can be so subordinated, for example,
since, as Virginia Woolf declares, life is not a series of gig lamps
symmetrically arranged but a "luminous halo."^° Short stories
and novels begin to present atmospheres rather than narratives;
and even when events are exciting in themselves, as in Conrad
and often in James, the artist's chief labor goes to establish their
meaning in a painstaking way, and he will often set the most
dramatic events offstage or, rather than present them directly,
allow someone to recollect them. Time can be twisted or turned,
for unity has little to do with chronology. What subject matter is
used becomes of less importance because any part of life, if fully
apprehended, may serve. As Ford Madox Ford says in describing
the novel of this period, "Your 'subject' might be no more than a
child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions of a nervous

27 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. by Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann (New York, 1959) , p. 40.

28 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 619.

29 Yeats, A Vision (New York, 1938) , p. 25.

30 Woolf, "Modern Fiction," in The Common Reader (London, 192r)) , p.
189.

TWO FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 33

woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world has
gone to putting child or woman where they are. . . ."^^ Since
characters are also subsidiary to the sought-after unity, there is a
tendency to control them tightly. Few Edwardian characters can
escape from their books. Galsworthy's plays are called Strife
(1909) or Justice (1910), as if to establish the preeminence of
theme over character. The heroic hero is particularly suspect. He
is undermined not only by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victo-
rians (1912) , but by Joyce, who calls his first novel Stephen Hero
as if to guard by irony against Stephen's being really heroic;
Granville Barker, as Mr. Weales has shown, writes plays in which
the heroes do not deserve the name. The Edwardian male, as he
appears in the books of this time, is often passive and put upon,
like Maugham's Philip in Of Human Bondage (published in
1915 but drafted much earlier) or James's Strether, not only
because this is the period of the feminist movement, but because
it is the period of the hero's subordination. Concurrently, there is
a loss of interest in what the hero does for a living — the emphasis
comes so strongly upon their relatively disinterested mental activ-
ity that the occupations of Strether, Birkin, or Bloom become
shadowy and almost nominal.

The amount of unity which the Edwardians instilled in their
work is one of their extraordinary accomplishments. As Edith
Wharton aggressively and seriously declared in the Times Liter-
ary Siifyplement in 1914, "the conclusion of [a] tale should be
contained in germ in its first page."^- Conrad said in his preface
to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" that a work of art "should carry
its justification in every line."^^ There were occasional signs of
revolt against this zealous "desire and pursuit of the whole."^'' So
Wells found Henry James's insistence upon what he aptly called
"continuous relevance" to be objectionable.^^ "The thing his

^ Ford, The English Nor>el, p. 147.

32 Quoted by Walter B. Rideout in "Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,"
in Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. by Charles Shapiro
(Detroit, 1958) . p. 151.

S3 Conrad's Prefaces, p. 49.

*• The title of Frederick Baron Corvo's novel, written in 1909.

35 Wells, Boon (New York, 1915), p. 106.

34 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

novel is about is always there," he said disapprovingly,^*' probably
remembering how Joseph Conrad had irritatingly asked several
times what Wells's own novels were really aboiit.^'' Wells thought
himself later to be in favor of irrelevance, but as Gordon Ray
points out, he himself said that "almost every sentence should
have its share in the entire design," and his best books are not
thoughtlessly constructed; they are unified, as I have suggested,
by the myth of selfhood.

The Edwardian aesthetic is fairly closely related to the imagist
movement, or part of it. T. E. Hulme had interested Pound and
others in his theory of intensive manifolds, that is, of wholes with
absolutely interpenetrating parts instead of aggregates of separate
elements. Hulme instructed them to place themselves "inside the
object instead of surveying it from the outside. "^^ This position
was that which Yeats also insisted upon when he said that the
center of the poem was not an impersonal essence of beauty, but
an actual man thinking and feeling. He threw himself into the
drama because he saw in it a rejection of externality, even of
scenery, and an invitation to the writer to relinquish his self.
Henry James was also convinced that the "mere muffled majesty
of irresponsible 'authorship' "^^ must be eliminated, and entered
the consciousness of his most sensitive characters so thoroughly as
to make possible disputes over where he stood.

What is confusing about the first imagist manifestoes is that
this theory has got mixed up with another, a notion of objectivity
and impersonality which, though it receives passing applause
from Stephen in A Portrait, is not Joycean or Edwardian. Most
Edwardian writing is not aloof, and the poems Pound praised for
their imagist qualities were poems like Yeats's "The Magi," or
Joyce's "I hear an army," in which the writer is not at all
removed from his image. Pound found a more congenial version
of the Edwardian aesthetic in the vorticist movement, for that

36/fe2d., p. 109.

37 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography , pp. 527-28.

38 T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. by Herbert Read (London, 1949), pp.
180-81,213.

39 Henry James, "Preface to 'The Golden Bowl,' " in The Art of the Novel,
ed. by R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1950) , p. 328.

TWO FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 35

was manifestly based upon the absorption of the artist into his
work, rather than his detachment from it. The word "vortex" was
something of an embarrassment. Pound said, with an obvious
allusion to its female symbolism, "In decency one can only call it
a vortex."*" But it had the advantage of implying the death of the
poet in his poem: the idtimate arrogance of the artist is to
disappear. This was the point of view of James and of Yeats as
well as of Joyce; Edwardian writers were not much concerned
with the artist as were writers of the nineties; they were con-
cerned only with the art. They began to put away their flowing
ties. Yeats could never understand the reluctance of some writers
to let him improve their poems for them, since to him the work
was all. The Edwardian writer is an artist not because he pro-
claims he is, as Wilde did, but because his works proclaim it.
There is much less time for affectation and eccentricity, the point
being to get on with the job. As Conrad said in his preface to The
Secret Agent, "In the matter of all my books I have always
attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete
self-surrender.""*^

Having yielded up his own identity to write his work, the
Edwardian wished the reader to make comparable sacrifices. The
hypocrite lecteur whom Baudelaire had arraigned was the reader
who thought he might observe without joining in the work of art.
This was to pass through the house like an irresponsible tenant,
and the Edwardian novelist was too good a landlord for that.
The reader must become responsible, must pay his rent. The
sense of the importance of what their books were doing, the sense
that only art, working through religious metaphor, can give life
value, made the writers free to ask a great deal of their readers,
and the literature of the time moved towards greater difficulty,
the revival of Donne in 1912 being one of its manifestations, or
towards greater importunacy, as in Lawrence. As Henry James
remarked to a writer who complained that a meeting of authors
was dull, "Hewlett, we are not here to enjoy ourselves."

It may seem that, though I have ollcred to exhibit two faces of

<OEzra Pound, Gaudier- Rrzeska (London, 1916) , p. 106.
*i Conrad's Prefaces, p. 110.

36 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

Edward, I have in fact shown only one, and that one staring
urgently toward the atomic age. Yet modern as Edwardian litera-
ture was, it w^as not fully modern. There was a difference in
mood, which Yeats hinted at when he said that after 1900 nobody
did any of the violent things they had done in the nineties. Can
we not detect in this period, so distinguished in many ways, its
writers so strict with themselves and with us, a sensible loss of
vigor and heat? The Edwardians managed to retain much of the
stability of the Victorians, but they did so only by becoming
artful where their predecessors had seemed artless. The easy skill
of Victorian narrative disappears, and while the Edwardians have
good reasons for trying for more awesome effects, their w^ork does
not escape the charge of being self-conscious, almost voulu. It is
the age of prefaces and of revisions. Their secular miracles, which
they arranged so graciously, seem too easy now, and the modern
equivalents of them, in Malamud's The Assistant or Bellow's
Henderson the Rain King for example, are deliberately wrought
with far greater restraint. Writers of social protest like Galswor-
thy seem, as Esm^ Wingfield-Stratford points out, resigned to
their own helplessness." H. G. Wells, though so energetic, seems
when he is not at his best too devout toward science, toward
popular mechanics, and the later history of his writing of novels,
which Gordon Ray has described, makes us wonder if even earlier
he was quite so energetic as he appeared. Bennett presents his
slices of life with the assurance of a good chef that life is appetiz-
ing, yet he has mastered his ingredients without much flair. A
Portrait of the Artist is a work of genius, but wanting in gusto;
and even Yeats is for much of this time more eloquent than
implicated, not so much passionate as in favor of passion. Conrad
achieves his effects, yet so laboriously, and with awkward narra-
tors like Marlow who, in spite of his laudable artistic purposes, is
a bit of a stick. The repetition of words and images, while helpful
to the creation of unity, gives an air of pedantry to this aspiring
period; the bird flies, but with leaden wings. I should like to find
in George Gissing's book. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
(1903) , a reflection of this diminution of vitality in a period that

42 The Victorian Aftermath, p. 173.

"nvo FACES OF EDWARD • Ellmann 37

prided itself on its life. Gissing lived turbulently enough, but in
this autobiographical fiction he is at pains to seem full of calm;
a writer today might live calmly, but would want his books to be
distraught.

The war, for I will not deny that it took place, made every-
thing harder. The Edwardian confidence in artistic sensibility
was broken down; the possibility of nothingness seems to replace
the conviction of somethingness. Those Edwardian writers who
lived through the war found stability less easy to come by. Before
the war Yeats could write "The Magi," with its longing for
violence; after the war he wrote "The Second Coming," in which
violence inspires horror. Forster, who had accomplished his secu-
lar miracles rather handily in his early books, as by the trick of
sending his thinner-blooded characters to lush Italy, descends
lower to A Passage to India, where there is more brutality, and
where the realizations to which he brings his personages are less
ample, less reassuring. Pound, content with his troubadours be-
fore the war, turns upon himself in Mauberley with a strange
blend of self-destruction and self-justification. Eliot, after politely
mocking Edwardian politeness in "Prufrock," becomes impolite
in The Waste Land. Lawrence becomes strident, frantic, exhorta-
tory, almost suffocating his own mind. Virginia Woolf, unable to
find herself before the war, discovers at last a tense point around
which to organize her books, and this is not so much unity as the
threat of the breakdown of unity. Joyce, content to stay in the
conscious mind in his earlier work, descends to a fiercer under-
world in the Circe episode of Ulysses, where Edward VII ap-
pears, appropriately now turned to a nightmare figure babbling
hysterically of "Peace, perfect peace. "'^ The miracle of birth
was accomplished in A Portrait of the Artist without much
resistance, but the comparable miracle in Ulysses, Bloom's rescue
of Stephen in a world where gratuitous kindness seems out of
context, is described by Joyce with great circumspection, as if
humanistic miracles now embarrassed him. The religion of life
keeps most of its Edwardian adherents, but it has begun to stir up
its own atheists and agnostics.

•"Joyce, Ulysses (New York. Modem Library Giant, 1934) , p. 575.

Sound and Fury

Realism, Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism
Early in the Second Decade

ROBERT H. ROSS

. . . Masefield was neither the first nor the only practitioner of
realistic verse in modern times. By 1911 both Alfred Noyes and
Henry Newbolt had had their fling at the kind of verse Masefield
was attempting; and of course he had been long anticipated by
Kipling. Compared to Kipling's realistic verse, indeed, Mase-
field's seems too obviously sprung from the forcing house, too
self-conscious, too clearly contrived. "When Mr. Kipling repeats a
soldier's oath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation.
When Mr. Masefield puts down . , . oaths ... he does so rather
as a melancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but like a
virtuous man. He does not, as so many realists do, love the
innumerable coarsenesses of life which he chronicles; that is what
makes his oaths often seem as innocent as the conversation of
elderly sinners echoed on the lips of children."

Why, then, the almost instant and widespread popularity of
The Everlasting Mercy"? Perhaps the reasons alleged by Harold
Monro are as sound as any. For the first time in many years, in
Masefield the general reader found verse which he could "ap-
preciate without straining his intelligence." Moreover, to the
public delight Masefield stretched traditional poetic forms to the
breaking point. No more exquisitely jeweled lyrics, no more

From Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt, Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal,
1910-1922 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965) . Footnotes
have been omitted.

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 39

triolets or double ballades on the nothingness of things; rather,
the "rapid, free doggerel," the "bold colloquialism," and the "nar-
rative interest" of The Everlasting Mercy. Perhaps an even more
compelling reason for the poem's startling success lay in its tim-
ing. It ■was published at precisely the right moment to act as a
catalyst for some of the new forces of discontent stirring beneath
the surface of British poetry in late 1911. Finally, like the natu-
ralistic novel and the realistic drama. The Everlasting Mercy
suited its age. In the liberal though not radical social ethos with
which the poem was infused, in its racy, colloquial diction, in its
rigorous avoidance of traditionally "poetic" subject matter, the
English reading public saw tangible evidence that poetry had
finally caught up, so to speak, with the contemporary novel and
the stage.

For whatever reasons, publication of The Everlasting Mercy
may be said to mark the beginning of the prewar poetic renas-
cence, for, as Edmund Blunden observed, Masefield's poem "ener-
gized poetry and the reading of it, no matter what extremes of
feeling it then aroused or now fails to arouse." Masefield followed
up the success of The Everlasting Mercy with other narrative
poems of the same order, The Widow in the Bye Street (1912),
The Story^ of a Roundhouse (1912) , and Dauber (1913) . And in
1915, when Edward Marsh staked the considerable critical repu-
tation of Georgian Poetry on two long works in the realistic
tradition — Abercrombie's "End of the \Vorld" and Bottomley's
"King Lear's Wife" — he made amply evident w'hat was in fact
true: the kind of realism first popularized by Masefield was one of
the major facets of the prewar revolt against the dead hand of
poetic tradition.

Futurism

The most spectacular Continental revolutionary movement to
strike England with something like a major impact at the begin-
ning of the second decade was Futurism. Originally a revolt
confined almost entirely to pictorial art, Futurism began around

40 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

1908 when a small band of Milanese painters — Marinetti, Buzzi,
Palazzeschi — with that splendid Latin penchant for artistic cote-
ries, creeds, and fiery pronunciamentos, declared themselves
henceforward free from the chains of artistic Academism. The
movement quickly caught on in both Italy and France, and its
implications for poetry were soon recognized by some of its
founders, principally Marinetti. On February 20, 1909, Marinetti
published the first Futurist "Manifesto" in Le Figaro, a document
which launched Futurism not only as an artistic but also as a
poetic movement. It was followed by a spate of manifestoes dur-
ing 1909 and 1910, most of them addressed to the artist — though
one was addressed to musicians and another was concerned with
motion pictures — and in 1910 the tenets of the movement were
simimed up by Marinetti's Le Futurism. In 1912 Italian Futurist
verse was collected in an anthology which, according to Harold
Monro, had sold thirty-five thousand copies by late 1913.

There could scarcely be a more cogent example than Futurism
of the desire for the violent, the self-assertive, and the primitive,
which was beginning to engulf Continental art and from art to
spill over into poetry. "We will sing the love of danger, and the
habit of energy and fearlessness," wrote Marinetti in the mani-
festo of 1909.

The foundations of our poetry shall be courage,
audacity, and revolt.

We announce that the splendour of earth has
become enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of
Speed. . . .

All beauty is based on strife. There can be no
masterpiece otherwise than aggressive in character.
Poetry must be a violent assault against unknown
forces to overwhelm them into obedience to man.

We will sing the great multitudes furious with
work, pleasure, or revolt; the many-coloured and
polyphonic assaults of revolution in modern capitals; . . .
stations, those ravenous swallowers of fire-breathing
serpents; factories, hung by their cords of smoke to
the clouds.

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 41

Futurism lauded war, it praised violence for its own sake; taking
a page from Henley's book, it idealized the machine, especially
the automobile; it stood for speed, love of danger, noise, and the
unrestrained ego.

If there was any organized rationale at all in Futurism, it
argued fundamentally from the premise that twentieth-century
sensibility had been completely changed by scientific discovery
and its stepchild, invention. In his "New Futurist Manifesto" of
May 11, 1913, Marinetti claimed that modern communication
and machinery had brought about a change in man's psyche
which, were he courageous or wise enough to admit it, must also
cause a complete and violent change in his art. Explaining what
he meant by "The Futurist Consciousness," Marinetti claimed
that twentieth-century life had effected at least fifteen specific
results, chief among them: acceleration of living, speed; horror of
the old, the familiar, the known; abhorrence of the quiet life,
love of action and danger; destruction of "the feeling of the
beyond"; "multiplication and inexhaustibility of human desires
and ambitions"; equality of the sexes; "depreciation of love
(sentimentalism and luxury) produced by greater erotic facility
and liberty of women"; a new sense of fusion of men and ma-
chines; "nausea of the curved line . . . love of the straight line
and of the terminal."

Upon such a tenuous foundation Marinetti erected the frame-
work of the Futurist poetic. Twentieth-century poetry, he
claimed, if it Avould accurately reflect the realities of twentieth-
century life, must embody several Futurist precepts:

WORDS AT LIBERTY. Lyricism has nothing whatever to do with
syntax; it is simply "the exceptional faculty of intoxicating and
being intoxicated with life." The poet must communicate by
using "essential" words only, "and these absolutely at liberty."

WIRELESS IMAGINATION. By which Marinetti meant "entire free-
dom of images and analogies expressed by disjointed words and
without the connecting wires of syntax. . . . Poetry must be an
uninterrupted sequence of new images."

SEMAPHORic ADjECTivATiON. Qualif\ iug adjcctivcs must be cut

42 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

to the bone in Futurist verse. They should be considered only as
"semaphores" serving "to regulate the speed and pace of the race
of analogies."

VERB IN THE INFINITIVE. Finite verb forms must be avoided at
all costs because they tend to make units of meaning (i.e., sen-
tences) . The infinitive form is far preferable, indeed indispen-
sable, because it negates "in itself the existence of a sentence, and
prevents the style from stopping or sitting down at a determined
spot."

ONOMATOPOEIA AND MATHEMATICAL SIGNS. Modern versc must
have "a most rapid, brutal, and immediate lyricism ... a tele-
graphic lyricism." To this end it must have the courage to intro-
duce "onomatopoeic chords, in order to render all the sounds
and even the most cacophonous noises of modern life." And it
must make copious use of mathematical and musical symbols
"to regulate the speed of the style."

TYPOGRAPHICAL REVOLUTION. The typographical harmony of
the normal printed page of verse must be rigorously eschewed.
Typography must rather show "the flux and reflux, the jerks and
the bursts of style" represented on the page. Therefore the Futur-
ist poet may "if necessary" make use of three or four colors of ink
and twenty kinds of type on a single page.

FREE AND EXPRESSIVE ORTHOGRAPHY. Words must Continually be
made and unmade ad libitum; they must be formed, reformed,
and deformed in the process of every poem. No syntax is allow-
able by any stretch of permissiveness. We must have "words at
liberty."

Perhaps the most charitable course at this late date is thus to
allow the futurist poetic to speak for itself. Though it undeniably
opened the door to all sorts of further experiments with verse
forms, few English poets appear to have taken it very seriously as
a guide for writing verse, if for no other reason than the English
poet's fundamental distrust of Latin extremism. "If Futurism
had triumphed here," Frank Swinnerton declared, "it would
have done so because the nation had lost its head." Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine that even the most ardent poetic revolution-

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 43

ary in London in 1913 could have considered a poem like Mari-
netti's "Bataille" as much more than mildly amusing.

BATAILLE / POIDS + ODEUR
Midi % flutes glappisscment
embrasement toumtoumb alarme Gargaresch
craquement crepitation marche Cliquetis
sacs fusils sabots clous canons crinidres
roues caissons juifs beignets pains-a-huile
cantilenas ^choppes bouff^es chatoiement
chassie puanteur cannelle
fadeurs flux reflux poivre rixe vermine
tourbillon orangers-en-fleur filigrane
mis^re d(^s tehees cartes jasmin + muscade
+ rose arabesque mosaique charogne
h^rissement + savates mitrailleuses =
galets + ressac + grenouilles Cliquetis
sacs fusil canons ferraille atmosphere =
plombs + lave + 300 puanteurs + 50 parfums
pave matelas detritus crottin charognes
flic-flac entassement chameaux bourricots
tohubohu cloaque.

The major impact of Futurism upon London came not from
the Futurist poetic but in the person of its incredible founder
and publicist Filippo Marinetti. Marinetti lectured frequently in
London from 1912 through 1914. A man of considerable wealth,
he was "a flamboyant person," as Douglas Goldring recalled,
"adorned with diamond rings, gold chains, and hundreds of
flashing white teeth." His public performances were perhaps
more spectacular than edifying: during one recitation in 1914 he
was accompanied by the intermittent booming of a large drum
off-stage, and he sometimes exemplified Futurist tenets by imitat-
ing the sound of machine guns from the platform. But he spoke
everywhere and to all kinds of artists and poets, at the Lyceum
Club and in Bechstein Hall, to T. E. Hulme's Poets' Club, in the
Dore Galleries, and in the meeting room of Harold Monro's
Poetry Bookshop. Not everyone was impressed. Richard Alding-
ton recorded in December, 1913: "M. Marinetti has been reading

44 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

his new poems to London. London is vaguely alarmed and won-
dering whether it ought to laugh or not." Perhaps Edward Marsh
had attended the same reading as Aldington; at any rate he wrote
a lively account of one to Rupert Brooke, absent in the South
Seas, on December 14, 1913.

Did anyone give you an account of Marinetti's visit? I only attended
one of his manifestations — a lecture at the Poetry Bookshop, in a kind
of loft which looked as if it was meant to keep apples in, and one ought
to get into it by a ladder through a trap-door. It was illuminated by a
single night-light, which I thought at first must be a Futurist tenet; but
it turned out to be only a fatuity of Monro's. Marinetti began his
lecture by asking how he could possibly talk in a penumbra about
Futurism, the chief characteristic of which was Light, Light, Light? He
did very well all the same. He is beyond doubt an extraordinary man,
full of force and fire, with a surprising gift of turgid lucidity, a full and
roaring and foaming flood of indubitable half-truths.

He gave us two of the 'poems' on the Bulgarian War. The appeal to
the sensations was great — to the emotions, nothing. As a piece of art, I
thought it was about on the level of a very good farmyard-imitation — a
supreme music-hall turn. I could not feel that it detracted in any respect
from the position of Paradise Lost or the Grecian Urn. He has a
marvelous sensorium, and a marvelous gift for transmitting its re-
ports— but what he writes is not literature, only an aide-memoire for a
mimic.

Wyndham Lewis expressed his antagonism more actively. To one
of Marinetti's lectures at the Dore Galleries in 1914 "Lewis took
'a determined band of miscellaneous anti-Futurists,' including
Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and T. E. Hulme (all big
men) . They heckled Marinetti. Gaudier 'put down a tremendous
barrage in French,' while the rest 'maintained a confused up-
roar'."

But Marinetti was quite capable of giving as good as he got. In
May, 1914, Harold Monro remarked in a letter to Marsh: "We
had tremendous fun with Marinetti the other evening. He came
around [to the Poetry Bookshop] and declaimed to Yeats and
made the room shake." This was not the first time Yeats had been
required to endure Marinetti's declamations. Sturge Moore,
Pound, and Aldington had taken Marinetti to Yeats' flat in the

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 45

Woburn Buildings upon an earlier occasion. As Aldington re-
called the episode, Yeats read some of his poems and then politely
asked Marinetti to reciprocate. "Whereupon Marinetti sprang up
and in a stentorian Milanese voice began bawling:

'Automobile,
Ivre d'espace.
Qui pidtine d'angoisse,' etc.,

until Yeats had to ask him to stop because neighbours were
knocking in protest on the floor, ceiling, and party walls."

Though Futurism did much to enliven the English literary and
artistic scene in 1912 and 1913, by 1914 it was being replaced by
other, more up-to-the-minute "-isms." Among other reasons for
the decline is the fact that the very word was being diluted by too
loose and too frequent use. By 1914 "Futurist" had come to be
applied in art circles not so much to Marinetti and his followers
as indiscriminately to anyone trying to rebel against merely rep-
resentational art. Moreover, by 1914 there were many artists —
especially those in rival coteries like the Vorticists — who claimed
that in the rush to modernity Futurism had long since been
passed by; it was itself (to use their own phrase) "pass^iste."
Wyndham Lewis could write patronizingly in 1914 that Futur-
ism, as bodied forth in a current exhibition of Futurist art, was
only "Impressionism up-to-date," with an admixture of "Automo-
bilism" and Nietzsche. It was "romantic," the most damning of
all epithets: "a picturesque, superficial, and romantic rebellion of
young Milanese painters against the Academism which sur-
rounded them. . . . The Automobilist pictures were too 'pictur-
esque,' melodramatic and spectacular," Lewis continued, "besides
being undigested and naturalistic to a fault. . . . Romance about
science is a thing we have all been used to for many years, and we
resent its being used as a sauce for a dish claiming to belong
strictly to emancipated Futures."

In its more specifically poetic phase, too, not a few critics were
quick to point out that Futurism was not so new as it pretended
to be. Henley had anticipated by some years the Futurist effu-
sions on the automobile and on the beauty of speed, and Kipling
had long since remarked upon the romance of the modern ma-

46 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

chine. Even so sympathetic a critic as Harold Monro felt im-
pelled to point out to the Futurists that the poetry which they
believed so new was "no more than frenzied Whitmanism, adul-
terated by an excessive if diverting, admixture of meridional
eloquence." Wyndham Lewis observed that in their praise of the
machine the Futurists had also been anticipated by H. G. Wells.
And J. C. Squire pointed out that Futurist poetry bore traces of
Impressionism, the very movement which the Futurists professed
so cordially to detest. "To me, at least," wrote Squire, "the
Futurist verse of Signor Marinetti reads like slightly more dis-
jected Whitman or Henley with a flavouring of French impres-
sionism."

But the rock on which Futurism finally foundered was the war.
With its single-minded emphasis on energy as a goal of art, its
love of the brutal, its open desire for and praise of war. Futurism
could not weather the universal revulsion at the very real world
of trench warfare in the mud of Flanders. "What Futurist, either
in the trenches or at home, honestly desires war to continue"?
asked John Cournos, art critic of the Egoist, in January, 1917.
"What Vorticist? They advocated violence, but violence has now
become too common; devastation and anarchy sweep Europe."
And so the Russian Futurist Mayakovsky could claim with justifi-
cation in early 1917: "Futurism has died as a particular group,
but it has poured itself out in everyone in a flood. Today all are
Futurists."

Vorticism

An even more pyrotechnic phase of the prewar revolt in the
plastic and pictorial arts which had implications for poetry was
Vorticism. In a sense both an outgrowth from and a rebellion
against Futurism, Vorticism was not a Continental import, but a
home-grown revolution. It was launched as a formal "movement"
by the second of Marinetti's lectures at the Dore Galleries on
May 5, 1914, the one to which went "a small band of miscella-
neous anti-Futurists" — Hulme, Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska —
led by Wyndham Lewis to heckle Marinetti. Their success

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 47

against so formidable an opponent apparently led the small band
to consider formalizing their views, and so with the addition of
several others to the group — among them Ezra Pound (who in-
vented the word "Vorticism") and Richard Aldington — Vor-
ticism began its brief but lively career.

Little more than a month later, in June, 1914, Vorticism be-
came vocal with the publication of that most amazing of all
prewar little magazines. Blast, which ran for only two numbers,
the second and final one appearing in July, 1915. Edited by
W'yndham Lewis and published by John Lane at the Bodley
Head, Blast was obviously out to shock both in content and
foniiat. Tlic first nimiber had a puce-colored paper cover, the
word "BLAST" being written in huge block capitals diagonally
across it. Inside appeared the inevitable manifesto printed in
inch-high capitals, poems by Pound, Vorticist drawings, "Vortices
and Notes" by Lewis, stories by Rebecca West and Ford Madox
HuefTer, and short pieces entitled "Vortex" by Pound and Gau-
dier-Brzeska. Harrying the Philistines was certainly no new aim
in Britisli letters from the mid-nineteenth century on, but Blast
did the job extraordinarily well.

Among other distinctions which fell to the journal, it was in
Blast that Eliot's four "Preludes" and the "Rhapsody of a Windy
Night" first saw print; and Pound's small tour de force "Ancient
Music" first appeared there. Pound no doubt took some pride in
the fact that three lines of one of his more scurrilous short poems
in the first number had to be inked out by a censor. And in the
second number appeared a small poem of Pound's which must
surely be tiie only published satiric poem about Rupert Brooke.
Both in truculence and in volume, however, the second number
showed a considerable falling off from the first. Though its lit-
erary quality was higher, it took a doomed, if forthright, stand
toward its task during wartime: "This puce-coloured cockle-
shell," Lewis wrote, "will ... try to brave the waves of blood, for
the serious mission it has on the other side of the World-\Var."
And though Lewis confidently looked forward to two more issues
in 1915, even going so far as to list the contents of the next
projected number. Blast, like most of the little magazines which

48 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

SO enlivened prewar literary London, became a casualty o£ the
war.

As one traces its tenets through the pages of Blast, Vorticism
appears to have had several strings to its bow. In a bristling
statement of aims at the beginning of the first number, Lewis set
forth the major principles upon which the journal would stand
and upon which subsequent articles and contributors only rang
the changes. "Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the
centre of this town!", he began.

We stand for the Reality of the Present — not for the
sentimental Future or the sacripant Past.

We want to leave Nature and Men alone.

We do not want to make people wear Futurist patches,
or fuss men to take to pink and sky-blue trousers.

We are not their wives or tailors. . . .

We believe in no perfectibility except our own. . . .

We do not want to change the appearance of the world,
because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or
Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism) , and do not
depend on the appearance of the world for our art.

WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to fccl its crude
energy flowing through us. . . .

We want to make in England not a popular art, not a
revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering of
such unactual conditions, but to make individuals wherever
found.

We will convert the King if possible.

A VORTICIST king! WHY NOT?

DO YOU THINK LLOYD GEORGE HAS THE VORTEX IN HIM?

MAY WE HOPE FOR ART FROM LADY MOND? . . .

AUTOMOBILISM (Marincttiism) bores us. We don't want
to go about making a hullobulloo about motor cars, anymore
than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.

Elephants are very big. Motor cars go quickly.

Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of
machinery. Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern
lodging houses was futurist in this sense.

The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of
the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870. . . .

SOUND AND FURY • RosS 49

We want those simple and great people found everywhere.
Blast presents an art of Individuals.

Vorticism was an artistic coterie to end artistic coteries. It set
itself against any other school except Vorticism; it was ecjually
disgusted by realism and aestheticism. Explicit in Lewis's mani-
festo was also Vorticism's intense hostility toward Futurism.
Though its credo shared several fundamental points with that of
the Futurists, Vorticism took a violent and forthright antipathy
toward its predecessor. Futurism had become a dead issue in
England by 1914, Lewis claimed, because it was too "romantic"
and "sentimental" — sentimental about the future, to be sure, but
no less sentimental than such outdated artistic movements as
Impressionism, which Futurism claimed to supplant. Vorticism
set its face as resolutely against Impressionism as against Futur-
ism. It had nothing but scorn for the "lean belated Impressionists
at present attempting to eke out a little life in these islands. . , .
Our vortex is fed up wuth your dispersals, reasonable chicken-
men," wrote Lewis.

Behind the antipathy toward both Futurism and Impres-
sionism, however, one detects a deeper hatred. Almost all the
denunciations and manifestoes in Blast were directed toward
what it was pleased to call "sentimentalism," be it sentimentalism
about the past or the future.

Our Vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten
its existence.

Our Vortex regards the Future as as sentimental
as the Past.

The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefor
sentimental. . . .

Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the
veiled weakness of the mind is sentimental.

In its emphasis on the anti-sentimental, the hard and dry, Vor-
ticism attempted to do in art much the same thing that Imagism
was contemporaneously attempting to do for poetry. Indeed,
"according to Pound," wrote John Gould Fletcher, the Vorticist
principles "were only an extension of the old principle of Imag-

50 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

ism, developed to embrace all the arts. The basis for poetry , . .
was not an abstract idea, but a concrete image; this emerged from
a radiant node, a cluster of energ)' from which and into which
and through which ideas and associations were constantly mov-
ing: therefore it could only be called a vortex."

Finally, Vorticism was aggressively, self-consciously English.
Unlike Futurism, an import from alien, Latin shores, Vorticism
took pains to distinguish itself as a native movement. It was
thoroughly bored, Lewis declared, with "that feeble European-
ism, abasement of the miserable 'intellectual' before anything
coming from Paris, cosmopolitan sentimentality, which prevails
in so many quarters." After all, because England "practically
invented this civilization that Signor Marinetti has come to
preach to us about," Lewis protested, there should be nothing
particularly intoxicating about modern machines to an Eng-
lishman.

The modern world is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, — its
appearance and its spirit. . . .

In dress, manners, mechanical inventions, life, that is, England, has
influenced Europe in the same way that France has in Art.

But busy with this life-effort, she has been the last to become
conscious of the Art that is an organism of this new Order and Will of
Man. . . .

Once this consciousness towards the new possibilities of expression in
present life has come, however, it will be more the legitimate property
of Englishmen than of any other people in Europe.

It should also, as it is by origin theirs, inspire them more forcibly and
directly.

They are the inventors of this bareness and hardness, and should be
the greatest enemies of Romance.

One runs a risk, perhaps, in taking Blast too seriously, with its
long lists in three-quarter-inch capitals of random persons,
events, and institutions to be "blasted" or "blessed." Under the
heading "Blast" (and one must recall the ubiqtiitous English use
of the word as epithet) occur such items as English weather,
"Humor (English variety) ," all things Victorian, the Bishop of
London (and "all his posterity") , Galsworthy, Dean Inge, Croce,

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 51

Bergson, "Beecham (Pills, Opera, Thomas) ," A. C. Benson, the
British Academy, William Archer, and the "Clan Meynell."
Under the heading "Bless" one finds "cold, magnanimous, deli-
cate, gauche, fanciful, stupid Englishmen," the Hairdresser, Eng-
lish humor (Swift and Shakespeare) , French "vitality, skep-
ticism, pornography and females," the Pope, "Barker (John and
Granville) ," the Salvation Army, Charlotte Corday, Castor Oil,
James Joyce, Lloyd George, Chaliapin, and the Commercial Proc-
ess Company. One cannot take too seriously either some of
Pound's poetic sorties in Blast, full of the new insolence, attack-
ing all manner of persons and institutions which he saw as
restricting the freedom of the artist. He hit out at the con-
servative reviewers:

Let us deride the smugness of 'The Times':

CUFFAWl

So much the gagged reviewers.
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling

in their vitals;
These were they who objected to newness,
HERE are their tomb-stones.

They supported the gag and the ring:
A little BLACK BOX contains them.

So shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist.

You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.

And he lashed his literary contemporaries in general:

You say that I take a good deal upon myself;

That I strut in the robes of assumption.

In a few years no one will remember the 'buffo,'

No one will remember the trivial parts of me.

The comic detail will not be present.

As for you, you will lie in the earth.

And it is doubtful if even your manure will

be rich enough
To keep grass
Over your grave.

52 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

The close relationship of Vorticism to Imagism is apparent in
some of Pound's contributions to Blast. Several of his semi-
Imagist efforts were printed in the first number:

L'ART

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries 1 Come let us feast our eyes.

WOMEN BEFORE A SHOP

The gee-gaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them.
'Like to like nature.' These agglutinous yellowsl

But the relationship is more clearly seen in Pound's explanation
of the meaning of Vorticism for poetry. Like the Vorticist
painter, the Vorticist poet, too, "will use only the primary media
of his art," said Pound.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

The Vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any

concept or emotion to drag itself out into mimicry.

In painting Kandinsky, Picasso.

In poetry this by 'H. D.'

Whirl up sea —

Whirl up you pointed pines.

Splash your great pines

On our rocks.

Hurl your green over us.

Cover us with your pools of fir.

By July, 1915, when the second number appeared, Blast had a
slightly less belligerent tone. Surpisingly, Blast II even had a
faintly patriotic odor about it. Active service in the trenches had
begun to expel the youthful arrogance from at least one of the
Vorticists. Gaudier-Brzeska wrote his last "Vortex" from the
trenches in France, a sympathetic, human document, warm with
humility, bright with new insight, the more tragic because its
gifted author was so shortly to be killed in action.

I have been fighting for two months and I can now
gauge the intensity of Life.

Human Masses teem and move, are destroyed and crop
up again.

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 53

Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.

Dogs wander, are destroyed, and others come along.

^Vith all the destruction that works around us, nothing
is changed, even superficially. Life is the same strength,
the same moving agent that permits the small individual
to assert himself. . . .

This war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride.

Just as surely as Futurism, Vorticism, too, was a casualty of the
War. It was a too self-conscious creed of ersatz violence which
collapsed of anemia when faced with the genuine, brutal violence
of modern warfare on the Western Front.

Imagism

Perhaps the most influential group of rebels in the prewar
poetic renascence was that oddly assorted coterie to which one
may apply the roughly descriptive term Imagist. This is not the
place to trace the history of the Imagist movement, to deal with
the controversial personalities which it attracted, or to enter the
labyrinth of personal animosities and tempestuous civil insurrec-
tions which arose within its camp. That task has been done. Here
the Imagists must be considered primarily historically — that is, as
only one of several parties to the prewar poetic revolt — and their
similarities to other prewar . . . coteries pointed out. Special at-
tention must therefore be given to two periodicals, the New
Frcewoman and the Egoist, around which the Imagists rallied
and in which they assiduously whetted their knives for their
enemies and greeted their friends with partisan huzzahs.

The New Frcewoman, a feminist paper edited by Dora Mars-
den and financed by Harriet Shaw ^Veaver, appeared for the first
time on June 15, 1913. Because Miss Marsden and Miss Weaver
engaged Ezra Pound for "the task of finding literary con-
tributors," it became apparent almost from the beginning that
the New Freewoman would become a repository for poems of the
Imagist school. Aldington's work appeared early in the life of the
journal, along with verse by "H.D.," Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint,
Skipworth Cannell, and William Carlos Williams. Early numbers

54 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

also contained critical articles on modern poetry by Rebecca
West and Ford Madox Hueffer as well as frequent reviews of
contemporary verse by Pound.

With a slight change in format, the New Freewoman became
the Egoist with the number of January 1, 1914. Like its short-
lived predecessor, the Egoist was published fortnightly, until
January 1, 1915, when it became a monthly for the duration of
the war. Never a journal to hide its light, the Egoist advertised
itself as the "only fortnightly in England that an intelligent man
can read for three months running." Miss Marsden edited the
journal until 1915, the assistant editors being Richard Aldington
and Leonard Compton-Rickett. When it became a monthly the
editorship was taken over by Miss Weaver. When Aldington
entered military service around the middle of 1917, T. S. Eliot
inherited Aldington's position as Assistant Editor. By 1919 the
Egoist Press had been established, and the Egoist staff had be-
come increasingly interested in book publishing and less so in
editing a magazine. The last number of the journal appeared in
December, 1919. Its leading contributors, Eliot, Pound, and Ald-
ington, were shortly to turn their efforts to the more famous and
influential Criterion.

The Egoist succeeded in putting itself in the avant-garde of
literary revolt from the beginning. A partial roster of those who
contributed either verse or critical articles on poetry to the jour-
nal in 1914 amply suggests its penchant for the new: Aldington,
Pound, Wyndham Lewis, F. S. Flint, Robert Frost, "H.D.," John
Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams. One
of its proudest accomplishments was the serial publication of
Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914-15 after it
had been universally rejected by other publishers. Pound and
Aldington alternated as book reviewers early in the life of the
Egoist and, as one might expect, succeeded admirably in keeping
things warm in their corner. Perhaps it was in the cor-
respondence columns, however, that the hottest controversies
raged. The Egoist had without doubt the most lively letters-
to-the-editor columns in London. The editorial staff and friends
of the paper were not above manufacturing letters under notns de
plume to stir up a lagging controversy or start a new one. T. S.

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 55

Eliot did so on several occasions, and one discovers several
amusingly fictitious names inscribed to letters in 1914 which bear
unmistakable traces of the deft hand of Ezra Pound.

What did tlie prominent Imagists who contributed to the New
Freewoman and the Egoist stand for? By and large they took
their position somewhere near the middle of the [literary rebels],
in which status they both agreed and disagreed with their . . .
compeers. They agreed with all the prewar rebels that the new
twentieth-century consciousness demanded a new poetry, that old
subjects, and particularly old techniques, were passeiste. Along
with the Futurists, the Imagists "proclaimed the need of the
modern poet for a free form of verse. Both condemned rhetoric.
Both . . . asserted the importance of complete freedom of play of
images and analogies." The Imagists were attracted to "Futur-
ism's vigor and energy, its hatred of the stylized, sentimental, and
academic, and its concentration on its own times." On one crucial
point, however, the Imagists took definite issue with Futurism:
Marinetti's Futurist poems. Aldington argued, were not only too
rhetorical and bombastic but also too formless and abstract.
"There is a vast disorganised energy in these poems," he wrote,
"and good journalistic observation. Their great drawback to
some of us is their utterly unrestrained rhetoric, their use of
abstractions, their vagueness. . . . M. Marinetti's poems are born
in confusion and may perish in it." It was in his emphasis upon
the necessity for form in poetry, upon "bringing content under
careful, efficient control instead of allowing it to overflow onto
the page," that the Imagist clearly parted company with the
Futurist.

In their opposition to representational art, again, the Imagists
joined forces with both Futurists and Vorticists. The major ques-
tion facing young artists in 1914, .Aldington declared, was simply,
"Shall we, or shall we not have 'parochialism in art' — or to put it
in different words: should artists confine themselves entirely to
modern life and to the modern world for their detail as well as
for the 'spirit' of their works?" The school of "the dust-bin and
the back yard" is gaining strength. "If one does not deal in the
latest tvpe of aeroplane or the latest refinement in factories, then
one is outside the pale." Too much modern art insists on

56 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

modernity not only of spirit, but also of detail. And Aldington
advanced three reasons why realistic art was in his eyes bad art:
first, realistic detail is uninteresting per se and quickly becomes
"tedious and out-of-date"; secondly, he claimed "the right for
every artist to use any subject he damn well pleases so long as he
uses it well"; and thirdly, he found the realist "a very bad
artist — as a rule. To drag smells of petrol, refrigerators, ocean
greyhounds. President Wilson and analine dyes into a work of art
will not compensate for lack of talent and of technique." Against
the dust-bin school the Imagist, in the person of Aldington in this
case, broke out two banners: the banner of artistic individualism,
a kind of latter-day art-for-the-artist's sake; and, though the de-
vices upon it are somewhat dimmer, the banner of art as private
experience, with all that such an aesthetic implies of the aloof,
scholarly, skeptical disregard for the plain reader.

Finally, the Imagists shared with all the parties of the prewar
revolt ... a strong antipathy to all things Victorian. Along with
all their compeers, they took arms, for instance, against "cosmic"
poetry. "Mistrust any poet using the word cosmic," Pound ad-
vised Harriet Monroe. The adjective was never precisely defined,
though it seems to have been coined in an attempt to describe
that segment of nineteenth-century verse which was didactic in
conception or in which the poet's aim seemed to be more to
convey general ideas or absolutes than to objectify an emotion or
describe an object in the existential world. By loose extension the
word came simply to connote "Victorian" or — an even more
odious epithet — "Tennysonian." In a withering burst of youth-
ful scorn, Rebecca West, while praising the Imagists for bring-
ing austerity back to English verse, managed to condemn the
contributors to Georgian Poetry I as mere belated Victorians:

Poetry should be burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white
with rains of affliction: the poet should love nakedness and the thought
of the skeleton under the flesh. But because the public will not pay for
poetry it has become the occupation of learned persons, given to soft
living among veiled things and unaccustomed to being sacked for
talking too much. That is why from the beautiful stark bride of Blake it
has become the idle hussy hung with ornaments kept by Lord Tenny-
son, handed on to Stephen Phillips and now supported at Devonshire
Street by the Georgian school.

SOUND AND FURY • RoSS 57

In no coterie perhaps did anti-Victorian feeling take quite the
extreme proportions that it did among the Imagists; and in no
school ^^■as the specific anti-Victorian tone which one usually
associates with the twenties so evident. In their bland offhand
dismissal of all Victorian poetry as utterly unworthy of serious
consideration in the twentieth century, in the tone of supercili-
ous condescension which they adopted toward the nineteenth
century, in the very language they used for their purposes, the
Imagists were a decade in advance of their time. Perhaps Richard
Aldington expressed it best:

However often gentlemen from Highgate and the adjacent suburbs may
write and protest it is nevertheless true that the majority of the poetry
of the last century had nothing to do with life and very little to do with
poetry. There was a plague of prettiness and a plague of pomposity
and several other minor diseases — such as over-much suavity, the cult of
decorated adjectives. And except for Browning and a little of Swin-
burne there was no energy which was not bombast, no rendering of life
without an Anglican moral, no aesthetic without aesthetic cant.

The Imagists were seldom reluctant to argue their aesthetic in
public print or to trumpet their new verse. One entire issue of
the Egoist, that of May 1, 1915, was devoted exclusively to spread-
ing the gospel. Ferris Greenslet wrote on "The Poetry of John
Gould Fletcher"; John Gould Fletcher on "The Poetry of Amy
Lowell" (Miss Lowell, by this time intent upon her own special
variety of Imagism, was not represented) ; F. S. Flint on "The
Poetry of H.D."; and Richard Aldington on "The Poetry of F. S.
Flint." The admiration was universally mutual and the praise on
all sides fulsome. The only discordant note was struck by Harold
Monro, who mildly bearded the lions in their own den, telling
them in essence that their poetic was neither so new nor so
startling as they believed. The Imagists dwelt too exclusively on
their own imiqiieness, he wrote; "they would probably benefit in
their own production by recognizing themselves more clearly as
one of the latest groups in the forward march of English po-
etry— not the only one."

In spite of their shortcomings, the Imagists were no doubt the
most significant prewar . . . coterie. The Futurists and Vorticists
were sometimes more shocking than constructive, more

58 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

symptomatic of the pandemic discontent among prewar poets
than influential. Though Ezra Pound coined the word "Imagist"
and served as chief publicist for the movement, it was the theories
supplied by T. E. Hulme which gave the early Imagist ex-
periments their "authority and direction." Both men served their
common purpose well; together they called the tune for one of
the most lively phases of the prewar poetic renascence. With
Hulme as metaphysician and Pound as impressario, the Imagists
"did a lot of useful pioneering work. They dealt a blow at the
post- Victorian magazine poets. . . . They livened things up a lot.
They made free verse popular. . . . And they tried to attain an
exacting if narrow standard of style in poetry." Indirectly they
did more. The Imagists, above all other prewar coteries, put into
the hands of the poets of the twenties the technical charts and
compasses by which to find their poetic way across the hard dry
sands of the Wasteland.

The Temper of the Twenties

Secularization and Innocence
in the Literary Cosmopolis

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

There is a really serious question whether decades are feasible
as units of time. What is so distincii\e about the number ten,
except as an aid in counting? Isn't it true that, looking at it in
terms of generations, a writer's span comprehends two or three
decades? Yet tlie 1920s seem to have been from the start des-
ignated as something distinguished and special. Why is this true?

There is, for one thing, the limitation of events. The Twenties
were neatly blocked off by the War at one end and the Great
Depression at the other; they were years that followed one great
form of modern disaster and preceded another. They were there-
fore comparatively free, with the release that came from the
ending of a major war, and not yet handicapped by the fears,
suspicions, and doctrinal myopia that inhibited the writers of the
1930s. The war was a shock, but it was a liberating shock which
left most of the energy and imaginative brilliance undamaged.

There is the curious matter of creative abiuidance. There are
times like these, when writers who for a decade or so show no
especially impressive talent but come to their time of genius at
approximately the same time, within a few years of one another.
In the case of the 1920s, the previous decade was a time of
ajDprenticeship, of fits and starts, and of clarification. The years
1908-1915 were especially important, for example, to modern
poetry and to the formulation of new critical princij>les, at the
time when Pound and Eliot and many otliers were beginning.

From The Minnesota Review, /, 1 {I960) .

60 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

The first real work was done then, but its results were seen in
works of the early 1920s.

A number of writers — the names of Yeats, Gide, Mann, Joyce
come to mind — transcend considerations of decade, though they
as well presented their most clearly effective diagnostic portraits
of the modern mind in the Twenties. Writers like Hemingway
and Fitzgerald could not have produced anything but juvenilia
before 1920; they were at their most brilliant in the decade
following. Their writing was of the substance and of the manner
of the postwar decade.

But perhaps most of all, there are atmosphere, spirit, mood,
and ^lan. However difficult to define or describe, the "temper of
the Twenties" was remarkable for its power of tolerance and
encouragement. All forms of rebellion, protest, satire, and ex-
periment, however erratic or naive, were admitted. Perhaps it was
no accident, therefore, that the finest and most precise literary
insights into our special kinds of value, problem, and agony are
given us in this decade.

Almost anyone can prove the decade's brilliance by citing rele-
vant texts. There is no comparable stretch of years; at least there
has not been since the 1840s or the 1850s in American literature,
the 1850s in French. A succession of works, which have held to
their initial success in the decades following, forces attention to
the 1920s and stirs the wonder over causes and reasons. In the
brief period of 1921-1925 alone, we have The Waste Land
(1922) , Ulysses (1922) , The Magic Mountain (1924) , Harmo-
nium (1923) , and The Great Gatsby (1925) . The second half of
the decade matches it: The Sun Also Rises (1926), The
Counterfeiters (1926) , The Tower (1928) , The Bridge (1929) ,
The Sound and the Fury (1929) . These books we consider "clas-
sics"; they focus attention upon their time and upon a civi-
lization of which they are a special manifestation. There are
lesser lights as well: Babbitt (1922) , which gave us a language of
satire and parody; Tulips and Chimneys (1923), which con-
tinues to serve as point of reference in the analysis of modern
romanticism; the cumbersome but perdurable An American
Tragedy of Theodore Dreiser (1925) ; the symptomatic and cru-

THE TEMPER OF THE TWENTIES • Hoffmatl 61

cial The Professor's House of ^ViIla Gather (1925) ; and of
course, A Farewell to Arms (1929) .

I list these titles not in a mood of celebration, but to suggest
that the "temper" of the decade was not superficial. \Ve have
been persistently led to believe that the generation which
Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine greeted at the conclusion of This Side
of Paradise (1920) was guilty of a thousand errors in taste and of
vulgar irresponsibility. This prejudice concerning the decade is
maintained far beyond the success of Frederick Lewis Allen's
Only Yesterday (1931), which established it.

It is important to note the icay in which the decade's repu-
tation was made. It ended in a financial crisis, which proved
subsequently also to have been a moral crisis. To this moral
perspective are added the expressions of repentance made by the
men and women who most enjoyed the "gaudy spree." This
dramatic "morning-after-the-decade-before" situation is nowhere
better presented than in Fitzgerald's description of Charley
"Wales ("Babylon Revisited," written in 1930) , as he faces his
most severe critic, Marion Peters: "He believed in character; he
wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character
again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out."
(Taps at Rez'eille, 1935) Wale's ambition to "jump back a
whole generation" in order once more to find "character" has an
especial reference to his personal problem; but it is also intended
as an expression of regret, that so remarkable a time had also
proved so debilitatingly vulgar and irresponsible.

Such a view as this assumes a tradition of "character" that had
momentarily been interrupted but should once again be sus-
tained. We have been primarily a moral people since 1929; our
moralities were re-enforced by concern over economic crises,
which were in turn replaced by military urgencies. Since 1945 we
have been too busy attempting to keep up with shocking scien-
tific developments really to do more than cast an occasional
nostalgic glance back at a time that now seems more fanciful than
real.

In his imaginary dialogue on The Democratic Vista (1958) ,
Richard Chase has one of his speakers (a professor of English

62 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

who talks very much as though he'd memorized Chase's other
books) discuss the American years from 1912 to the present. The
time from 1912 to 1918 was a "resurgence," a truly promising
period; but its promise was lost in the general crackup of the
postwar years: "The impact of the First World War fragmented
and dispersed the Resurgence into the brilliant but unstable
performances of the writers and artists of the 1920's. . . ." This is
one way of viewing the decade; it is certainly true that most of
the achievements of the 1920s had their sources in earlier
decades — some of them much earlier than the time Chase so
much admires.

If we examine these sources more closely, we may more prop-
erly appreciate the "temper of the Twenties." It seems to me that
the late years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th
contained two major components of the Twenties spirit: the
apparently substantial moral and economic structures of an es-
tablished society; and detailed and systematic description of the
skeptical means of destruction and rebellion. We needed only a
convincing demonstration of the weaknesses that underlay so-
ciety; this demonstration occurred in the War of 1914-1918. The
skepticism and the rebellion survived the war, but the "enemy"
did not. Mr. R. P. Blackmur once spoke (in a lecture at the
Library of Congress) of "that explosion of talent" that occurred
from 1922 to 1925, and suggested that all of the great works of
those years "came deeply from the bourgeois humanist tradition"
of the past. The great artists of the 1 920s are truly descendants of
the "bourgeois humanist tradition," but they are also rebels
against it, the consequence of a surviving and triumphant skepti-
cism.

It is at least in part a matter of generations. Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks (1901) speaks brilliantly of the passing of the
solid, capable. God-fearing generations of Protestant business-
men, and of their being menaced by the doubts and rejections of
the newer generations. The later Buddenbrooks are haunted by
thoughts of nihilism and death; the 20th century threatens the
19th, as the Buddenbrook dynasty moves toward its awkward and
clumsy collapse. This history, of generations in decline, is re-
peated again and again in the literature of the prewar years. The

THE TEMPER OF THE TWENTIES • Hoffman 63

truth is that the forms of that society, so zealously and proudly
guarded, were vulnerable; and the War, for all its having been
justified in humanist terms, proved literally too much for its
survival. The liberal, "genteel," bourgeois humanism was judged
literally to be inadequate to the stresses and strains of modern
violence.

The intellectual world of 1912-1918, of which Chase speaks so
fondly, was neither strong nor precise in its formulations. It was a
liberal world, held together by liberal imaginings and expecta-
tions. The men and women who lived in it were immensely
good- willed but often naive. The writers of the 1920s found their
speculations quite thoroughly inadequate. Inadvisedly, they were
held accountable for the disastrously wide chasm that opened in
the War years between moral securities and social chaos. Most
important of all, the moral and philosophical structures of the
earlier society collapsed in the destructive blasts of the war. We
were left, in 1920, with many minds and talents of great promise,
who had both the glory and the responsibility of a radical indi-
vidualism. But this was not the individualism of the Emersonian
self, or even of the more cautiously hedged self-definition that
Whitman offered at the end of the 19th century.

The "temper" of the Twenties was in this way historically
caused. It was experimental, improvisatory, skeptical, and free.
The literary achievements of the decade were marked by an
immense self-esteem and egotism. Most of all, they were produced
by men and women who — perhaps for the first time in our
history — were convinced of the value of aesthetic discourse in and
of itself. Each of the great works which the decade offered is in its
own way an experimental departure from its predecessors. Each
demonstrates the advantages of an aesthetic and a moral release
from 19th century constraints. In each case, the forces of rebel-
lion contained in the earlier century are brought forward and
become the major incentives of the creative life.

If I were asked to characterize quickly the literary conse-
quences of that life, I should say they were rather like these: an
audacious confidence in individual perceptions; a comic self-
consciousness with respect to a once formidable but now rather
ludicrous "enemy"; ideological and philosophical flexibility; an

64 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

ease and an informality of discourse; and an impulsive desire to
seek out the "new" in all imaginable areas of literature and life.
All of this is of course unconventional, and in a special sense it is
also unpolitical. But it was not superficial or without character;
it may even be called "profound," though it was surely not
pompous. The history of the 1920s is a most convincing demon-
stration of the value of an avant garde in a democratic society.
Chase says of the phenomenon of the avant garde, that "In its
critical function it is wherever anyone is trying to give a true
account of the history and nature of our civilization." Members
of the avant garde are engaged — in their major and their most
serious occupations — in reformulations of principles and forms
that their own skepticism has made necessary.

I should like to bring all of these essays in definition down to
two principal ideas, or intellectual "conceits": these may be
called the move toward secularization and the fundamental uses
of innocence. As for the first, I should say that it is a necessary
consequence of religious and moral collapse. The spirit does not
disappear, or even weaken, but it needs a new language and new
aesthetic adaptations. In a condition that is secular instead of
traditionally "religious," the metaphors and symbols of religion
are reexamined, and the psychology of the self redefined. Many of
our major works are attempts to redefine a state of grace, or to
portray the great difficulty of achieving one. But secularization is
more than merely an account of the decline of past religious
conventions. More significantly, it is a redistribution of the major
metaphors of our lives, an attempt to give them new uses and
new meanings.

The principal impetus of Joyce's Ulysses is this felt need of a
recasting of accounts and balances. It appears at first sight a
scramble of both forms and beliefs, but it is essentially Joyce's
essay in the redirection and redistribution of all basic metaphors
of the human condition. At times the effect is downright blasphe-
mous, as in the opening scene, in which "Stately, plump Buck
Mulligan" appears on the stairway, in a mockery of religious
ceremony, intoning "Introiho ad Altare Dei." But the total
effect is less profane; it is a linking of pagan and Jewish rituals

THE TEMPER OF THE TWENTIES • Hojjman 65

and meditations with the Christian, to the persistent accompani-
ment of a brilHant adaptation of the Homeric analogy to quo-
tidian and commonplace concerns. As in almost all otlier prod-
ucts of the 1920s, the object is not to destroy the religious
substrata of human values but to redistribute the terms in which
they had previously been stated and defined.

A host of other examples are available. Many of these are
directly associated with the atmosphere of the War. In that War
there were many Christs; one may almost say that Christ is
assumed universally as the hero-victim of the War's circum-
stances. E. E. Cummings, on his way to The Enormous Room
(1922) , comes upon the wooden figure of such a Christ:

The wooden body clumsy with pain burst into fragile legs with absurdly
large feet and funny WTithing toes; its little stiff arms made abrupt,
cruel, equal angles with the road. . . . There was in this complete silent
doll a gruesome truth of instinct, a success of uncanny poignancy, an
unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion.

The suffering is there, but it has become grotesque and indefin-
able. It is no longer easily explainable along theological lines,
but must be associated with a secular situation. The great conse-
quence of secularization is the effort to make language and im-
agery correspond to the human circumstances to which they refer.
Another important characteristic of the literary Twenties has
to do with the improvisation of language and manners. Despite
the superficial gaiety and ease of the decade, its major literary
scenes were often grim and forbidding. The pressure upon the
individual was formidable. Litcrars' heroes feel it intensely, and
their behavior is often acutely melancholy. The final impact of
Fitzgerald's Gatsby is a disaster. He is left alone at the end, as he
was ignored throughout his lifetime. The energy of his romantic
affirmation has no real or valid context. He becomes, in Nick
Carraway's words, a "son of God — a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father's
business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."
Into these remarks Fitzgerald concentrates a wealth of criticism,
which reaches far into the decade's skeptical disapproval of the

66 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

Bruce Barton images of "Salvation and Five Per Cent." Most of
the significant protagonists of this literature suffer a comparable
distress of misplaced or dislocated affection and drive.

Neither the major forms nor the established manners of the
past sufficed. Fitzgerald flaunted his eccentric manners in Man-
hattan and in its French suburbs. Mrs. Wharton's neat manneris-
tic discourses upon the decline of moral proprieties disintegrated
in the Twenties into feeble comedies of bad manners. The major
weapons of criticism in the decade were satire and parody. These
were all addressed to the task of proving that conventional prac-
tices were ludicrous. The principal areas of critical discourse
were psychoanalysis and the Nietzschean rebellion. Freud pro-
vided the tools of analysis for the examination of what Nietzsche
had described as the consequences of God's death.

All of this, temporarily at least, added up to an extraordinary
egotism, a self-esteem of great force which had erratic results.
Each major work of literature was unique and sui generis. For
the first time, perhaps, in modern civilization, all patterns of
society and tradition were subjected to fresh, original and outra-
geous scrutiny. Fundamental impulses concerning "right action"
offered strange perspectives upon the past. Only the most original
of experiments could emerge from this initial impetus. Blackmur
remarks upon the literature of this time that "where the great
novelists of our times have dealt with the troubles caused by the
new knowledges (and the erosion of some of the old ones) in a
kind of broad and irregular psychology, so the poets have been
led to deal with them ... in a kind of irregular and spasmodic,
but vitalized metaphysics."

The "irregular metaphysics" was freshly inspired by a con-
scious trust in the validity of irrational or unaccustomed insights.
The major poetic strategies were a consequence of the deliberate
exploration of the discrete, specific object or event in personal
experience and of the attempt to prove that poetry was informed
by a special power of language and meaning. All of this intense
critical activity is the obverse of the examination of manners
and the past. It is in the line of progress for the discovery of
secular values to take the place of fixed religious ones. In such
poets as Wallace Stevens, theology is redefined in terms of ontol-

THE TEMPER OF THE TWENTIES • Hoffman 67

og\' and epistemolog). The beginnings of the modern interest in
archetypes, which tended to consider all religions and cultures as
variants of one, correspondingly left the burden of moral defini-
tion to the individual poet. This is a condition in which a willed
transcendence of the actual served to move self above the level of
the real. There are infinite varieties of definition as a result. The
symbolic orders of our long poems are forced and deliberately
introspective. They are ingenious orderings of sj:)ecial insights,
and their formal eccentricities immensely advanced the range of
literar)' definition.

The levels of literature in the 1920s are as various as the levels
of thought. Each of them defines precisely an individual's special
recourse to knowledges, of both technique and metaphysics. It
moves objectively to an introspective center. Each artist seems a
Hans Castorp, set upon and fought over by a host of authorities
on physical and metaphysical disease. Castorp seems a true image
of modern man, a man on whom nothing is wasted, but who
initiates nothing. The form defines the special qualities of his
determination to explain the malaise of his time, as well as to
point toward its cure. A common pressure is that of the deperson-
alizing force of organized knowledges upon the individual force
of protest and belief.

What I have called the "uses of innocence" in the Twenties are
in fact necessary revisions of experience. For obvious reasons, the
attention of the Twenties was directed to present time. The
greatest innocence conceives a present deprived of its past. Men
discussed either the necessity of the present or the futility of
attempting to escape from it. Major experiments in literature,
from Stein to Faulkner, are explorations of the interrelationship
of past and present, or carefully worked out strategies for repre-
senting the present condition and status of "the thing seen." The
object and rhythm of life are freed of responsibility to abstrac-
tions. This was a peculiar form of innocent awareness, which
was directly related to the driving need for fresh definition.
Innocence takes two principal forms in the decade: an intense
preoccupation with the immediate present, and the sense of
dissociation from larger or deeper orders of experience.

As for the first, it led to many expressions of "arrogant ecccn-

68 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

tricity," of self-centered folly. Nevertheless, from a multitude of
eccentric practices have come most of our best respected modern
literary traditions. If it were not for Life magazine and such
journalists as Frederick Lewis Allen, the frivolities would long
since have been forgotten. As I have said in The Twenties, the
love of free and innocent intellectual maneuvering was im-
mensely useful, in the manner of its removing stale cultural
rubbish and establishing new forms of expression: "They were
truly, recklessly, innocently, rawly, tenaciously naive. . . . But
the best of them were from the beginning, and remained, en-
dowed with talent, with reserves of irony, satire, and intelligent
respect for the 'right word.' The best of them preserved in their
work the exact rapprochement of experience with the act of
experiencing, of action with the moral comedy of man acting,"

The second of these characteristics of innocence is more dif-
ficult to fit into the pattern of our history. The very fact of
dissociation was distressing. Eliot tried to narrow the feeling to
an agony of disbelief or moral sloth, and he succeeded in convinc-
ing most of his contemporaries that a recovery of Christian
asceticism was the sole means of salvation. But the problem of
dissociation was analyzed in many other ways. The strongest of
these was an enforced irrational mysticism, defined in terms of
the special aesthetic values of the decade. It is true, as Chase has
said, that this struggle for an aesthetic reordering of faith was
very hard on the liberal tradition, and that the Twenties in
consequence have the appearance of a brilliant but unstable
performance. But the very exaggeration of its eccentricity forced
upon the consciousness and conscience of modern man a sense of
the need for frequent review of the tactics used for moral sur-
vival. Surely the all but purely doctrinal and editorial emphasis
of the 1930s led to a major ideological disaster in the violence of
the Spanish Civil War and the events of the early 1940s.

The significance of the Twenties for our century is a profound
one; we have come back ever since 1930 to the truth of its initial
and initiating premise, that no world-system is ever entirely fixed
or immune from moral revision. The events of the decade have
surely emphasized a salient truth, that a paradise of pure reason
is beyond our reach and that the effort to impose one leads to

THE TEMPER OF THE TWENTIES • Hoffman 69

many stresses and agonies. Beyond this, the Twenties have re-
enforced our conviction of the value of the nonconformist, the
aberrant, erratic self, the avant garde of the human personality
who may not always have the right answers but sees to it that the
established ones don't enjoy an undeserved long life.

I should like to summarize the meaning of the decade, its
apparent advantages over our own. First, one may generally
concede to it a free, casual intimacy of intellectual and aesthetic
exchange. There was generally a willingness to allow for "intel-
lectual waste"; waste or a margin of error was not then so
disastrous to contemplate. Further, social balances were more
helpfully maintained by a shrewd sense of ridiculous and harm-
ful extremes of idiocy. A remarkable, graceful, and useful flexibil-
ity in matters of human judgment was an immense advantage.
All of these qualities contributed to the successful career of 1920's
intellectual life, in its sustaining a "poetic," critical, ironic, and
complex vision of the human condition.

Heresy, Guilt, Munich

The Collapse of Popular Front Poetics
in the Late Thirties

JULIAN SYMONS

The art, the ideas, the politics of a decade are never so nicely
self-contained as historians like to make them. The Nineties
contained Kipling as well as the artists who contributed to The
Savoy; and, more than this, the Kiplingesque attitude and that of
the Savoyards both sprang from the same social situation. So the
heretics of the Thirties, Wyndham Lewis, George Orwell, Robert
Graves, all represented something important in the decade. They
showed the other side of the Popular Front medal, whereas the
social ideas and literary activities of T. S. Eliot (say) became
steadily more remote from what was going on.

We are swept away by a strange tide.

Did Mr Eliot at Hyde

Park Corner in 1917 boarding a bus

Foresee it? He was not born in us

But we in him.

He gave us a voice, straightened each limb,

Set us a few mental exercises

And left us to our own devices.

Gavin Ewart

Those devices are emphatically not Mr. Eliot's. He be-
queathed a style rather than an attitude, and the Christianity of
the Four Quartets appeared not so much uncongenial as mean-
ingless to the Thirties writers. Eliot's technical mastery as poet

From Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London: The Cresset
Press, 1960) .

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICH • SymOtlS 71

and dramatist was acknowledged, but in ilie realm of ideas he
was regarded as an eccentric reactionary unlikely to do much
harm. The writings of W'yndliam Lewis and Orwell, however,
aroused the fiercest social opposition. They became, as the decade
went on, more and more like some terrible memento mori. 'If
we were not as we are, if we had not been saved, this,' orthodox
Artists and Pragmatists thought with a shiver as they contem-
plated the Fascist monster Lewis and the Trotskyist demon
Orwell, 'is what we might have become.' Both Lewis and Orwell
suffered from delusions of persecution, yet it is true also that
they both were writers actually persecuted for their expression
of heterodox and inconvenient opinions. The suggestion that
Lewis's works should be boycotted through Left Book Club
groups was seriously canvassed at one time, and Orwell believed
that after tlie publication of Homage to Catalonia his work was
rejected in many places where earlier it would have been re-
ceived. Lewis was not a Fascist, although he wrote one article
for the British Union Quarterly, and H. G. ^Vells's description
of Orwell as 'a Trotskyist with flat feet' was more witty than
truthful. They were pilloried because they presented such un-
comfortable interpretations of the same image of reality that
acted as model for the Popular Front orthodoxy.

'Politically I take my stand exactly midway between the Bolshe-
vist and the Fascist,' Lewis wrote at the time when he was most
obviously sympathetic to Fascism. 'The gentleman on my left I
shake with my left hand, the gentleman on my right with my
right hand. If there were only one (as I wish there were) I'd
shake him with both hands.' This equating of Left with Right,
this implication that violent cliange was the important thing and
that the political form of the ensuing dictatorship did not greatly
matter, horrified the Audience. Was it for this that they had
reluctantly supported the 'good' use of force that was to defeat
the 'bad' use of force by reactionaries? To be told that the force
itself, the violence, was what mattered, and that once the slate
liad been wiped clean the benevolent dictator, Adolf, Benito or
Josef, would be able to make a world fit for artists to live in?

Orwell's sins were different, but no less serious. They consisted
in a persistent heterodoxy in relation to the basic assumptions

72 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

made particularly by the Pragmatists about the working class and
the Soviet Union. The condition of the working class in Britain,
the behaviour of the Communist Party in Catalonia, were things
that Orwell had seen with his own eyes, and he drew from his
observations deeply irritating and embarrassing conclusions. So
far had the rebels of the early Thirties hardened into orthodoxy
that they regarded it as almost irrelevant to consider whether
what Orwell said was true. They said that the eye of the individ-
ual was always myopic, that he saw a picture inevitably blurred
and incomplete; and to more direct questioning they answered in
that phrase of Day Lewis's which could be used to justify any
murder or atrocity: 'Will the use of violence in this particular,
concrete situation benefit the majority of persons concerned?'
What we saw during the Thirties was an attempt to deny utterly
the validity of individual knowledge and observation. So, when
Spender asked his friend Chalmers what he thought about the
1938 Moscow Trials, in which Yagoda, who had been responsible
for the investigation that led to the earlier trials, was himself
sentenced to death, Chalmers asked calmly: 'What trials? I've
given up thinking about such things long ago.'

Not many of the intelligentsia had grown so strong a carapace
of unthought: but still, their attitude towards the Soviet Union,
their belief in what was incredible and their savage treatment of
unbelievers, was the blackest betrayal of their own integrity. One
must make a distinction here. The impulse that prompted the
intelligentsia to support the Spanish Republican cause, whether
heroically or absurdly manifested, was a generous one. They
could not be aware of the deceits practised upon them by the
Koestlers, the Cockburn-Pitcairns and others, nor did most of
them realize for some time that they were pawns, used deliber-
ately not for Spanish but for Russian ends. But the impulse that
led them to express faith in the Soviet Union after the Moscow
Trials had no better motive than self-preservation. Twitch away
this blanket of belief, and they would be left naked and shudder-
ing to face the winter wind of reality. It would be pointless to put
down in detail the monstrous incongruities that they willingly
swallowed, pointless because these arguments have been re-
hearsed so many times, and also because they are arguments no

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICIH • SymOHS 73

longer. ^Vith the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 came the flight of the
fellow-travellers, and this flight automatically reversed their ver-
dict on the Moscow Trials, which now became obvious frame-
ups. But they had not been deceived. In relation to the Soviet
Union they had deceived tliemselves, and in the end one has to
pay bitterly for such self-deceits.

The assault on the standards of the Thirties made by Robert
Graves and his disciples was aesthetic, and not political. Graves
himself showed always a marked dislike for the manifestation of
political feeling in art, and professed to think himself ignored for
that reason. 'My entry in the great Left Dossier is now something
like this,' he wrote ironically. 'Graves, Robert. Sometime friend
of Siegfried Sassoon, the Pacifist poet. His critical investigation of
folk-rhythms heralds dawn of PROLVERS-TEK.' Graves's view
was that Auden's poetry, and by extension that of his close
followers, was wholly imitative, and worthless. The imitation, in
Auden's case, was of Graves himself and of Laura Riding (if
Auden was in fact his literary offspring. Graves once said, he was
not prepared to legitimize the child) , and Graves later commit-
ted himself to the view that Auden was a poet who had perhaps
not written a single original line. I well remember going to
dinner with a Gravesian who produced with some relish a copy of
'Spain' and suggested that we should prepare a line by line
exegesis of the poem showing its multifold debts to Graves and
other ^vriters. My refusal, which was combined with some mildly
critical references to Laura Riding, was not well received. Auden-
ites were as unpopular in tlie Graves circle as Trotskyists at a
Communist Party conference.

Tlie poetic talent of the Auden Group was questioned by
others as the decade advanced. The stirrings of revolt were sub-
terranean, but real. We are all romantics today, yes, but some are
more romantic than others, and a number of yoimg writers found
themselves uncomfortably confined both by Left wing orthodoxy
and by the sharp discouragement of vague poetic feeling in New
Verse. That nauseating concern for poetry was being felt again,
and a generation of writers had appeared above ground tliat was

74 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

to take Dylan Thomas as poetic herald of a New Apocalypse, an
acknowledgement which the herald accepted with pop-eyed sur-
prise. Then there were many writers as yet little known, like C. P.
Snow and his scientific colleagues, who found the content of the
proletarian work in New Writing trivial and the Audenesque
jokes silly. There were devotees of the Twenties, like Anthony
Powell, who once briskly said that he thought the work of the
whole Auden Group worthless. There was Edith Sitwell, who
dismissed Louis MacNeice's poems by saying that they were very
dull and seemed to be covered in chocolate. The literary wars of
the period were more spirited and more destructive than any
conducted today; it may be worth recalling one of them, as an
indication of — what? The resilience of literary reputation, per-
haps.

In November 1934, G. W. Stonier reviewed in the New States-
man Miss Sitwell's book. Aspects of Modern Poetry. The book
was, he said, very largely a defence of modern poetry against the
Big Bad Wolf, Dr Leavis, whose opinion of Miss Sitwell's talents
was known to be low. How odd it was, then, to find quite
remarkable similarities between this book and Dr Leavis's own
New Bearings in Modern Poetry, published a few years earlier.

'If the reader will compare Miss Sitwell's chapter on Yeats with
Mr Leavis's remarks on the same poet, he will find that these two
critics think more closely alike than Miss Sitwell's "attack" would
seem to suggest. For example. Miss Sitwell begins by quoting
Lang's sonnet, "The Odyssey"; this sonnet was quoted, with the
same intention and effect, by Dr Leavis.'

Stonier went on to point out over a dozen cases in which the
same passages had been quoted and very similar remarks made
about them, and ended by saying that he preferred Dr Leavis.
'One never doubts his accuracy; Miss Sitwell's chapter on Hop-
kins contains numerous mistakes in quotations, besides misspelt
names.'

The hunt was up. In the following week a correspondent gave
a further nineteen parallel quotations in detail, and a week later
Geoffrey Grigson discovered several parallels between Miss Sit-
well and Herbert Read in their writings about Hopkins.

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICH • SymOTlS 75

Sprung rhytlim is not an innovation; it is the rhythm natural to English
verse before the Renaissance. It is the rliythm of Piers Ploughman and
of Skelton. Read

We may see, therefore, that Sprung Rhythm is not an innovation.
Indeed it is the rhythm of Piers Ploughman and the rhythm of Skelton.

Sitwell

At the same time Edith and Osbert Sitwell both wrote letters.
Miss Sitwell said that had she known Dr Leavis was the author of
the 'Odyssey' sonnet ('and I think him capable of it') she would
have acknowledged her debt; Osbert Sitwell asked whether 'if I
informed a class of school-children that the Normans invaded
England in 1066 and if Dr Leavis had previously said the same
thing, I should be guilty of plagiarising Dr Leavis?' Whether the
use of Lang's 'Odyssey' as a starting point for considering the
poems of Yeats is comparable to saying that the Normans in-
vaded England in 1066 — that, it may be, is still in doubt.

'There are grounds to fear that strong tendencies are drawing
some members of the "post-war" group away from the People's
Front. New Verse, the periodical that has served as a major
rallying-ground for them, has by now lost every semblance of a
genuine Left wing journal. . . . It is systematically hounding Day
Lewis for what it regards as an excess of Communist loyalty. It
has every appearance of becoming a cesspool of all that is rejected
by the healthy organism of the revolutionary movement — a sort
of miniature literary Trotskyism.'

So D. S. Mirsky in International Literature. The dread pejora-
tive word, Trotskyism, had been spoken. As the Artists and
Pragmatists became more dubious about Spain, Communism,
Moscow Trials, so it became obviously the job of party-line
stalwarts to keep backsliders up to the mark. In reply Grigson
said that New Verse had not been founded as a wing journal,
although 'its editorial view of the nature of poetr\' is not idealist'.
He added, with characteristic bloodthirstiness, 'The Berts of Left
Review will certainly shoot the Cyrils and Raymonds of the New
Statesman. We may clap at that; it will be small loss. But as the
years pass they will shoot the Audens and the MacNeices and the

76 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

Isherwoods', and that would be disastrous. It is interesting to
notice that for the unpoHtical Grigson, as for many others, 'Lib-
eral' had become, like 'Fascist', a term of literary abuse. 'Mr
Waley's fairly clean "Liberal" English seems much queerer and
more lifeless than it did in 1918.'

[. . .]

To be as heretical as I was absolves one from feelings of guilt.
It is the orthodox who feel guilty when the ground of their belief
is taken away, it was the orthodox fellow-travellers, not Commu-
nist true believers or heretics, who turned to the consolations of
psychology and symbolism.

It always seemed to me that Marxist materialism was abso-
lutely irreconcilable with Freudian psychology, and I read with
thorough approval John Strachey's scornful reference to Freud as
'one of the last great theorists of the European capitalist class' in
The Coming Struggle For Power, and the criticism in Left Re-
view which pointed out that the conclusions of psycho-analysis
were largely drawn from a limited section of the leisured and
cultured, and that 'Freud might never have heard of the fact that
the human individual under Western civilization is a member of
a class'. But any idea which in any period seems to correspond
with a personal apprehension of reality will be rationalized so
that it can co-exist with other and perhaps contradictory ideas.
Thus, the materialist view of society presented by Strachey corre-
sponded for many people with what they saw happening around
them, but the psychological view of it derived from Freud corre-
sponded very directly to what they felt in their own natures.
Those who regarded themselves as both Freudians and social
materialists had therefore a double set of values. They assessed
their own behaviour and that of their friends by psychological
tenets, while applying Marxist ideas to all mass social move-
ments. It was inevitable that this should happen, for to say that
Hitler was a psychopathological personality of a compulsive anal
sadistic type was of no help at all in discovering how to get rid of
him. Some of the politicians decided that psychology had its
subsidiary uses. John Strachey, in writing of a book called Freud
and Marx, forgot that Freud was a theorist of the capitalist class:

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICH • SyjTWnS 77

He (the author) shows that while Trotskyism, like fascism, is, of
course, basically a political and economic phenomenon, yet one cannot
exhaustively explain it without recourse to modern psychological knowl-
edge. Above all one cannot guard against the recurrence of this terrible
disease of degeneracy, to which men and women either within, or, more
often, just on the fringes of the working class parties, have shown
themselves subject, without recourse to psychological knowledge.

Must there not have been a blush on Strachey's cheek, must his
pen not for a moment have faltered, when a few months ago he
expressed the view that Trotsky was a great and ill-used man?
But this is by the way. The Artists were not concerned with using
psychology to prove poHtical points. Psychology gave them a
wider ground for expressing in art their feehngs of guilt.

'Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for
without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine
morning.' One hardly needs to read further than the opening
sentence of The Trial to understand why Kafka exerted so much
influence over English prose writers in the late Thirties. Like
Kafka's heroes they were aware of guilt without being able
clearly to discover its nature; like them, were in rebellion against
the authority which they respected, and to which they desired to
submit. 'If an authority is good why should it not be feared?' K
asks in The Castle, and this too was a question that fellow-travel-
ling artists asked themselves. Yet the opposite view which may
also be found in Kafka, 'All virtues are individual, all vices
social', was again, in a way, exactly what they felt. And the
working-out of the individual's struggle against authority with
every possible complication and subtlety, the assertion of his code
of values at the moment of their necessary and inevitable defeat,
these things appealed to the deepest elements in their natures. I
avoid, out of personal distaste for them, the obvious psychologi-
cal interpretations, and say only that, like Kafka, these writers
were unable to fulfil their longing for submission to an imper-
sonal force.

Kafka's influence did not spring solely from the fact that artists

78 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

in the Thirties were able to identify his moral problems with
their own, but also from the evident possibility of applying his
symbolism to the social situation. Malraux and Hemingway had
been able to say something directly about the social and moral
problems of the time without using symbolism or descending to
propaganda, but this direct approach was (as it seemed) possible
because they were both men of action. The symbolism of Kafka
offered another strategy to those who were not eager participants
in warfare. The artists might tell the truth of our times symboli-
cally or in parable. I remember going round, after first reading
Kafka, telling my friends that his apparatus of ambiguity could
be used for all sorts of purposes, comic, tragic or merely mysteri-
ous, and that such a technique might produce anti-Fascist fairy
tales of great power and beauty.

Munich. Louis MacNeice is a wonderfully sensitive recorder of
those weeks, expressing almost perfectly the feelings of the most
intelligent members of the Audience; yet the emotion he records
here, the appalled sense that a way of life was over, did not last.

Hitler yells on the wireless,

The night is damp and still
And I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;

They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill.
The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken.

Each tree falling like a closing fan;
They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft.

The guns will take the view
And searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli

With narrow wands of blue.
And the rain came on as I watched the territorials

Sawing and chopping and pulling on ropes like a team
In a village tug-of-war; and I found my dog had
vanished

And thought This is the end of the old regime,'
But found the police had got her at St John's Wood
station

And fetched her in the rain and went for a cup
Of coffee to an all-night shelter and heard a taxi-driver

Say 'It turns me up

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICH • Symons 79

W^hen I see these soldiers in lorries' — rumble of tumbrils

Drum in the trees
Breaking the eardrums of the ravished dryads —

It turns me up; a coffee, please.

What one has to remember always in thinking of a period, and
what one can never quite convey in writing about it, is that
things bear quite a different appearance at the time to the
artificial historian's neatness that is imposed upon them after-
wards. "What Munich showed to many people was the need to
prepare for war; but many others, like James Maxton and George
Lansbury, thanked Chamberlain for preserving peace, and hoped
that the peace might be permanent because the alternative was so
terrible to contemplate; and to supporters of the Popular Front,
Afunich was merely one more proof of the need for collective
security, something that they took metaphorically in their stride.
Their reaction was neither to wish for British rearmament nor to
thank Chamberlain; it was rather to feel that although war
would have been terrible, peace on such terms was even worse.

But once again

The crisis is put off and things look better
And we feel negotiation is not vain —

Save my skin and damn my conscience.
And negotiation wins,

If you can call it winning.
And here we are — just as before — safe in our skins;

Glory to God for Munich.
And stocks go up and wrecks

Are salved and politicians' reputations
Go up like Jack-on-the-Beanstalk; only the Czechs

Go down and without fighting.

"WTiat was the whole affair but one further proof of what they
had often maintained, that the Chamberlain Government would
in the end always give way to Hitler? It seems in retrospect that
one likely effect of the Munich settlement might have been a
decrease in support of the Left Book Club, as its members saw
that the Club had been powerless to influence events in any
degree; but this was not at all the case. On the contrarv, it made
liberal sceptics like MacNeice believe for the first time that

80 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

collective action was essential, and that they must participate in
it.

For from now on

Each occasion must be used, however trivial,
To rally the ranks of those whose chance will soon be gone

For even guerrilla warfare.
The nicest people in England have always been the least

Apt to solidarity or alignment
But all of them must now align against the beast

That prowls at every door and barks in every headline.

The Left Book Club never approached the figure of a hundred
thousand members that had been prophesied in the early months,
but the membership rose slowly until it topped sixty thousand,
and Munich had no significant effect upon the graph of its rise. It
is true that Victor Gollancz found himself looking again at the
Club's activities and saw 'something rather wicked about it,
mixed up with a great deal that was good: an element of Hitler-
ism, almost, in reverse', but this is a late gloss, and at the time
Gollancz said nothing stronger than that 'in my view the publica-
tions of the Club have tended to concentrate overmuch (though
by no means exclusively) on two or three points of view, and to
forget that any author has a place in our ranks, provided only
that his work is of value in the struggle for peace and a better
social and economic order and against Fascism.' This, however,
had no effect at all on the books chosen, nor did Gollancz feel at
the time that the Club was the wrong vehicle for expressing his
ideas. The discussion groups continued their activities with undi-
minished zeal, and the Labour Party became increasingly anxious
about the political use of these groups. Herbert Morrison said
that

There is ample evidence that the Left Book Club movement, through
its groups, has become a political movement with substantial money
behind it, and that one of its main activities is in the direction of
manipulating and controlling local Labour parties. This cannot be
tolerated.

[. . .]

HERESY, GUILT, MUNICH • SymOTlS 81

One must see a double, and contradictory, process working in
the Audience during these last years of the Thirties. To one side
many of the Pragmatists and Artists were acknowledging with
infinite reluctance the extent and nature of the deception in
which they had willingly acquiesced, and were moving slowly
away from all political attachments towards the point of view put
forward by E. M. Forster, in What I Believe. Tolerance, good
temper and sympathy, Forster said, were the prime virtues, per-
sonal relationships were at least 'comparatively solid, in a world
full of violence and cruelty'. One should not give more than two
cheers even for Democracy.

Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it
is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to
that extent it deserves our support. It does start from the assumption
that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make
a civilization. It does not divide its citizens into the bossers and the
bossed — as an efficiency-regime tends to do. The people I admire most
are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover
something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get
more of a chance under democracy than elsewhere. They found reli-
gions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do
disinterested scientific research, or they may be what is called 'ordinary
people', who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children
decently, for instance, or help their neighbours. All these people need
to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them
liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a
democracy.

It was towards such a political quietism, and away from belief
in the Age of Faith ('It is extremely unpleasant really. It is
bloody in every sense of the word') that one section of the
Audience unconsciously moved. To this attitude there was coun-
terposed that of anti-Forsterian liberals like MacNeice (taken as
an example on the basis of the attitude shown in Autumn Jour-
nal) who felt that they had lived too much in the world of
personal relationships, and that Fascism presented a threat before
which all individualism must seem finicky. These reluctant re-
cruits to the idea of collective security were not really an ade-

82 LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND FORCES

quale replacement for those who were deserting the cause, but
this was not apparent at the time.

These are pubhc events. A private one, reported in the Daily
Express of January 19, 1939, had more than a purely personal
significance.

To USA, last night, to lecture and see about staging of their last play:
poet Wystan H. Auden and collaborator Christopher Isherwood.

To this may be added a report in the Evening Standard a
couple of months later.

The young pair are not wholly impressed with the New World. They
shut themselves up in a flat in one of the city's less fashionable slum
districts. Here, in conclave, they proceeded to evolve a new philosophy
of life. Its main principle, I gather, is a negation of Auden's previous
thesis that art is inseparable from politics.

The Pressure of Other Ideas

in the Philosophical and

Cultural Milieu

G. J. WARNOCK

First Retrospect

WILLIAM VAN O'CONNOR

Toward a History of Bloomsbury

SHIV K. KUMAR

Introduction to
Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

The Problem of Influence

J. M. COHEN

Le Frisson Nouveau

WYLIE SYPHER

The Cubist Perspective — The New World of Relationships:
Camera and Cinema

First Retrospect

of English Philosophy since 1900: Absolute Idealism,
Analysis, Logical Atomism, Logical Positivism

G. J. WARNOCK

Before passing from the philosophy of yesterday to that of
today we may try the effect of an even more rapid, more Olym-
pian survey of the position now reached, and its relation to a
lengthier history. Very general remarks may be helpful, and are
not always untrue. It is no doubt perilous to make them. But that
cannot be helped.

In the species of Idealism which appeared so suddenly and
violently in this country in the later years of the nineteenth
century there was, perhaps, nothing fundamentally new. The
notion that the proper concern of the philosopher was with the
question 'What is the ultimate nature of Reality?' was a notion at
least as old as Plato, and arguably older. Moreover it had long
been felt, more or less confusedly, that this was no ordinary
empirical question; there had been a persistent and quite proper
tendency, as more and more aspects and departments of life and
the world were made the subjects of systematic empirical study,
to distinguish these as not within the philosopher's province. The
philosopher's method of inquiry was to consist in reasoning. He
was to consider — not challenging, or at least not challenging on
their own level, the factual findings of other investigators — how
Reality, how things in general, ought to be viewed, in such a way
as to satisfy the demands of reason. Of course, what reason
demands is not immediately clear; and in fact past philosophers

From G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy Since 1900 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958) ; Chapter V, pp. 52-60.

86 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

could be quite illuminatingly classified in terms of the startlingly
divergent answers they gave, or very often assumed, to the ques-
tion what these demands were. What determined these answers
might be said to be their various senses of what was satisfactory,
ideally intelligible. Some found their ideal in tight deductive
s)stems; others, very differently, in the notion of physical mecha-
nism. Others again preferred explanations in terms of purpose.
And there were some, as Hume in certain moods but pre-emi-
nently Kant, whose concern was with the question whether any
view could be both tenable and rationally satisfying.

Absolute Idealism can be distinguished chiefly as being a sys-
tem for extremists. [It was in the first place highly and ambi-
tiously metaphysical. The claim was made, that is, to establish
striking and important conclusions about the universe as a whole,
about Reality, not in this or that more or less superficial or
limited aspect, but in its ultimate nature. The philosopher's
concern with 'the whole' was constantly and powerfully con-
trasted with the merely partial or fragmentary interests of other
disciplines; his endeavour to arrive at really 'ultimate' truths was
distinguished from, say, scientific attempts to establish proposi-
tions that would serve for some non-ultimate purpose, or would
satisfy some more or less arbitrary or provisional standard. It was
held that what passed for truths in the world, or in the labora-
tory, were all, or almost all, somehow unsatisfactory — that for the
philosopher there was not only something more, but also some-
thing very different, to be said. — Inserted from p. 3.] The sup-
posed satisfactoriness only of the undifferentiated Absolute en-
tailed the consequence that, in order to satisfy reason's demands,
the whole apparatus not only of our, but of any, system of
thought and speech must be dismantled, and a view substituted
which might be occasionally guessed at or glimpsed, but which
certainly could never be embodied in sober statement. In natural
but perhaps unholy alliance with this novel extremism of
thought, there occurred a striking rise in the temperature of phil-
osophical writing. With honourable exceptions, the Idealists
brought into British philosophy a species of vivid, violent, and
lofty imprecision which even in general literature had hitherto
been rare. That this was so was by no means unimportant. It

FIRST RETROSPECT • Wamock 87

liclpecl iheni to convey a vague general impression that tlicy were
concerned with far deeper questions, and concerned with iliem
far more seriously and intently, than any of tiieir predecessors had
ever been. This impression has survived in some cjuarters to
plague their successors. It was doubtless not dishonestly conveyed;
but it is certainly mistaken. It is not an indication of blindness or
bias to distinguish between the importance of what is said, and
the emphasis or eccentricity in the manner of saying it. That dis-
tinction is often extremely important in philosophy.

From the point of view of this striking but short-lived philo-
sophical extremism, Moore appears as a far more extraordinary
figure than Russell. Certainly, Russell's world of indefinitely
numerous, independent logical atoms is the metaphysical oppo-
site of Bradley's Absolute. Certainly, the kind of logic which he
thought of as exhibiting the pattern of linguistic perfection, and
therefore the true picture of reality, was as far removed as possi-
ble from anything that Bradley would have felt to be satisfactory.
His respect for mathematics and physics w^as un-Idealistic. But
there is a sense, even so, in which he was playing the same game.
He had his own strange notion of the rationally satisfactory, and
in terms of it tried to 'give an account' of the world. AVhat was
new in this enterprise (and doubtless exceedingly important)
was the detail of its execution; its general character was, on the
contran,', wholly traditional. Moore, however, was a quite new
kind of important philosopher. Though he did not deny the
legitimacy of metaphysical ambitions, he was himself entirely
without them. If (as he has said himself) his passion for argu-
ment had not been provoked into action by the strange doings of
others, he might never have been a philosopher at all. For, in
general, he did not feel it to be difficult at all to make out a
world-view that would satisfy reason's demands. He found the
view we all hold, the 'Common Sense view of the world', to be
perfcctlv imsurprising, undistressing, quite certainly true. Per-
haps he would have wished to adjust it a little here and there;
and, being \\ hat he was, this miglit have occupied him for quite a
long time. But this was not what he was really interested in
doing. Quite certain of the truth of most things that we ordinar-
ily believe, and profoundly sceptical of the possibility of deciding

88 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

on the truth or falsehood of large metaphysical theories, he
engaged with astonishing pertinacity in the clarification — ^which
he conceived as meaning the analysis — of any propositions, philo-
sophical or otherwise, that engaged his interest. Part of the great
interest and importance of this for others consists, I would sug-
gest, in the fact that this is something which anyone can do — to
practise philosophy in the manner of Moore, it is not necessary to
have (as most of us doubtless have not) nor to pretend to have
(as some at least would be unwilling to do) large-scale metaphy-
sical anxieties. It is necessary only to want to get things clear.
And this aim can be pursued, as it was conspicuously by Moore,
with an utter absence of pretension, an air of intellectual respec-
tability, provided otherwise by Russell but by Idealism at least
not always. There are no doubt many who also take satisfaction
in the absence from Moore's manner of writing of any aspiration
to inappropriate literary virtues. Philosophy as he has pursued it
can be seen to be work.

M^hat then are the bearings in this setting of Logical Positiv-
ism? Here the situation is decidedly an odd one, owing, as so
often, to discordance between theory and practice. In theory the
Positivists had made a most radical departure. For they held, as it
had never been held before, that philosophers as such could have
no concern at all with questions of fact. The logical analysis of
language was not regarded, as it had been by Russell and Moore
and in some degree by all earlier philosophers, as part of the
philosopher's business, but as the whole of it; it was explicitly
held that there was nothing else for him to do. Positivists some-
times maintained, in defensive mood, that they ought not to be
regarded as revolutionaries — for had not all philosophers from
Plato onwards spent much of their time on the niceties of linguis-
tic analysis? Certainly they had. But it had not hitherto been
contended that language alone formed the entire subject-matter
of philosophy. Those who maintained that this was radically new
were quite right, and those who denied it were, perhaps, less than
ingenuous.

However, I believe that to a really Olympian eye the Positiv-
ists, again, would look less extraordinary than Moore. For in fact
they had, surely, their own metaphysical beliefs. Even if their

FIRST RETROSPECT • Wamock 89

attachment to the Verification Principle is not, as it quite plainly
could be, construed as itself expressing a metaphysical conviction,
their later doctrines of Physicalism and the 'unity of science'
fairly clearly express a particular world-view, a particular ideal of
rational acceptability. They were no more reluctant than, say,
Bradley woidd have been to throw over the plain opinions of the
plain man, if these could not be squared with the demands of
their peculiar principles. No doubt such disagreements were, in
their careful moments, represented as not factual, but as 'syn-
tactical' or analytic; but this, even if it were true, would not be
decisive; for even the most overtly metaphysical paradox is not
quite ordinarily at odds with our common opinions.

Continuing our lofty retrospect over the recent past, we may
well be struck next by the very curious fact that all the successors
of the Idealist empire, however variously related to it by practice
or theory, had among themselves a strong family resemblance.
Their interests, their principles, and even their prejudices turned
out in fact to be remarkably alike. First, they had all arrived by
their different routes at the view that the day-to-day labours of
the philosopher consisted overwhelmingly in the ajialysis of lan-
guage. For Moore this was simply the route to clearer under-
standing, a preliminary' perhaps to metaphysical theory, but in
practice taking up almost all of his time and attention. For the
Logical Atomists the analysis of language was regarded as itself
the key to metaphysical truth. Their whole thesis was derived in
part, as Russell avowed, from the study of logic conceived as the
syntax of a 'perfect language'; and the so-called 'location',
through the fog of our imperfect language, of the ultimate facts
that we really refer to, was to be achieved by the logical analysis
of propositions. The Positivists were also engaged in linguistic
analysis, officially without metaphysical ambitions; theirs was
supposed to be the two-sided task, on the one hand of exposing
the muddles of metaphysicians, and on the other hand of humbly
clarifying the vocabularies of the scientist and the mathemati-
cian. Thus, in spite of their very substantial divergences in aim
and disagreements in doctrine, what each party actually did was
vcrv much the same.

liut the resemblance in practice went also furtlier than this. All

90 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

parties were alike, not only in their concern with language, but
also in their predominant concern with a particular part of it.
They were interested almost exclusively in statements of fact.
This is not, of course, in the least surprising. The Positivists
wished to distinguish the truths of science from the alleged truths
of metaphysics, and hence were concerned to draw a clear distinc-
tion between genuine statements of fact and mere impostors. The
Atomists, bent on the location of atomic facts, had of course to
take ordinary statements of fact as their point of departure. And
Moore was mainly concerned with the analysis of what was, or at
least might perhaps be, true^ and hence he too made statements
the topic of his inquiries.

More interesting, perhaps, is the further point that certain
prejudices about statements were also common to all parties.
This is shown in the commonly accepted notion of 'analysis', and
in the commonly held conviction that analysis of this type was
entirely adequate for philosophical purposes. The search for
philosophical analyses always took the form of an attempt to
formulate a sort of linguistic equation. On the left of the equa-
tion was to be the expression to be analysed, and on the right
another expression, usually longer and more explicit, designed to
be synonymous with or equivalent to the first — equivalent in the
sense of being entailed by, entailing, and being logically inde-
pendent of the very same things. It seems not to have been
doubted that language did actually have the rather simple and
perfectly rigid articulation presupposed by this faith in simple
linguistic equations; nor does it appear to have occasioned any
discomfort that they leave out of account all questions of non-ver-
bal context — questions, that is, about the characteristic situations
or circumstances in which, or purposes for which, linguistic
expressions are typically employed. The practitioners of analysis
operated in effect with a startlingly simplified picture of what a
language is — the picture of a firmly and simply articulated system
of expressions employed, not indeed without reference to fact,
but in other respects in a total contextual vacuum, for the one
sole purpose of stating things truly or falsely. The Logical Atom-
ists can be said to have adopted this picture quite deliberately as
representing the real state of affairs. For others it was implicit

FIRST RETROSPECT • ]Varnock 91

only. But it was certainly present. For unless one pictured lan-
guage to oneself in this way, it would be unreasonable to attach
so much value to the standard procedure of analysis. It would be
too clear that analyses of the standard pattern might often be
undiscoverable, or if discovered, then often so very thinly inform-
ative as scarcely to merit the labour of formulation.

Thus there was in philosophical circles, say twenty years ago, a
large measure of uniformity in practice, overlying, and to a great
extent concealing from view, considerable diversity in aims and
doctrines. It is not surprising that the situation was often then,
and has often been since, misunderstood. It has been particularly
tempting, I believe, for commentators outside the professional
ring to identify, first, what in fact was common to all parties —
pre-occupation with analysis of language; next, to take note of
the novel idea that this was the sole proper business of philoso-
phy— an idea sponsored only by Logical Positivism; and finally,
confusing this singularity of doctrine with the general uniformity
of practice, to decide that all philosophers of the day were Logi-
cal Positivists. This was in fact not true at any time. I am in-
clined to think that it was not even true that those philosophers
who really were Logical Positivists were the most revolutionary
or radical figures. By profession they were. But by temperament,
by practice, and by force of example, far more difference
was made, I believe, by the work of Moore. He was not only
among the first to oppose both the manner and the matter of the
Idealist 'tradition'; he was also far more profoundly unlike its
practitioners. By comparison the Logical Atomists and even the
Positivists have very much of the look of traditional figures.
Their work has a truly 'philosopiiical' air which would not have
been quite strange, though it might well have seemed disagree-
able, to their predecessors. Moore's work is in essence so simple, so
direct, so wholly unprejudiced and candid, as scarcely to seem
philosophical at all. It is just argument. That, perhaps, is its
])cculiar virtue, and the secret of its power.

Toward a History of Bloomsbury

Group Attitudes of an Intellectual Elite
WILLIAM VAN O'CONNOR

Reviewing Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary for the New
Yorker W. H. Auden said it is "already too late to hope that some-
one will write a definitive history of Bloomsbury, that fascinating
cultural milieu which formed itself during the twenties, and
came to an end with the death of Virginia Woolf." There is,
Auden adds, a history of its origins in Maynard Keynes's Two
Memoirs (1949) and another account in David Garnett's auto-
biography, The Golden Echo, the first of several volumes. John
Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Thoby and Adrian Stephen,
Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, and others who formed
the group of friends that was to be called Bloomsbury, are dead;
but its history might still be written, or contributed to, by Leon-
ard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa
Bell, to name no others. As a matter of fact, the Memoir Club
that gave rise to Keynes's "My Early Beliefs" still meets, produc-
ing papers such as Clive Bell's "Recollections of Lytton
Strachey," "Roger Fry," and "What Was Bloomsbury?" and at
least one piece in Desmond MacCarthy's posthumous Memories.
(The Memoir Club, incidentally, had its origin as the Novel
Club, a plan whereby Virginia Woolf hoped to get MacCarthy to
write a novel; each member was to read from a novel in progress.
MacCarthy was, his friends say, a brilliant talker but bone-lazy.
The plan did not succeed, but the group continued to meet and
read their essays, frequently memories from their younger days.)

From Southwest Review, 40 (Winter 1955) .
92

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBLRY • O'ConnOT 93

And the scholarly studies of Bloomsbury have begun, with Irma
Rantavaara's Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury and J. K. John-
stone's The Bloomsbin-y Group.

Bloomsbury has been called a mutual admiration society, and
it is true that members of Bloomsbury have written a great deal,
although sometimes sharply, about each other; Mrs. Woolf on
Forster and Fry and Strachey, Forster on Mrs. Woolf and G. L.
Dickinson — a figure at the edge of their set — Bell on Strachey
and Fry, MacCarthy on Fr)' and Strachey, and so on. Their
connections, naturally enough, extend beyond a narrow circle.
For example, Raymond Mortimer, who now seems to be the
doyen of critics in London, and who is second generation Blooms-
bury, has written an introduction to the Penguin edition (1944)
of Duncan Grant's paintings, and articles, from the inside, on
Mrs. \Voolf and Strachey in Channel Packet. If Bloomsbury was a
mutual admiration society, there was ample reason for admiring.
In Keynes they had one of the leading public figures of the age,
and, in the judgment of Bertrand Russell, the most brilliant man
in England. In Forster and Virginia ^Voolf they had two of the
foremost novelists, and in David Garnett a very gifted fantasist.
In Strachey they had the foremost biographer. In Desmond Mac-
Carthy they had the lead critic for the Sunday Times. In Roger
Fry and Clivc Bell they had the leading art critics of the period.
In Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell they had two gifted painters.
And so on. Certainly Bloomsbury was an unusual group of
friends, and it is no wonder that Bloomsbury fact and Blooms-
bur)' myth are a little hard to separate.

One of the papers read at the Memoir Club, Vanessa Bell's
"Old Bloomsbury," has been summarized in Noel Annan's Leslie
Stephen (1951) . The summary provides a useful introduction to
the figures who composed Bloomsbury:

. . . the original circle, whicli gathered in Brunswick and Gordon
Squares between 1904-15, had ceased to exist many years before the
term became fashionable and other people inherited its name and
reputation. The original members were Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf,
Thoby and Adrian Stephen (the four children of Sir Leslie) ; Clive Bell
and Leonard Woolf; J. M. Keynes, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry;
Desmond and Molly MacCarthy; Lytton, Oliver, Marjorie and James

94 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Strachey; Sidney Saxon Turner, musician and civil servant, R. T. J.
Norton, mathematician and don; and on occasions E. M. Forster and
Gerald Shove, who was a Fabian and a Cambridge economist, and
married F. W. Maitland's daughter, whose great aunt was Julia Stephen.
Thoby Stephen, Bell, Woolf, Turner and Lytton Strachey had all met
at Trinity where in 1899 they founded the Midnight Society which met
on Saturdays to read plays and poetry at that hour. Keynes was brought
into the circle through Strachey and Woolf, and Grant was cousin to
the Stracheys. Lady Strachey knew the Stephens well through her
friendship with Annie Ritchie. There were, of course, other visitors to
the circle but this was the original nucleus.^

In "My Early Beliefs," Maynard Keynes shows how important
to the group Professor G. E. Moore had been, and he extends the
membership, as it were, of Bloomsbury a little beyond Vanessa
Bell's listing:

I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore's Principia
Ethica came out at the end of my first year. I have never heard of the
present generation having read it. But, of course, its effect on us, and
the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still
dominates everything else. We were at an age when our beliefs in-
fluenced our behavior, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for
the middle-aged to forget, and the habits of feeling formed then still
persist in a recognizable degree. It is those habits of feeling, influencing
a majority of us, which make this Club a collectivity which separates us
from the rest. They overlaid, somehow, our otherwise extremely differ-
ent characters — Moore himself was a puritan and precisionist, Strachey
... a Voltairean, Woolf a rabbi, myself a nonconformist, Sheppard a
conformist and (as it now turns out) an ecclesiastic, Clive [Bell] a gay
and amiable dog, Sydney-Turner a quietist, Hawtry a dogmatist, and so
on. Of those who had come just before, only MacCarthy and Ainsworth,
who were much influenced by their personal feeling for Moore, came
under his full influence. We did not see much of Forster at that time;
who was already the elusive colt of a dark horse. It was only for us,
those who were active in 1903, that Moore completely ousted McTag-
gart,^ Dickinson, and Russell. The influence was not only overwhelm-

1 There are similar accounts in Duncan Grant's "Virginia Woolf" {Horizon,
III, June, 1941) and in Garnett's The Golden Echo.

2 J. McT. E. McTaggart, Trinity College lecturer in philosophy from 1879
to 1923. G. L. Dickinson published /. McT. E. McTaggart (London: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1931) .

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'CoTlTlOr 95

ing; but it was the extreme opposite of what Strachey used to call
funeste: it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the
opening of a new heaven and a new earth, we were not afraid of
anything.

Keynes then proceeds to examine Moore's philosophy, pointing
out what the young men in the group accepted and what they
chose to ignore. (Russell says, bluntly, that they left out Moore's
morals.) He describes an intellectual milieu in which criticism
was unsparing and constant, in which humor was both gay and
biting.

They believed that nothing mattered but "states of mind," by
which they meant "communion with objects of love, beauty and
truth." Thus the group was contemptuous of worldly values, of
wealth, power, or social position. (They satisfied their need for
prestige by membership in their own intellectual aristocracy.)
The group rejected Original Sin and subscribed to Man's Rea-
sonableness, they rejected supcrnaturalism but insisted on man's
religious nature. They were tolerant of sexual freedom, but in
their own conduct rather proper. "Thus we were brought up,"
Keynes wrote, "with Plato's absorption in the good in itself, with
a scholasticism that outdid St. Thomas, in calvinistic withdrawal
from the pleasures and successes of Vanity Fair, and oppressed
with the sorrows of W^erther." Perhaps it is fairer to say that they
were not indifferent to morality but opposed to those forms of
morality that become weapons in philistine hands.

Desmond MacCarthy, in an essay on Henry james,^ makes a
point about how his group looked to experience for "states of
mind."

Morality was either a means to attaining these goods of the soul, or it
was nothing — just as the railway system existed to bring people together
and feed them, or the social order that as many "ends" as possible
should be achieved. These ends naturally refined themselves down to
personal relations, aesthetic emotions and the pursuit of truth. We were
perpetually in search of distinctions; our most ardent discussions were
attempts to fix some sort of scale of values for experience. The tendency
was for the stress to fall on feeling rightly rather than upon action.

^Portraits (1949 edition) , pp. 164-65.

96 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Naturally enough, James would and did appeal strongly to them,
for James "cared immensely for spiritual decency; nothing in life
beguiled him into putting anything before that."

MacCarthy's "Bloomsbury, an Unfinished Memoir," which is
included in Memories, is truly unfinished, being mostly a sketch
of Clive Bell as a Cambridge undergraduate, both bon vivant and
intellectual. MacCarthy objected to the attacks on Bloomsbury as
an exclusive club dedicated to "moral frivolity." MacCarthy de-
nied that Bloomsbury was in any real sense a "movement."

Clive Bell has provided a good chronology in "What Was
Bloomsbury?" for anyone writing the history of Bloomsbury, and,
quite rightly, he also has insisted that proper attention be given
to differences of opinion. The name, he says, was first applied by
Mrs. Desmond MacCarthy — in a letter, dated about 1910, she
called the group of friends "the Bloomsberries." Bell refers to the
Cambridge group and the meetings in Gordon Square and Fitz-
roy Square, and he adds the names of those who joined them
after 1914. These include Raymond Mortimer, a friend of Bell;
Stephen Tomlin, who married into the Strachey family; Ralph
Partridge, an Oxford lecturer and friend of Lytton Strachey;
Sebastian Sprott and F. L. Lucas, friends of Keynes, who, with
him, lived with the Bells and Grant for a time in Sussex; and
Frances Marshall, who married Partridge. Obviously there is a
difEerence between "Old Bloomsbury" and the later Bloomsbury,
of the twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties.

Bell, like MacCarthy, doubts the existence of Bloomsbury.
Historians, he says, will not be able to find a central doctrine
because there is none. By way of illustration, he says Strachey was
interested in Elizabethan and eighteenth-century literature but
disapproved of the interest of Fry and Bell in modern French
literature and art. Keynes and Bell were much influenced by
Moore, but Fry was anti-Moore, and Mortimer, Partridge, and
Tomlin — all Oxford men — were indifferent to him. "At last they
[historians] may come to doubt whether 'Bloomsbury' ever ex-
isted. And did it?"

It is quite true that in many respects the individual writers
went their own ways, but as a group they had considerable
coherence: their educational backgrounds, as Keynes indicates.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURV • O'CoUTlOr 97

were very similar, and so were many of their convictions. They
belonged to the intelligentsia of the Left; most of them came
from upper-middle-class families; a number of them were pacifists
or conscientious objectors; they were opposed to Orthodox Chris-
tianity; they believed friendship and aesthetic experience are of
primary importance in the conduct of life; they believed in the
relaxed manner, gaiety of spirit — and serious dedication. It may
well be true that after 1914 the group was less homogeneous.
Even so, the \\'oolfs and Bells were held together by ties of blood
and marriage. Strachey and later Grant were two of Keynes's
closest friends. Birrell and Garnett ran a bookstore for a time.
And so on. Anyone reading Keynes's The Economic Conse-
quences of the Peace and Strachey's biographies will immediately
recognize the similarity in tone. Anyone reading Virginia Woolf's
A Room of One's Own and Keynes's broadcast inaugurating the
British Art Council' (government subsidizing of the arts) will
recognize a community of sentiment and doctrine. And many of
the articles in E. M. Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy are in a
sense Bloomsbury manifestos: the importance of friendship over
politics and institutions, love, the great republic, art for its own
sake, and so on.

One of the lives of Keynes, R. F. Harrod's John Maynard
Keynes (1951) , has an informative chapter on Bloomsbury, being
especially useful in identifying the "minor" figures in the group,
but it probably errs in making Keynes the central and revered
figure. Also certain magazine articles that followed Virginia
"Woolf's death seem to imply, perhaps unintentionally, that
Bloomsbur)' had its center in the Leonard Woolfs and the Ho-
garth Press. Both Bell and Garnett say that Keynes's friends
treated him like any other member of the group, and he them,
and, second, there was no center to the group; there were friends
who saw each other in their various apartments over the years.
The continuity of Bloomsbury, its center, whether it was or was
not a movement and so on, are likely to depend in part on the
observer.

Virginia Woolf in A Writer's Diary indicates that the idea of

* The Listener, July 12, 1945.

98 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Bloomsbury troubled her no little bit because her reputation and
Bloomsbury were intertwined. On Saturday, March 16, 1935, she |
wrote:

I have had three severe swingeings lately: Wyndham Lewis; Mirsky;
and now Swinnerton; and I am dismissed with it. I didn't read W. L.:
and Swinnerton only affected me as a robin affects a rhinoceros — except
in the depths of the night. ... In last week's Time and Tide St. John
Ervine called Lytton that "servile minded man . . ."

And on Monday, two days later:

Having just written a letter about Bloomsbury I cannot control my
mind enough to go on with The P's. I woke in the night and thought of
it. But whether to send it or not, I don't know. But now I must think of
something else. Julian [Bell] and Helen last night . . . L advised me not
to send the letter and after two seconds I see he is right. It is better, he
says, to be able to say we don't answer. But we suggest a comic guide to
Bloomsbury by Morgan [E. M. Forster] and he nibbles.

The letter presumably is the one entitled "Middlebrow, To the
Editor of the New Statesman" which was to be published by
Leonard Woolf in The Death of the Moth. Mrs. Woolf men-
tioned Bloomsbury frequently. For example, to Rose Macaulay
she said: "All this rubbish about Bloomsbury; do you feel Ma-
rylebone or Chelsea, Kensington or Hampstead?" But, as Mrs.
Woolf knew, Bloomsbury was not a place, it was an idea, and she,
as much as anyone, felt it. The names that recur in her diary are
David Garnett, the Stracheys, the MacCarthys, Roger Fry, E. M.
Forster, Duncan Grant, the Bells, et al. And the attitudes ex-
pressed can be seen as Bloomsbury attitudes.

Miss Rantavaara, a Finn, says she undertook her Virginia
Woolf and Bloomsbury^ because she was curious to know why the
Cambridge lecturers she heard held such contradictory views
about Bloomsbury. Her investigations led her to believe "that
Bloomsbury cannot be properly understood without a compre-
hension of Virginia Woolf." The acknowledgments, to F. L.
Lucas and to Leonard Woolf, at the front of her book tell us

5 Helsinki, 1953.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • 0'Co7inor 99

something about her approach. She gives a good deal of attention
to Clive Bell's Civilization, and one could infer that Lucas,
closely associated with Bell, sees that as one of the more impor-
tant documents. Bell's book was also indebted, as he says, to the
opinions of Mrs. Woolf.

Miss Rantavaara presents the Cambridge world of McTaggart,
Dickinson, Russell, Moore, and the otiiers, as, in some form, it
was inherited by or understood by Virginia Stephen. In fact, she
gives it more attention than she gives the ideas of Mrs. \Voolf's
contemporaries, except, that is, for Bell's Civilization.

Civilization is Bloomsbury on its Epicurean side, but probably
it is not as serious in tone as similar books by Keynes, Leonard
Woolf, Forster, Garnett, or some of the others might have been.
It is still Bloomsbury; it is highly critical of the English social
structure and of the English public schools, it asks for tolerance
and open discussion of all topics, it tries to establish a hierarchy
of values leading to good "states of mind," and it sees the neces-
sity for an intellectual elite, free from material struggles. Bell's
Utopia is arguable and many reviewers took issue with him, some
of them using the occasion to give Bloomsbury a working over.
One of Miss Rantavaara's more interesting chapters is "The
Atmosphere of Bloomsbury," in which she rehearses some of the
anti-Bloomsbury sentiments.

There is an interesting section on Leslie Stephen, and one is
given a good sense of the spirit of rationality and hopefulness in
the pre-World War I Cambridge. One almost sees them reading
The Way of All Flesh or hears them arguing about the necessity
of pacifism (Russell, Strachey, and Bell were conscientious objec-
tors) . However, Miss Rantavaara does not quite show us how this
milieu became Mrs. Woolf's milieu. We assume that much of it
did, but it would help to see the process. If Mrs. Woolf was the
center of Bloomsbury Miss Rantavaara had some obligation to
place her there for us — to let tlie reader see her alive in Blooms-
bury. One of the relevant volumes, Roger Fry, is hardly men-
tioned.

The Bloomsbury Group*^ by J. K. Johnstone is also a useful

^Seeker and Warburg, 1954. also Noonday Press, 1954.

100 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

book, but it is neither as useful nor as good as it might have been
with the expenditure of a little more effort, or effort of a different
sort. Chapter i is an expansion of Noel Annan's footnote, quoted
above. Chapter ii is an explication of Moore's Principia Ethica,
and a statement that this volume greatly influenced Fry, Keynes,
Strachey, Forster, and Virginia Woolf. Chapter iii does for Fry's
aesthetics what the preceding chapter did for Moore's philoso-
phy. The following chapters are highly intelligent studies of
Strachey, Fry, and Mrs. Woolf, and there is a concluding chapter
of less than two pages, praising the Bloomsbury group for its
contribution to the humanistic spirit: Moore's doctrine of the
intrinsic good. Fry's insistence on the place of sensibility in
human affairs, and the group's concern for individualism and
friendship in a world increasingly collectivized and abstract.

Mr. Johnstone's book, which was a doctoral dissertation at the
University of Leeds, is much less speculative than it might have
been. For example, he gives very little attention to Lord Keynes,
who was, after all, not merely a Bloomsbury notable but a very
influential figure in the era between the wars. His Strachey-like
treatment of the Versailles conference in The Economic Conse-
quences of the Peace (apart from his statistical figures) was taken
as straight fact, and it contributed no little bit to the common
view of a greatly victimized Germany. Strachey was read as a
literary man and due allowances were made for the ironic man-
ner, his trimming down of Victorian solemnities. But Keynes was
an economist, a man of figures and facts, and therefore told
something close to the exact truth. Keynes's truth, on the literary
side, was also Strachey's truth, cutting away at the reputations of
the world's public figures. One is tempted to say that Keynes's
portrait of President Wilson is not notably different from Stra-
chey's Dr. Arnold.

Mr. Johnstone notes the differences between Bell, who is al-
most ignored, and Fry on the doctrine of "significant form," and
he observes other differences. But his thesis — that Bloomsbury is
a group — rather demands that Forster somehow "derive" from
Fry (there is less trouble with Virginia Woolf, who obviously was
greatly indebted to Fry) , and he makes out a better case than
dates and evidence would seem to allow. Fry did not join the
Woolf-Bell gatherings until 1910, and Forster's earliest novels

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'CotinOT 101

were published in 1905, 1907, 1908, and 1910." It is true enough
that Forster was, like Fry, a Cambridge figure, the student and
friend of G. Lowes Dickinson, but they were fifteen years apart. It
is most unlikely that Fry influenced Forster the novelist. It is
possible that Forster's interest in aesthetics (his fine essay on art
for art's sake in Two Cheers for Democracy being a case in point)
owes something to Fry.

If it is necessary to compare these two books, one may say, first,
that they are different. Miss Rantavaara tries to do a great deal
more with the antecedents of the group and to do something with
the popular notions about Bloomsbury. Mr. Johnstone concen-
trates on Moore and Fry for doctrine and on Strachey, Forster,
and Mrs. \Voolf for the literary manifestations of the doctrine.
Neither, unfortunately, treats the excellent fiction of Garnett.
Miss Rantavaara is the better historian of Bloomsbury, but Mr.
Johnstone is the better critic of individual works, when he is not
dealing with influences. Whoever writes the next book on
Bloomsbury will be greatly indebted to both of them.

English critics quite rightly stress the upper-middle-class ori-
gin of most members of Bloomsbury.® Auden mentioned it in his
review of A Writer's Diary, and Stephen Spender, a frequent
visitor at the Leonard Woolfs, made a good deal of it in his
autobiography, World Within a World. Spender says that to the
Bloomsbury set there was "something barbarous about our genera-
tion," the generation proclaiming the end of bourgeois civiliza-
tion and welcoming the revolution that would end it. The careers
of Virginia Woolf and her friends are summarized thus by
Spender:

She and her circle formed a group of friends who shared the same ideas
and who, within a common appreciation of high values, had a deep

^ Nfr. Forster says he docs not think he knew Fry when he was writing his
fiction. He also says that if Fry had a theory of fiction it was not as a serious
student of critical theory, that Fry was a highly intelligent man who theorized
about everything, and if he had a theory of fiction probably it was held
only tentatively and if he had had occasion to think further about it the
theory would have been modified.

8 Mr. Forster says the family origins of members of the group undoubtedly
were important, if only because they had leisure to write or to paint.

102 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

loyalty for one another. Living in their small country houses, their
London flats, full of taste, meeting at week-ends and at small parties,
discussing history, painting, literature, gossiping greatly, and producing
a few very good stories, they resembled those friends who at the time of
the plague in Florence withdrew into the countryside and told the
stories of Boccaccio. Our generation [the 1930's], unable to withdraw
into exquisite tale-telling and beautiful scenery, resembled rather the
Sturm und Drang generation of Goethe's contemporaries, terribly in-
volved in events and oppressed by them, reacting to them at first
enthusiastically and violently, later with difficulty and disgust.

T. S. Eliot in a note contributed to Horizon on Virginia Woolf
also represents her as having maintained the upper-middle-class
intellectual tradition:

Her position was due to a concurrence of qualities and circumstances
which never happened before, and which I do not think will ever
happen again. It maintained the dignified and admirable tradition of
Victorian upper middle-class culture — a situation in which the producer
was neither the servant of the exalted patron, the parasite of the
plutocrat, nor the entertainer of the mob— a situation in which the
producer and the consumer of art were on equal footing, and that
neither the lowest nor the highest.

I£ Eliot's generalization is true of Mrs. Woolf, it is also true of her
group.

Lytton Strachey's father was Lieutenant General Sir Richard,
descended from a family that had achieved distinction as early as
the sixteenth century, and his mother, a Grant, belonged to a
notable Scotch family, her father being a successful governor in
India and later governor of Jamaica. Duncan Grant, perhaps the
best of the Bloomsbury painters, lived with Lady Strachey, his
aunt, and her family during the absence of his own parents in
India, and through the Stracheys he came to know the children of
Leslie Stephen. The two families had had connections for several
generations, and, as Raymond Mortimer wrote, they were "re-
lated to half the most scholarly families in England." And there
were connections other than by blood or marriage. E. M. Forster's
wealthy great-grandfather, Henry Thornton, was the leading
figure in the Clapham Sect and Leslie Stephen's father, Sir James,
was its chronicler. When David Garnett's grandfather, the author
of The Twilight of the Gods, retired from his post at the British

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBLRY • O'ConnOT 103

Museum, he was feted by some of the leading Hterary figures, and
the man who addressed the group was Leslie Stephen. Edward
Garnett, David's father, probably was the best book editor of his
generation. Francis Birrell's father was Augustine Birrell, a min-
ister in Lord Asquith's cabinet. Fry's father was Sir Edward, a
judge. Such families (the Keynes family were related to the
Darwins, and so on) tended to form an intellectual aristocracy.
They were not always well-to-do, but frequently they were, and
they were accustomed, for the most part, to servants, comfort,
travel, and country houses. They inherited good taste and a sense
of obligation, and took the joys of the intellectual life for
granted.

If they revolted against the Victorian world, as most of the
Bloomsbury group did, they did not revolt as bohemians do, by
living outside the middle-class world; they revolted inside, as
intellectuals, in ways similar to the revolts of their parents.
Mortimer says that in ridiculing the Victorians Strachey and Mrs.
Woolf "used weapons forged in Victorian homes." (Lady
Strachey in a letter to her son said, "I don't much fancy your
taking up Queen Victoria to deal with. She could not help being
stupid, but she tried hard to do her duty, . . . highly to her
credit." Lady Strachey gave him a good deal of information, and
so did her cousin, Lady Lytton, who had been one of Victoria's
ladies-in-waiting.) "The mastery of a mass of detail," Mortimer
said, "the solid and admirably j^roportioned architecture of Mr.
Strachey's books are an inheritance from generations of civil
servants." Afrs. ^Voolf and Lytton Strachey, he concluded, had in
common "a voice that is never too loud, a skepticism that re-
mains polite, and a disregard, that never becomes insidting, for
the public taste. It is a quality of inherited culture." The division
of classes, one assumes, would be readily accepted by such people,
and by and large they do seem to accept it.^

^In Keynes's Es<:ays in Biofrraphy there is a section fpp. 79-83) on families
that, for generations, have produced leaders in statesmanship and thought.
Harrod says that Keynes "had no egalitarian sentiment; if he wanted to im-
prove the lot of the poor and that qiiicklv — and he believed that far more
progress was possible than was being made — that was not for the sake of equal-
ity, but in order to make their lives happier and better. . . . The idea of de-
stroving anyliiing good in itself in the interest of equalitv was ;inathema
to him."

104 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

A Writer's Diary makes it clear that, in Mrs. Woolf's mind, the
social origins of James Joyce interfered very seriously with his
ability as a writer. The entry for Wednesday, August 16, 1922,
reads:

I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I
have read 200 pages so far — not a third; and have been amused,
stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters — to the end
of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillu-
sioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom
[T. S. Eliot], great Tom, thinks this on a par with War and Peace! An
illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught
•working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic,
insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.

Joyce, as a matter of fact, was a much better educated man than
Virginia Woolf was a woman, and it would seem equally evident
that his analytical powers were far greater than hers. When Joyce
died, she made another entry (Wednesday, January 15, 1941) ,
recalling Eliot's advocacy of Joyce, the Hogarth Press declining to
publish Ulysses, and her own, as she mistakenly "remembers,"
mixed feeling about his genius:

. . . Then Joyce is dead: Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I
remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in typescript to
our teatable at the Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we
devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incon-
gruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with
indecency. . . . Then I remember Tom in Ottoline's room at Garsing-
ton saying — it was published then — how could anyone write again after
achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was, for the first
time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book,
and read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of
discovery, and then again with long lapses of intense boredom. This
goes back to a prehistoric world. And now all the gents are furbishing
up their opinions, and the books, I suppose, take their place in the long
procession.

Mrs. Woolf was very critical of Lady Ottoline Morrell for inviting
an embroidress to one of her tea parties (it may of course have
been an affectation in Lady Ottoline) , and she sneers with a little
too much self-satisfaction at the gaucheries of Arnold Bennett.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'ConnOT 105

That she could, as her friends testify, be very kind and helpful
has nothing to do with her also being of her class.

Forster, insofar as one judges from his novels and essays, is not
merely amused by snobbery, he feels it a restrictive convention,
an enemy of the spontaneous life. The whole issue in A Room
Wilh a Viexo is whether Lucy, held in by convention and snob-
bery, will be able to understand the generous but unconventional
Emersons, father and son. Convention, priggishness, and snob-
bery have a way of running together — and Forster has a good eye,
much better than Mrs. AN'oolf's, for their connections. The essay
"Mrs. Miniver" shows Forster's perception of snobbery in un-
likely places and his understanding of what is gained and what
lost with the passing of aristocracy. Mrs. Woolf wanted her
characters to be self-aware, to feel, to be receptive to color, shape,
tone, and the haunting evanescence (states of mind) . Forster
wants the educated heart and he understands, better than Mrs.
^Voolf did, that snobbery does not enlarge but restricts awareness.

In his introduction to Memories, Raymond Mortimer relates
MacCarthy to Bloomsbury and to the "Bloomsbury manner":

A delighted interest in the variety of human experience was stronger
in him than fastidiousness about the forms in which this was expressed.
For the same reason, proud as he was to proclaim himself a highbrow, he
made himself loved, as critic and broadcaster, by many who fancy that
they hate highbrows.

David Garnett, both in his person and in The Golden Echo, is
mild-mannered and kind. Leonard Woolf has given his energies
to public service and, one may guess, sacrificed mtich of his own
career to his wife's career. And so on. To give the members of
Bloomsbury marks, merits or demerits, in terms of their pride or
their humility would undoubtedly be fatuous. Snobbery and
arrogance are relative matters, and a member of Bloomsbury,
though in a milieu inviting arrogance, could also be humble in
his relationship to intellectual integrity and high aesthetic stand-
ards.

Books about twentieth-century British art almost invariably
treat the criticism of Fry as the best of its time, Bell's as, at least.

106 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

suggestive. Perhaps it is fair to say that Bell is also a popularizer,
in a good sense of the term. Fry's Vision and Design, Transforma-
tions, Duncan Grant, Reflections on British Painting and Bell's
Art and Since Cezanne are listed even in brief bibliographies. Less
frequently there are references to Mrs. Woolf's Roger Fry and
Walter Sickert: a Conversation.

The most dramatic public event in twentieth-century British
painting was the first Post-Impressionism Exhibition in 1910,
when England first saw Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin,
Seurat, Picasso, and others. Eric Gill wrote of it in a letter to Sir
William Rothenstein:

You are missing an awful excitement just now. . . . All the critics are
tearing one another's eyes out over it and the sheep and the goats are
inextricably mixed up. John says "it's a bloody show" and Lady Otto-
line says "oh, charming." Fry says "what rhythm" and McColl says
"what rot."

A second Post-Impressionist exhibition, held in 1912, included
Vanessa Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Grant, and others. After these
shows the artistic life of England was constantly involved with
movements and theories: Futurism, Synchromism, Vorticism, etc.
More than any other figure, as Forster observed, Roger Fry was
the agent of these changes. Three of his Bloomsbury friends,
MacCarthy, Bell, and Mrs. Woolf, have written their impressions
of the man.

MacCarthy's piece on Fry, in Memories, provides a humorous
account of the 1910 exhibition in the Grafton Galleries, and an
affectionate image of Fry himself. MacCarthy says that Fry's
willingness to go against public opinion was a mark of his disin-
terestedness, and that the only quality or characteristic he in-
sisted on from his friends was candor. MacCarthy, who also wrote
the catalogue for the 1952 exhibition of Fry's paintings, says
further that "he bore with magnanimity the indifference to his
own work of younger artists whom he had praised and taught."
Clive Bell, although he places Fry as the foremost critic, seems
not, at bottom, to have really liked him.

In Bell's analysis Fry's sensibility is seen as "trained" and much
is made of his having at first been a science student; the upshot is

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBLRY • O'ConuOT 107

that he did not have innate sensibility, and lacked gusto. Again,
his family tradition was puritanical, which led to his regarding
his "principles as in some sort the will of God," and he wanted a
generalization that fully accounted for all art. The scientist side
in Fry made him willing to listen to all arguments, thus to
enlarge his generalizations, but the puritan side made him uneasy
with charm. Facts in large numbers have their way of resisting
generalizations; therefore Fry was better at attacking or breaking
down theories than in building his own.

Mrs. ^V^oolf's biography has established Fry as "one of the most
remarkable men of his age" and one of the most lovable. His
other friends. Bell says, can but "bring a few flowers to his
monument and cherish the inscription." But what Mr. Bell
brings are not exclusively "flowers." Fry had boimdless
energ) — but it produced impatience and a prodigious strength of
will; and Bell records an instance of Fry's capacity for making
others bend to his will. Fry also admired sincerity — but, "not to
mince words, he was a champion gull"; and again Bell records a
telling example. Fry is also seen as the poorest possible judge of
men and, ironically, inordinately proud of his understanding of
them; he was forever imagining plots and misinterpreting the
motives of his friends. But this did not lead to serious prob-
lems— because he was easily diverted, by general discussion and
by "gossip." Brutus was an honorable man, but. . . .

It is clear from A Writcj-'s Diary that Mrs. Woolf had a deep
affection for Fry, and, ironically, this may have contributed to the
weakness of her Roger Fry, A Biography. Fry suffered many
unhappy experiences, the worst imdoubtedly being the insanity
of his wife, and Mrs. Woolf writes with great sympathy for him.
It is possible that a more skeptical view, like Bell's, would have
produced a more interesting biography. Her attitude toward him
is cauglit in this passage, a part of a speech she gave at an
exhibition of his paintings: "While he was reasoning he was
seeing; and while he was seeing he was reasoning. He was acutely
sensitive, but at the same time he was uncompromisingly honest."
It is clear that her intense interest in the visual arts owed a great
deal to Frs'. She was also indebted, of course, to her sister Vanessa
and to their friend Duncan Grant.

108 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Duncan Grant, who is represented in the Tate Gallery by six
pictures," undoubtedly owns a better reputation as a painter
than either Fry or Vanessa Bell. Only Desmond MacCarthy seems
to have held a very high opinion of Fry's paintings. Grant's
reputation appears to have diminished that of Mrs. Bell. Of the
relationship of the two friends, Raymond Mortimer (in the
Penguin Duncan Grant, 1948) has said: "She is altogether a
graver, less exuberant, artist; her landscapes and still-lifes bear
the signs of careful consideration and are all the better for this.
The resemblances between her work and his have, I think, pre-
vented her gifts receiving the full appreciation they merit."

Mortimer has also said that Grant and Mrs. Bell have for

some forty years worked in close association. They collaborated in their
decoration of various rooms including one for Virginia Woolf in Tavis-
tock Square, one for the present Duchess of Wellington (the poet
Dorothy Wellesley, in her Kent country house, called Penn's in the
Ricks) and one for me in Endsleigh Place, at the corner of Gordon
Square. (I moved two years ago [1952] and then gave the painted panels
but not the painted doors to the Victoria and Albert Museum.) They
both worked also for the Omega Workshop, which was a venture of
Fry's; and later designed furnishing fabrics for a firm called Allan
Walton, run by a painter of the name, now dead, whose work was
doubtless influenced by Grant.

At present in the National Portrait Gallery there is a lead bust
of Virginia Woolf by Stephen Tomlin, another Bloomsbury inti-
mate. It was cast from an original in the possession of David
Garnett and added to the collection in 1953. He also did fine
heads of Julia and Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant, all in
Garnett's possession. Tomlin, the second son of Lord Tomlin, a
Chancery judge, was married to Julia, the daughter of Oliver
Strachey. He died in 1937, in his thirties.

There appears not to have been, other than for Mrs. Bell,

10 "Lytton Strachey," "Margery Strachey," "Vanessa Bell," "Lemon Gather-
ers," "Queen of Sheba," and "Dancers." Mrs. Bell is represented by "Flowers
in the Jug." Mrs. Bell has done some of the jacket designs for Hogarth Press
books, including those for The Death of the Moth and The Captain's Death
Bed.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'CoHTlOr 109

Grant, Fry, and Tomlin, a gioup of Bloomsbury artists." Fry
tended to dictate tastes, to the extent that Sickert, belonging to
an older generation of painters, enjoyed asking promising young
artists if they had been certified by Fry. Keynes, the W^oolfs, the
Bells, the Stracheys, Garnett, and others did of course collect
modern art. Bloomsbury, then, may be said to have contributed a
significant bit to the actual art of the period and to have contrib-
uted greatly to its taste and enthusiasm.

Perhaps Frank Swinnerton's comments in the often reprinted
The Georgian Literary Scene (1935) best suggest the nature of
the anti-Bloomsbury bias, at least on its journalistic side:

The odd thing about it is that Bloomsbury was politically Left, and
only intellectually Royalist — royalist, you understand, to itself. ... It
dressed distinctively and — in the female part of it — did its hair as Mrs.
Gaskell used to do hers a hundred years ago, wearing long earrings and
in some way managing always to look sickly. ... It was conversationally
insincere, what one would call "strained" ... It was very sensitive and
sarcastic ("alirony") ; was full of jealous contempts; was spiteful and
resented being ignored, although it went in a good deal for the wilful
ignoring of others.

Swinnerton's little analyses of the writing of the various members
of Bloomsbury — he treats the more eminent writers at some
length, including Russell — do not quite bear out these prelimi-
nary generalizations; by and large, he is quite respectful of their
achievements and their decency in human relationships.

However, there does seem to have been a Bloomsbury atmos-
phere, which certain temperaments found difficult to suffer. The
nature of this atmosphere is suggested by what Harrod calls the
"Bloomsbury voice," apparently the contribution of Lytton
Strachey. \Vhen one wished to ridicule a comment he could speak
in a thin, incredulous voice which MacCarthy called "a gnat-like

^1 In the Tate collection there is also a portrait entitled "Vanessa" by Ethel
Walker. According to David Garnett, Mrs. Bell and Miss Walker sometimes
painted together biu Miss Walker was not a member of the Bloomsbury
group. Keith Baynes and Frank Dobson are also sometimes mentioned as
having been offshoots from Bloomsbury.

110 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

voice." Constant alertness, watchfulness, and the ironic manner
can, of course, be very wearing, and it is not surprising that the
Bloomsbury manner was sometimes attributed to insincerity and
a desire to seem superior.

None of the above remarks seem to apply exactly to the Vir-
ginia Woolf who emerges from A Writer's Notebook, and none of
them, conceivably, would apply exactly to any single member of
the group. Certain of the articles written about Mrs. Woolf after
her death present her as friendly, warm, generous. The woman
emerging from A Writer's Diary seems exacerbated and driven.
Whatever the forces driving her, they led to a remorseless desire
to be brilliant, to excel. There is, finally, for all the sensitivity,
something a little inhuman in the notebooks — although this
impression may be corrected by later excerpts, if these are ever
published.

Bertrand Russell unhesitatingly accuses the group of intellec-
tual arrogance. In "Portraits from Memory II," a discussion of
Keynes and Strachey, he says:

The generation of Keynes and Lytton did not seek to preserve any
kinship with the Philistine. . . . They aimed rather at a life of retire-
ment among fine shades, and conceived of the good as consisting in the
passionate mutual admirations of a clique of the elite. . . . From this
atmosphere Keynes escaped into the great world, but Strachey never
escaped.

According to Russell, Keynes did not find it "unpleasant to
epater les bourgeois." Keynes had also, he says, a moralistic side,
but it was involved in his Cambridge "religion," as he himself
later called the early philosophy of his group, not in his public
life. "When he concerned himself with politics and economics he
left his soul at home. This is the reason for a certain hard,
glittering, inhuman quality in most of his writing." Russell is
extremely harsh with Strachey, stating unequivocally that a cari-
cature was of more moment to him than the truth.

The overtones in Keynes's "My Early Beliefs" seem to imply
that Russell and his old friends had had their differences, which
may account for some of the harshness of Russell's portraits.
Nonetheless the detached reader is bound to feel that "glitter-

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'ConnOT 111

ing," "hard," and "inhuman" are fair enough applied to either
Keynes or Strachey. They do not tell everything about their
styles — but they have a relevance.

The diversified views of Strachey published by those who knew
him suggest a person difficult to understand: he could in appear-
ance be exceedingly proper or very eccentric; he could be gay and
playful, or withdrawn and morose; and so on. He was subject to
bad health, and died from cancer at fifty-one. Clive Bell says he
will be difficult for a biographer because he could hate, he knew
"love and lust and that mysterious mixture of the two," and he
was disinclined to put himself out. He wanted fame and was lazy.
His letters. Bell adds, "should not be published till those he cared
for and those who thought he cared for them are dead." Stra-
chey's mordant irony is sometimes in the service of moral indigna-
tion, but other times, as in his notorious essay on Pope, a manner
takes over, allowing him to insist on Pope's greatness but to offer
only unpleasant views of the man and belittling comments on his
talent. Strachey at his worst is Bloomsbury at its worst.

Max Beerbohm is referred to affectionately in A Writefs
Diary, but Mrs. Woolf, though admiring, seems to have deplored
his lack of intensity. In 1938, as recorded in the Diary, he told her
that he regretted not having belonged to a group when he had
been a young man. "Now dear Roger Fry who liked me was a
born leader. No one so 'illuminated.' He looked it. Never saw
anyone look it so much." The evening with Beerbohm, Mrs.
\\'oolf noted, was not really serious. In certain respects Beerbohm
might have fitted easily into the Bloomsbury group, but he
lacked their intellectual rigor. In the National Portrait Gallery,
where Fry's self-portrait also hangs, Beerbohm has a fine carica-
ture of Fry, thoroughly "illuminated," entitled "A Law Giver,
First King of Bloomsbury."

In his introduction to Keynes's Two Memoirs David Garnett
recalls D. H. Lawrence's violent dislike of the Bloomsbury group.
Lawrence, he says, was a prophet and he hated everyone whose
creed prevented his ever becoming a disciple. "But I was a
rationalist and a scientist, and I was repelled by his intuitive and
dog-malic pliilosophy, whereas the ideas of my friends from Cam-
bridge interested and attracted me." One week end in April,

112 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

1915, Garnett and Francis Birrell visited Lawrence, following
which Lawrence wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell to say how
much they annoyed him, and also to Garnett himself, advising
him to give up his Bloomsbury friends. To Lady Ottoline Law-
rence wrote: "They are cased each in a hard little shell of his own
and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any
outgoing of feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of
reverence. I cannot stand it."

In his paper Keynes recalls the visit of Lawrence to Cambridge,
and especially a breakfast party Bertrand Russell gave for Law-
rence and Keynes. Lawrence had remained silent, and Russell
and Keynes had talked at Lawrence. What they had talked about
Keynes had long since forgotten, but he wrote, "I expect it was
pretty brittle stuff — not so brittle as Frankie Birrell's — but pretty
brittle all the same." Keynes adds, preparing to look back at his
early beliefs, that Lawrence not merely felt no positive worth in
their attitude but was violently aware of a "lack." In Lawrence's
letter to Lady Ottoline he had clearly expressed what was miss-
ing: they lacked reverence.

It is easy to understand therefore why a more recent critic,
F. R. Leavis, and his Scrutiny associates'^ would dislike Blooms-
bury. Like Lawrence, one of their revered figures, they are heavily
moralistic and in Bloomsbury they find, to their chagrin, an air
of amusement.

Perhaps amusement is not precisely the right word. But
Bloomsbury was uneasy with greatness, with the ponderous, the
solemn, even the solemnly comic like Ulysses, which Forster

^- Q. D. Leavis replied in a tone of outrage to Desmond MacCarthy's Leslie
Stephen lecture (1937) at Cambridge — see Scrutiny, Vol. VII (March,
1939) — and her reviews of Mrs. Woolf's books were invariably harsh. For
Thursday, September 1, 1938, Mrs. Woolf's notebook entry was "... a violent
attack on Three Guineas in Scrutiny by Q. Leavis. I don't think it gave me an
entire single thrill of horror. And I didn't read it through. A symbol though
of what wiggings are to come. But I read enough to see that it was all
personal — about Queenie's own grievances and retorts to my snubs. . . ."
There are quite a few references to Scrutiny in A Writer's Diary. (Unfortu-
nately these and other references are hard to find because the index was very
poorly done.) On the other hand. Scrutiny has treated Forster with admira-
tion.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'CorinOT 113

cannot quite accept and which Mrs. Woolf found "underbred."
But distinctions need to be made. Behind Bloomsbury amuse-
ment were soHd achievement, education, taste, tradition. The
reserve capital was considerable, and ironic amusement was less
inflationary for them than it would be with certain groups. One
can feel, with Lionel Trilling in his fine study of Forstcr, that the
relaxed manner is an amiable vice. On the other hand, one may
feel that in a curious way it is Forster's own greatness, his refusal,
not twice or three times but ever, to be crowned or to wear the
purple gowns. Perhaps as a group, or in their manifestos. Blooms-
bury insisted a little too airily on its preference for the "high-
brow" over the "middlebrow," and one may feel a little uneasy
with Leonard Woolf's title Hunting the Highbrow (1927) or
Raymond Mortimer's insistence on the "highbrow" in the pref-
ace to Channel Packet. On the other hand, they are quite right to
insist on a preference for grade A over other grades. And, as
intelligent people, they can make exceptions, as when Clive Bell
observes that the rules seem against them but Kipling can write
in a most moving way and the Parliament buildings are beauti-
ful, or when Mortimer shrewdly separates the abilities from the
disabilities in the writings of Mrs. Woolf or Strachey.

Again, their sense of amusement was a part of the reaction
against Victorianism, or certain of the Victorian conventions.
They belonged to and helped to form their age. In the years
before World War I and even after it the spirit of liberalism,
which is all anti-Victorianism was, was naturally the dominant
spirit. It was easy enough in 1910 to hope for a cultural renais-
sance, as some of them did. And it was easy, even highly reason-
able, to be pacifists like Bell and Strachey. Perhaps in Strachey
and Mrs. Woolf we have almost pure types of the library writer.

To Strachey's ultimate credit, it is now much easier to tell the
truth in biography, but it is not to his credit that "debunking" is
even easier. The words preposterous, absurd, ridiculous were
used tellingly, and the established order of things, in government,
church, or family, was bound to be on the defensive when they
were used. In Mrs. Woolf's books there are fretjuent ironies about
English rituals in the law courts, the universities, the parliament.
Mrs. Dalloway has many misgivings about tlic pretentiousness of

114 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

officialdom, and Three Guineas points out this weakness and that
weakness in man-run institutions. Neither Strachey nor Mrs.
Woolf is very good at holding things together. Mrs. Woolf
acutely divides Conrad into sea captains and the skeptical Mar-
low, but there are no sea captains, with their simple but necessary
beliefs, in her novels. Nor was Strachey able to match, as he had
hoped to do, his "eminent" Victorians with admirable Victorians.

Maynard Keynes, as he grew older, became more than a little
dubious about the sheer strength of intellect and judgment in
ordering social and political events. In "My Early Beliefs" he said
he had come to recognize the precariousness of civilization. Of his
group in their earlier years, he said: "I can see us as waterspiders,
gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of
the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents
underneath." Forster not even as a young man was quite an
orthodox liberal. He believes in the cultivation of the body and
the mind, but he knows there are places the mind cannot quite
reach. His Italian fauns can be natural and also cruel, and not all
gentlemen of the cloth are hypocrites or fools. His hopefulness is
dark-shadowed. The Longest Journey presents an almost Conra-
dian world, though caught more lightly, gently, almost playfully.

The politics of Bloomsbury also was of the time. Leonard
Woolf has been a very active Socialist, both as an essayist and
speaker. Mrs. Woolf wrote essays about women's rights, and
Forster has wTitten and made speeches in liberal causes. Julian
Bell, the son of the Clive Bells, was killed fighting for the Loyal-
ists in Spain. Keynes, of course, was a leading figure, or adviser,
in Mr. Attlee's government. But as Spender, Auden, and Eliot
noted, the Bloomsbury group was upper-middle-class and their
politics were in relation to the traditions of that class. They were
liberals, like other intellectuals of their time, but certain of them,
for whatever reasons, could both take it and leave it alone.

Alan Pryce-Jones, now editor of the Times Literary Supple-
ment, has written an article^^ relating the spirit of Bloomsbury to

13 "The Frightening Pundits of Bloomsbury," The Listener, 45, No. 1 148,
March 1, 1951, pp. 345-46.

A HISTORY OF BLOOMSBURY • O'ConnOT 115

the general spirit of the 1920's. A characteristic of intellectual
and literary life after World Wslt 1, he says, was that it was taut,
demanding, and ironic. Even the little things, as in the novels of
\'irginia Woolf, were looked at with microscopic eyes. In all of the
important figures, in Aldous Huxley, or Eliot, or Ezra Pound, or
in Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield there is a quality of alert-
ness. The word "amusing" took on a special connotation in the
1920's, relating itself to a function of the intellect. "It might be
applied to Alexander Calder's first mobiles or to a new collage or
to a strange piece of orchestration; but you would have got a
\er)' frigid stare if you had called anything amusing which
implied mere relaxation. . . ."

In recent years historians have begun to write histories not
merely about "solid facts" but about mythical facts. The histo-
rian of Bloomsbury will have to deal with both sorts. It is easy to
sympathize with Mr. Bell when he protests an article in the
Times which said that Bloomsbury was against everything old
and for e\ erything new, providing the new be cryptic and caviar
for the general. The Times's point, however, has an element of
truth. Bloomsbury belongs to myth, and the myth presents the
ironic Mr. Strachey tittering over some stupidity, the "illumi-
nated" Mr. Fry turning his X-ray eyes on a French painting, the
stiff and elegant Mrs. ^Voolf writing and rewriting her luminous
sentences, and all of them, with their innumerable friends, laugh-
ing and talking, ever so intelligently. This is not quite the way it
was either, but it offers a pleasant image for the historian to
analyze.

An article by R. G. G. Price in a June, 1954, issue of Punch
calls the Bloomsbury group "The Pre-Elizabethans," and gives
them credit for having routed the philistines. "The militant
lowbrow was defeated and the danger today is far more that the
arts may be killed by kindness than that they will be suppressed."
A little group of "Cambridge expatriates" caused this revolution.
Mr. Price is mvthologi/ing a little himself; but this too is a
pleasant image, much to the credit of a Bloomsbur)- that has all
too frequently been abused:

To-day Britain, having been a Rome, has the chance of becoming a
Greece. During the post-war period London succeeded Paris as the

116 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

cultural capital of the civilized world, and philistinism has at least gone
underground. The successors to Bloomsbury have attained positions of
authority, and perhaps appear to the young painter or writer like a
great wall of orthodoxy blocking his way; but at least it is a more
civilized orthodoxy than the one it supplanted. The queues outside the
Tate, the unexpectedly high listening figures of the Third Programme
and the type of book taken increasingly out of the local public libraries
do suggest that the country has returned some way towards the Mediter-
ranean tradition.

Note: I am grateful for a grant from the American Philosophical Society
which helped make it possible for me to undertake a study of Bloomsbury. A
number of people in England, some of them closely associated with Blooms-
bury, have given me information and told me their opinions about what
Bloomsbury was. Necessarily I have had to form my own opinions from all
that I have read or heard, and therefore, as we say, I am responsible for the
general impression created in this essay.

Introduction to Bergson and the
Stream of Consciousness Novel

and Connections with William James and Proust

SHIV K. KUMAR

The emergence of the stream of consciousness novel in contem-
porary fiction has provoked much controversy, but the basic
issues involved still remain vague and unexplained. The new
form of narrative has been variously defined, not infrequently
from conflicting points of view; its origins are traced to sources
which fail to reveal the real creative impulse behind this new
mode of representing human experience. All this confusion re-
sults from a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying
intention of the new novelist, who does not conceive character as
a state but as a process of ceaseless becoming in a medium which
may be termed Bergson's duree reelle.

Before inquiring into the full implications of this approach, it
may be useful here first to give a brief r^sum^ of the various
theories which have so far been advanced to explain the nature
and scope of the new technique.

A popular theory', put forth by many critics, presents the
stream of consciousness method as an inevitable sequel to the
disintegration of values in the first quarter of this century, and an
attempt to compensate by excessive experimentation for the spir-
itual vacuum prevailing everywhere. The new novel, therefore, is
a manifestation, says H. J. Muller, of "the blurring of objective

From Shiv K. Kumar, Berp:5on and the Stream of Consciousness Novel
(Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1962) . Footnotes heme been omitted.

117

1 1 8 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

reality and the dissolution of certainties in all fields of thought."
Professor Weidl^ also seems to support this view when he attrib-
utes extreme cultivation of technique to the highly subjective
modes of artistic apprehension, unrelated to any established code
of values. Proust, Joyce, Svevo and others, in his opinion, embody
in their work an exaggerated form of principium individiiationis.
The new novel, therefore, is described as a withdrawal from
external phenomena into the flickering half-shades of the au-
thor's private world. It will, however, be shown in the course of a
detailed analysis of the work of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce that the new prose-fiction does not imply
a "withdrawal" from objective reality but constitutes, on the
contrary, a deliberate effort to render in a literary medium a new
realization of experience as a process of dynamic renewal.

According to others, the new technique derives from the psy-
cho-analytical school of Jung, Freud and Adler. The spirit of
Zurich, it is suggested, broods over Joyce's Dublin, Virginia
Woolf's and Dorothy Richardson's London. The "business of
producing the psychological novel has much in common", says a
critic, "with the business of being psycho-analysed", and it is
asserted that "the thought-stream novel usually can only be ap-
preciated fully by people whose subconscious is in the same state
as that of the author". F. J. Hoffman and Pelham Edgar, how-
ever, do not prescribe any such limits in their interpretation of
the new technique. The former attempts to explain the purport
of the stream of consciousness novelist as the representation of
four different levels of consciousness: the conscious, the precon-
scious, the subconscious and the unconscious, as if the author had
undertaken to solve a complex psychological problem in terms of
literary symbols.

Robert Humphrey stresses another psychological aspect of the
technique by defining it "as a type of fiction in which strong
emphasis is placed on exploration of the pre-speech levels of
consciousness for the purposes, primarily, of revealing the psychic
being of the characters". This type of fiction becomes for him
"essentially a technical feat".

Edward Bowling presents more or less the same view when he
describes the new form of novel as "a direct quotation of the

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL • Kumar 119

mind — not merely of the language area but of the whole con-
sciousness". The pre-speech area thus again fonns a predominant
part of the range covered by the stream of consciousness novelist,
^vho attempts to externalize sensations and ideas not normally
expressed by words and images. Professor J. W. Beach, on the
other hand, emphasizes "exploitation of the element of incoher-
ence in our conscious process" as the "defining feature" of the
new technique.

The interest of all stream of consciousness novelists in the
contemporary psycho-analytical theories cannot be overesti-
mated; the danger lies only in exaggerating this relationship and
reading their novels as mere "liberation of suppressions". To label
Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage as a document of "the Daph-
nean furtiveness of a woman's mind", would be as inaccurate
as to treat Ulysses as a text-book of psychology and psychiatry.
Nor again, would the work of Virginia Woolf yield any significant
results if analysed in terms of psycho-analysis, since the stream of
consciousness novelists are essentially concerned with presenting
indi\ idual personality and experience in terms of artistic sensibil-
ity.

A psycho-analytical interpretation of the stream of conscious-
ness novel would hardly illuminate its treatment and presenta-
tion of la duree, memoire involontaire and intuition, nor would
it bring out the significance of the various protagonists' preoccu-
pation with the ultimate nature of reality. It is here that Bergson-
ism attempts to reach out beyond the limits of psycho-analysis. In
being more sympathetic towards aesthetic inclinations, more at-
tuned to the mysterious nature of creative processes, Bergson's
philosophical theories of time, memory and consciousness provide
a more useful clue to the understanding of the new technique.
The emergence of time as a new mode of artistic perception in
the contemporary novel would alone justify the Bergsonian
apjjroach as being more aesthetic than the mechanistic treatment
of psycho-analysts.

The technique has also been described by some as a mere
literary embellishment, a means of investing character, scene and
incident with "wise bits of philosophy", or iridescent "flashes of
beauty", lending to the entire narrative a touch of ethereality, of

120 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

"something spirit-like". This is how Ethel William Hawkins
defines it — as something synonymous with a hypersensitive aware-
ness of phenomena highly tinged with the observer's own evanes-
cent moods. This theory obviously takes a very restricted view of
the technique by ignoring altogether its aesthetic and philosophi-
cal implications.

This kind of novel has been analysed by others in terms of
impressionistic painting, and referred to as "the Post-impression-
istic Novel". "The problem of the twentieth-century novelist was
the same as that of the twentieth-century painter". Is the tech-
nique to be photographic or impressionistic? asks Professor
Isaacs, and proceeds to show how even the phraseology and
imagery in Virginia Woolf's famous essay "Modern Fiction" are
full of echoes from such works as R. M. Stevenson's exposition of
Velasquez's art. These novelists, as Herbert Muller also affirms,
have in various ways adapted to fiction the technique of the
impressionistic painters, specially as it was supplemented by Ce-
zanne.

But a closer examination will show that beyond suggesting a
certain similarity of aesthetic intention, this theory also fails to
offer a satisfactory explanation of the new technique of character-
ization. It would be incorrect to say that Virginia Woolf, Dorothy
Richardson or James Joyce was influenced by the impressionistic
school of painting, which was itself a manifestation of the new
awareness of reality as "les donnees immediates de la conscience".
There is yet another school of criticism which relates the new
technique to the symbolistic modes of expression. Speaking of the
characters in Ulysses, Edmund Wilson remarks: "When we are
admitted to the mind of any of them, we are in a world as
complex and special, a world sometimes as fantastic or obscure, as
that of the symbolist poet — and a world rendered by similar
devices of language". In his use of the interior mono-
logue— "symbolistic monologues" — ^Joyce fully exploits, accord-
ing to Edmund Wilson, "the methods of symbolism". In their
anti-mechanistic intentions, their emphasis on intimating things
rather than stating them, their use of a complicated association of
ideas, their insistence upon inventing a special language to ex-
press individual personality, the symbolists seem to imply a meta-

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL • Kumar 121

physic similar to Bergsonism. In fact, the work of James Joyce,
Virginia "W'oolf and Dorothy Richardson is, in a certain sense, a
continuation of symbolism.

But again, Bergsonism appears to offer a more comprehensive
explanation of the literary and philosophical implications of the
new novel than symbolism. Durational flux, which constitutes the
essence of this technique, is obviously more Bergsonian than
symbolistic in character, and the former in its wider scope seems
to embrace the basic principles of the latter.

And lastly, the relation of the stream of consciousness narrative
to such popular arts as the cinema has also been studied. Harry
Levin suggests a similarity between this technique and montage
under which he analyses the various aspects of le monologue
interieur. "Bloom's mind", he observes, "is neither a tabula rasa
nor a photographic plate, but a motion picture, which has been
ingeniously cut and carefully edited to emphasize the close-ups
and fade-outs of flickering emotion, the angles of observation and
the flashbacks of reminiscence. In its intimacy and in its continu-
ity, Ulysses has more in common with the cinema than with other
fiction. The movement of Joyce's style, the thought of his charac-
ters, is like unreeling film; his method of construction, the ar-
rangement of this raw material, involves the crucial operation of
montage."

There may be some justification for each of these expositions
of the stream of consciousness novel, which has undoubtedly
some elements in common with the post-impressionistic painting,
the symbolist modes of expression, or even the cinema. But as
mentioned earlier, none of these theories presents a comprehen-
sive view and explains fully the precise nature and scope of the
technique. The new novelist is neither exclusively an impression-
istic delineator of character and scene, nor a psycho-analyst whose
primary function is to render a clinical analysis of human mo-
tives and impulses. Characters like Mrs. Dalloway, Miriam Hen-
derson and Stephen Dedalus are self-sufficient, deriving their
validity from their creator's vicarious experience. They do not
require the help of a psycho-analyst for any fuller imderstanding
of them, for the "business of producing the psychological novel"
is not the same as "the business of being psycho-analysed". Nor

122 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

again is the stream of consciousness technique an esoteric jigsaw
of words and sentences, implying a withdrawal from objective
reality into the author's own private world. On the contrary, this
kind of novel seems to make a positive affirmation of a view of
experience which can be apprehended better in terms of Berg-
son's durational flux.

Before investigating this parallelism more fully, it may be
profitable to say a word about le monologue interieur as em-
ployed by Edouard Dujardin, whose novel Les Lauriers sont
coupes (1888) is supposed to have influenced James Joyce. Du-
jardin is also responsible for popularizing in literary criticism
this term which, according to him, was invented by Valery Lar-
baud; "L'invention de I'expression, dans le sens que nous lui
donnons aujourd'hui, semble etre due a Valery Larbaud lui-
meme."

The credit, however, of originating the term "monologue inte-
rieur" and presenting a detailed analysis of its various aspects,
together with a comprehensive survey of its theory and practice
in literary and philosophical history, belongs to Victor Egger who
published in 1881 his scholarly treatise La Parole Interieure. He
defines it as "un des ^l^ments les plus importants . . . de nos
actes; la serie des mots interieurs forme une succession presque
continue . . . le moi et la dur^e sont des idees equivalentes . . .
c'est le moi; je suis une pure succession."

Later in 1930 when Edouard Dujardin, in the course of a series
of literary conferences, gave an elaborate analysis of the interior
monologue, he had little to add to Victor Egger's definition of it.
"Le monologue interieur," says Dujardin, "est, dans I'ordre de la
po^sie, le discours sans auditeur et non prononc^ . . ."

The important point to note, however, is that both these
commentators emphasize the element of fluidity in our states of
consciousness. In the words of Dujardin: "la nouveaute essen-
tielle qu'a apportee le monologue interieur consiste en ce qu'il a
pour objet d'evoquer le flux ininterrompu des pensees qui traver-
sent I'ame du personnage . . ."

It is precisely this inner flux ininterrompu that Bergson desig-
nates as la duree, a process of creative evolution which does not
lend itself to any logical or intellectual analysis. La duree or

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL • Kumar 123

psychological time thus becomes the distinguishing feature of the
stream of consciousness novel. The new novelist accepts with full
awareness inner duration against chronological time as the only
true mode of apprehending aesthetic experience. Only in terms
of the emergence of time as the fourth dimension can, therefore,
one of the most important literary movements of this century be
understood. "There is a plane geometry", writes Marcel Proust in
a letter to his friend Antoine Bibesco, "and a geometry of space.
And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychol-
ogy in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to
isolate." Again, towards the end of Remembrance of Things Past,
he sums up his entire aesthetic theory:

"I should endeavour to render that Time-dimension by tran-
scribing life in a way very different from that conveyed by our
lying senses . . . everybody feels that we are occupying an unceas-
ingly increasing place in Time, and this universality could only
rejoice me since it is the truth, a truth suspected by each one of us
which it was my business to try to elucidate ... If, at least, time
enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not
fail to mark it with the seal of Time . . . and I would therein
describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time
infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for
them in space . . ."

Every stream of consciousness novel bears this seal of time.
Time, or as Bergson prefers to call it la diiree, enters the field of
creative thought as something incapable of measurement and
intractable to such symbolical representations as hours, days,
months and years which are only its spatialized concepts.
Edouard, Andr^ Gide's protagonist in The Coiners, enunciates
his theory of the novel as a breadthwise and depthwise cutting of
"a slice of life", in preference to "the naturalist school" that
"always cuts its slice in the same direction; in time, lengthwise."
Gide, obviously, implies the durational as an integral mode of
apprehension of reality as contrasted with the spatial rendering
of life in fiction, for in the latter, time projected lengthwise is
nothing but space.

The extent to which this new concept of time as an immeasura-
ble and multidirectional process had permeated the European

124 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

novel of the first quarter of this century, may be assessed from
these novelists who employed this stream of consciousness
method in representing la duree.

Jacques Goddard, Jules Romains's protagonist in The Death
of a Nobody, reflects on the theme of time; "In particular he had
pondered upon time. Time seemed to him something quite arbi-
trary and elastic. He found it difficult to believe it was a depend-
able entity, and clocks seemed to him fallacious mechanisms for
measuring it."

A similar realization of the elasticity of time dawns within the
consciousness of Italo Svevo's hero in The Nice Old Man:

"I, on the contrary, am obstinately trying to do something else
in this present and if, as I hope, there is time to develop an
activity in it, I shall have proved that it is longer than it appears.
It is hard to measure it and the mathematician who tried to do so
would come hopelessly to grief, thus showing that it is not his
work."

Virginia Woolf stresses this discrepancy between "time in the
mind" and clock time more explicitly in Orlando. Thomas Wolfe
in Look Homeward Angel and Gertrude Stein in Composition as
Explanation, affirm almost the same view of duration. The work
of Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce is no less an illustration
of this subjective notion of time.

This "time in the mind" is symbolically represented by most of
these novelists as a flowing river with memories and visions as its
chief constituents. The flux of human experience consists in this
perpetual mixing of memory with desire, making one "live in a
mixed tense, as is man's lot, the grammar of which has, however,
those pure tenses which seem made for the animals." This "horri-
ble activity of the mind's eye", lies in our ceaseless response to a
multiplicity of sensory impressions and recollections, the latter
conditioning and therefore, in a sense, recreating each moment of
experience. Time, no longer a mere extended image of space,
now becomes the pure essence of reality, which may be described
as "a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and
permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any
tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another";
or, as a principle "of becoming which is reality itself."

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL • Kumar 125

The key to the emergence of the stream of consciousness novel
lies in this new awareness of experience, this marked shift from a
conception of personality as built round a hard and changeless
core to a reahzation of it as a dynamic process. This reality is to
be realized in immediate experience as flux, to be grasped by
intuition or intellectual sympathy. La duree is the stuff of which
this kind of novel is made.

To understand completely the durational aspect of the new
novel, it will be necessary to examine in detail the philosophical
significance of the work of Marcel Proust, who is often associated
with certain aspects of the technique as employed by Dorothy
Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. It must, however,
be achnitted at the outset that Proust does not use the stream of
consciousness method of narrative; in fact, instead of completely
immersing himself in the stream of becoming, he retains the right
to elucidate, analyse, comment and judge. But in most of his
observations on the art of the novel, he seems to provide the new
novelist with a suitable working credo.

Proust always claimed to have presented in his work "a whole
theory of memory and consciousness, although not directly pro-
jected in logical terms." In denouncing intellect as a spatializing
tendency, in recognizing the supremacy of involuntary memories
over vohmtary memories and tlie validity of fugitive impressions
as significant phenomena, in endeavouring to bring reality
within the fold of his work witli the "least possible shrinkage", in
"respecting" in the matter of style "the natural progress of my
thought", and lastly, in emphasizing the importance of la durie
in a work of art, Proust supplies all the ingredients of the stream
of consciousness technique, except, of course, its practical appli-
cation.

The work of Proust has, therefore, a two-fold significance to
the student of the stream of consciousness novel; first because
many younger novelists found in him a confirmation of what was
already dawning within their own minds, and secondly, because
he proved to be, though quite unwittingly, a provocative intro-
duction to Bergson's philosophy of time, memory and conscious-

126 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

ness. Although it is often futile to trace direct influences, the
relation between a particular philosophy and a certain form of
art may be so intimate that the study of one in terms of the other
becomes immensely rewarding.

In the case of Proust at least it is not difficult to establish even
direct relationships between him and the French philosopher. A
pupil of Bergson's at the Sorbonne (1891-93) , and his nephew by
virtue of the philosopher's marriage with his cousin Neuburger,
he found himself oscillating all his life between Yea and Nay. In
a letter to Georges de Lauris in 1909, he wrote:

"I am glad you have read some Bergson and liked him. It is as
though we had been together on a great height. I don't know
L'£,volution Creatrice . . . but I have read enough of Bergson,
the parabola of his thought is already sufficiently discernible after
only a single generation . . . Besides, I think I have told you of
my great respect for him . . . and of the great kindness he has
always shown me . . ."

On the other hand, in an interview he gave to Elsie Joseph
Bois, published in Le Temps of November 1913, he said:

"I should not in any way feel ashamed to describe my books as
'Bergsonian novels', if I thought they were, for in every period,
literature has tried to attach itself after the event, naturally, to
the reigning philosophy. But it would not be accurate, for my
work is dominated by the distinction between the 'm^moire
involontaire' and 'm^moire volontaire', a distinction which is not
only not to be found in M. Bergson's philosophy, but is even
contradicted by it."

We shall have occasion to show in a subsequent chapter how
this basis on which Proust always tried to deny Bergson's in-
fluence is refuted by the latter's clear distinction between "pure
memory" and "voluntary memory". But whatever be his relation
with Bergson, Proust certainly renders a very faithful presenta-
tion of the Bergsonian theories of memory, la duree and con-
sciousness.

Among the English writers of the first quarter of this century,
we may mention T. E. Hulme who, through his various critical
essays on Bergson's aesthetics and translation of Introduction a la

THE STREAM OF CONSaOUSNESS NOVEL • KUTUar 127

mctaphysique, enabled many contemporary poets and novelists
to realize in Bergson an articulation of their own awareness of
experience as flux. In his essay entitled "Bergson's Theory of
Art", he seems to justify the impulse behind the new technique:

"The process of artistic creation would be better described as a
process of discovery and disentanglement. To use the metaphor
which one is now so familiar with — the stream of inner life, and
the definite crystallized shapes on the surface — the big artist, the
creative artist, the innovator, leaves the level where things are
crystallized out into these definite shapes, and, diving down into
the inner flux, comes back with a new shape which he endeavours
to fix."

This "new shape" is obviously a durational pattern which
reveals an inner reality of things as against their crystallized
surface. Therefore, although one may find oneself in this dura-
tional flux, as if one were "en presence d'une desorganisation",
this is none the less reality itself.

During the last years of his life Hulme was contemplating a
book on "Modern Theories of Art", a synopsis of which appears
as an appendix to his Speculations. In the third chapter of this
proposed book he planned to show how "rough analyses which
artists themselves have given . . . can be interpreted in the light
of new psychology — Bergson." In another chapter he intended
further to elaborate Bergson's theory in terms of "actual and
intimate acquaintance with emotions involved — Time and Free
Will, Introduction a la Mctaphysique — L'Effort Intellec-
tual— Laughter."

Many other English contemporaries of Hulme felt sympatheti-
cally interested in the new philosophy. When Bergson came to
the notice of the so-called "Bloomsljury Group" is not clear, but
it is worth noting that Desmond MacCarthy, in a dedicatory
letter to Roger Fry (dated 1914), accompanying his translation
of Jules Romains's novel. The Death of a Nobody, drew Bergson
to Fry's attention:

"At the end of the book there is an attempt to portray in the
emotions of a young man walking down a rain-swept boulevard
one late afternoon, a conception of the world not imlike that

128 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

which M. Bergson's philosophy suggests. How far such experi-
ences are engendered by reading M. Bergson, and how far they
are independent, M. Romains can tell better."

This is, however, not an essential question to ask Jules Ro-
mains or any other stream of consciousness novelist. To suggest
that the new form of fiction emerged under the direct influence
of Bergson would be rather misleading. In fact, Bergson was
himself, like those he is supposed to have influenced, a manifesta-
tion of the Zeitgeist. It should, therefore, be more appropriate to
say that in his philosophy one finds a most effective articulation
of that intuitive sense of fluid reality of which sensitive minds
were becoming aware in the early years of this century. This new
realization of experience as flux manifests itself in contemporary
fiction in the form of the stream of consciousness novel.

William James's analysis of consciousness seems to supplement
Bergson's theory of the "stream of life"; it may, therefore, also be
helpful to understand the former's presentation of thought as a
continuum.

The phrase "stream of consciousness", it may be noted, was
first used by William James in The Principles of Psychology
(1890) , and later introduced into literary criticism by May Sin-
clair who, in her article on Dorothy Richardson in the Egoist of
April 1918, wrote: ". . . there is no drama, no situation, no set
scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is
Miriam's stream of consciousness, going on and on."

William James, like Bergson, believes that "empty our minds
as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel,
and cannot be expelled." Our psychic kaleidoscope is perpetually
forming itself into new patterns. Like Bergson again, he exposes
the Humian doctrine that our consciousness consists of discrete
fragments capable of repeating themselves. On the contrary, he
observes that consciousness cannot be analysed into fragments or
"chopped up in bits". "Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not
describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is
nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors
by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter,

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL • Kumar 129

let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjec-
tive life."

In this "wonderful stream of consciousness" sensory images
form the halting places or "substantive parts", and the thoughts
of relations or "transitive parts" denote places of "flight". But it
must be remembered that the former are mere terms of conven-
ience and do not indicate or suggest any break in the continuous
flow of consciousness, for even these "substantive parts" are invar-
iably sufi"used with notions of "flight" or "movement".

Elsewhere, William James refers to the "halo or penumbra
surrounding the image", "the overtone, halo or fringe", suggested
also by Virginia ^Voolf in her description of life as "a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the begin-
ning of consciousness to the end." And when she calls upon the
new writers to convey "this varying, this unknown and uncircum-
scribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display
. . ." and, citing the example of James Joyce, asks them to
"record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in
which they fall . . . trace the pattern, however disconnected and
incoherent in appearance", she defines the basic philosophical
sanction behind the stream of consciousness novel.

What James calls "halo, or fringe", and Virginia Woolf "lumi-
nous halo", is nothing else than those transitional phases of our
mental processes which mark the merging of the past into the
present, and the fading of the present into the future, thus
making experience a continuum. In James's words again, "the
knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near
or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present
thing . . . these lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new,
are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and
the prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to con-
sciousness without which it could not be called a stream." It is
this durational aspect of consciousness which defines the basis of
the stream of consciousness novel.

We may here say a word about the present moment of experi-
ence which forms the exclusive material in the traditional novel,
unless a writer chooses to introduce the past in a flashback, or

130 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

what Dr. David Daiches calls "memory digression". According to
the new concept of durational flux, the present loses its static
nature and ceaselessly fades into the past and future. William
James gives this concept a new name — "the specious present",
and defines it as "a. bow and a stern, as it were — a rearward- and a
forward-looking end." In contemporary psychological fiction this
specious present is always instinctively felt and sometimes di-
rectly described by novelists who employ a highly subjective,
though not necessarily the stream of consciousness, technique.
Gertrude Stein, for instance, calls it the "prolonged present":

"I wrote a negro story called Melanctha. In that there was a
constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction
of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed
to past present and future, and why, because the composition
forming around me was a prolonged present".

We can easily see a certain correspondence between Gertrude
Stein's and William James's conception of fluid present. Their
exposition of the qualitative aspect of time, however, is not as
comprehensive as that of Bergson, who remains the true embodi-
ment of the new awareness of duree creatrice.

In the context of these observations, it will be seen that much
new light can be thrown on the stream of consciousness form of
narrative and characterization by studying it in relation to the
theory of durational flux as expounded by Bergson. Interpreted
in terms of memoire involontaire, la duree and intuition, this
kind of novel acquires a new meaning and coherence, and ceases
to be "the offspring of a creator's negative mood".

In Bergson's philosophy one finds an attempt to correlate the
new philosophical awareness with methods and ideals of literary
composition, particularly prose-fiction. We shall now try to pre-
sent in the next chapter, what may be called, "Bergson's theory of
the novel", based on his observations on the novelist's art, scat-
tered in his various philosophical writings.

The Problem of Influence

of Freudianism on the Literary Mind

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

iii

Such criticism as this [by Herbert Read] has justified some
attention because of its intelligence and because of the sugges-
tions it offers for a final aesthetic appraisal of Freudian influence.
We may note that critics have been concerned with two kinds of
inquiry: the psychological nature of the artist, and the sugges-
tions which psychoanalysis has made regarding modern efforts to
revise and alter the formal and stylistic character of literature.
This latter problem is central to the study of modern aesthetics.

The experimental writing of the twentieth century saw in the
unconscious a linguistic problem which required a revision in the
matter of imagery and symbolism. Many writers were willing to
go beyond the mere "stream of consciousness" manner of arrang-
ing phrases in a fluid pattern, and of suspending the control of
space-time over mind. For them the "stream" must resemble the
"flow" of the unconscious psychic life. Hence the eccentricity,
and the unintelligibility of much modern experimental writing.
An ideal approximation to the unconscious cannot be looked for
in literature; even when words are most plastic — that is, when
they suggest a variety of meanings and lend themselves readily to
visual diffusion — they are still words, and as such only indirectly
represent the affective and concrete "life of the unconscious." Yet

From Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, 2nd ed.
(Baton Range: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). Footnotes have been
renumbered.

131

132 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

words are the writer's tools. He cannot employ paints or electric
wires; nor can he leave the page blank, as one irate critic sug-
gests.^ If the unconscious is so difficult to represent, why bother?
Why renounce our habitual communication to find what even
Freud admits is accessible to the conscious mind only by careful
and painstaking inference? Isn't a metaphorical description more
satisfactory than a "faithful transcript"? The experimenters reply
that, for various reasons, it is within the range of artistic possi-
bility— though, perhaps, not within the range of the reader's com-
prehension-— to reproduce the unconscious. They believed that
this "new writing" should follow, not the laws of ordinary com-
munication, but the dictates of the unconscious itself. Since this
is a repudiation of the laws governing communication, it may be
considered an instance of the hyperindividualism that character-
ized much of the revolt of the twenties. Surrealism is its foster-
child. The surrealist would go directly to the unconscious itself
and leave out the intermediate avenues by which it approaches
consciousness. Freud "discovered" the unconscious by devious
methods, and he found that we can have access to it by measuring
the peculiarities and disguises which distinguish its attempts to
break through to reality. The surrealists wish to integrate dream
with reality (by which they mean, of course, "make reality sub-
servient to dream") . Surrealism is an extreme example of what
has come from Freud's exploration of the unconscious mind of
man. But Freud explored the unconscious, not by "remaining
within it" but by measuring by means of it the complex and deep
resources of the human psyche. As Herbert Muller has put it:
"He [Freud] conceived the unconscious as primary only because
more rudimentary, and sought always to control it. They [the
surrealists] conceive it as the source of beauty and truth, and seek
to exploit it."^

1 Joseph Prescott, "James Joyce: A Study in Words," in PMLA, LIV (1939) ,
314. "Joyce will call his next work tabula rasa and will regale the reader with
hundreds of pages of closely bound paper, every one of which will be
innocent of printer's ink. . . ."

2 We have Transition proclaiming among other things, "the Plain Reader
be damned!" "Proclamation," in Transition, XVII (1929).

3 Herbert Muller, "Surrealism: a Dissenting Opinion," in New Directions in
Prose and Poetry, 1940, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, Conn., 1940) , 553. Cf.

THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE • Hofjman 133

The coincidence of Freud's with surrealist thinking — Andr6
Breton had once planned to become a psychiatrist — called atten-
tion to the possibilities of the dream-life. It was the surrealists
intention not only to exploit these possibilities for themselves but
also to sponsor the irrational or unconscious life as the property
of all men. They tried to ally themselves with the Communist
International, claiming kinship on the grounds of their common
hatred of bourgeois morals and restrictions.

It is with their influence upon aesthetic theory and practice
that we are most concerned, however. It is their purpose, says
David Gascoyne (who since 1938 has no longer been one of
them) , "to extend indefinitely the limits of 'literature' and 'art'
by continually tending to do away with the barrier that separates
. . . the printed page or the picture-frame from the world of real
life and action."* More specifically they are interested in exploit-
ing the aesthetic possibilities of imconscious metaphor, hoping to
find within the unconscious a riot of imagery and unsyntactic
profusion, "a perpetual flow of irrational thought in the form of
images."

Surrealism began with the destructive nonsequiturs of Parisian
dadaism. Dadaism was launched noisily in Zurich, Switzerland,
in 1916. and continued in Paris imtil about 1922. Perhaps it was
the desire to subject revolt to some form of aesthetic discipline
which caused the establishment of surrealism. In the words of its
first manifesto, surrealism wished to destroy the restrictions of

Kenneth Burke, "Surrealism," ibid., 563-79. Muller's essay on surrealism,
though intelligent and just, is another indication of his growing distrust of
the irrational in literature. He sees in almost ever)' literary use of irrational
themes a suspicious alliance with the forces of evil in modern society — more
specifically, with Hitler. In his Science and Criticism (New Haven, 1943) , a
book otherwise temperate and wise, he refers to this change of heart: ". . . in
my book on the modern novel, written some years ago, I noted the obvious
limitations and excesses of D. H. Lawrence's work but ended by stressing its
values. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that in a science-governed age both
literature and philosophy needed his impassioned rendering of the 'unknown
modes of being' and his exaltation of old ways of feeling. Today I should stick
by almost any given sentence in the chapter. Yet I should also shift my
emphasis and dwell more on the dangers of Lawrence's attitude. In Hitler's
world there are men enough to glorify the Unconscious, rally behind the
instinctive and irrational." Ibid., 15 n.
* David Gascoyne, A Short Surrey of Surrealism (London. 1935) , x.

134 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

rationalism because " 'the methods of logic are applied nowadays
only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest. . . .
Under colour of civilisation, under pretext of progress, all that
rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition has
been banished from the mind.' "^

The attachment to Freud is more than accidental. The surreal-
ist practice was first to reject all of the limitations of the ego,
sublimation as well as repression; secondly, to use the uncon-
scious as source of both aesthetic and moral departures from the
norm; and finally, to break loose altogether from the analyst's
control and tutoring of the unconscious, to which the analyst of
course attached primary importance. Subsequent additions to
surrealist theory have accepted the unconscious desire or wish as
the end of activity, poetic or otherwise.

The three principles of surrealistic aesthetics and morality are
called the Objective Hazard, Estrangement of Sensation, and
Black Bile. The first is perhaps the most strictly original contri-
bution. It begins by assuming that the unconscious desire is the
single arbiter of action. Freud's cautious and almost lifelong
preoccupation with the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Prin-
ciple is thus eliminated at one stroke. The Objective Hazard
disregards this example of psychoanalytic caution. Freud had
insisted that, although the unconscious drive is for immediate
satisfaction of instinctual desires, this drive is halted and its
energies retarded by the rude shock with reality and the conse-
quent efforts of the ego to protect the psyche from any repetition
of its painful experience. Surrealists regard such precautionary
efforts on the part of the ego and its social assistants as mere
interference. The unconscious, instinctual desire must leap out of
its prison and find brutal and violent satisfaction.

We live in Society, we have desires, and we find obstacles to their
realization; we are fighting for the realization of our desires. We are
fighting against all obstacles to their realization. Our morality leads us
to an ethic of desire because the artist in following what Freud called

5 Quoted, ibid., 59-60.

THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE • Hoffmon 135

Pleasure as opposed to Reality expressed desires more clearly than other
men do, and takes the lead in the field of hope.'

The second of the three principles, Estrangement of Sensation,
is of course linked with the linguistic and illogical habits of the
unconscious as they are exposed in the manifest dreams and in
other situations developed by the psychoanalyst. The literature
of surrealism regards the eccentricity of language and the illogi-
cal suspension of intelligible comparison as central to its expres-
sion of reality. "Everything that produces estrangement, from a
broken motorcar to the Pyramid of Cheops, from deep sea life to
the dance at the Savoy in Harlem, can produce this estrangement
and therefore be poetic."^ There is no such thing as formal
beauty in surrealist aesthetics. The surrealist relies upon the
shocking — comically shocking — persistence of disorder to convey
its poetic or pictorial impression of unconscious reality. The
image ought to "bring about the fusion of two mutually distant
realities." Thus the image of Lautrcamont (nineteenth-century
predecessor of surrealism) , the " 'chance meeting, on a dissecting
table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella,' " succeeds in bring-
ing "about the union of two mutually distant realities upon a
plane equally unrelated to either of them."^ The surrealist will
go to the dream report as often as it furnishes examples of such
coincidences. But later statements by surrealists lead one to be-
lieve that they have not been altogether satisfied with what the
dream report has to offer. "I think we have exaggerated," says
Galas, "the poetic value, not of the unconscious image, but of the
free-association method which is the modus operandi of psycho-
analytical confession. . . . There is in [the poet's] care no psycho-
analyst to command the rhythm of the poem like a God, a father
or a lover; unless the poet discovers the rhythm himself his
images will remain inert." The limitations of the analyst's proce-
dures— whicii the sunealist never really considered anyway —

8 Nicolas Calas, "The Meaning of Surrealism." in New Directions in Prose
and Poetry, 1940 (Norfolk, Conn.) , 389.
Ubid.
^ Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 66,

136 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

have struck him as endangering the freshness and originahty of
surrealist expression; for the symbols and images of the dream do
recur with monotonous regularity and similarity. The great
difference between the surrealist poet and the analytic patient
must again be stressed: "Freud's patients are merely victims; the
poet, by the sole fact that he creates, is a hero, a hero who suffers
assuredly, who feels inferiorities which are often terrible, but one
who has discovered a world he can explore and conquer, a world,
moreover, of high social significance, and cannot be degraded to
the rank of patient."®

The third of these principles. Black Bile, Breton's I'humour
noir, is a kind of introjected irony, an irrational laughter which
the poet expresses when he is aware of the violent incongruities
of unconscious reality. Freud had shown in his Wit and Its
Relationship to the Unconscious that the intention behind
laughter can be quite cruel.

Surrealism, thanks to the discoveries of Freud, has managed to go very
deeply into the process of affective reaction and has discovered that
when irony becomes really revolutionary (from the point of view of the
poet) it becomes something much more cruel than what is understood
when we use the term irony. ... It is laughter of the most disagreeable
kind and with the most disturbing effects.^"

This laughter does not exclude the scatological, though it does
not necessarily exalt it. It is a humor associated with the shock of
dislocation from conscious signposts of good and evil.

These and other indications of the totally irrational must be
associated with the history of Freud's influence on modern litera-
ture; the influence is undeniable. The surrealists, however, have
themselves marked the limits of their debt to Freud. They reject
all but his description of the unconscious, and they accept that,
not for the reasons for which Freud himself introduced it, but for
their own reasons. Their contributions to modern literature are
perhaps more symptomatic than constructive. Some value must

9 Nicolas Galas, "The Light of Words," in Arson, I (1942) , 16.

^0 Galas, "The Meaning of Surrealism," loc. cit., 390. For a brief but concise
study of the sources of surrealism in nineteenth-century French literature, see
Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism (New York, 1950) .

THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE • HoffmOJl 137

be admitted in their unceasing attacks upon credulity, for the
imagery of surrealistic poetry is often accidentally striking and
effective, and the plastic representation of incongruity is a cease-
less hindrance to stuffy platitudes about the "spiritual signifi-
cance of the arts."

Freud's interpretation of the dream has remained an impor-
tant influence. As a result of it the writer has revised his view of
himself as an artist, and of his responsibility to his readers.
Experimental writers expect their readers to participate in the
creative act in an ingenious way. The elements of commonalty
which any reader of nineteenth-century fiction may enjoy are not
so easily accessible. If a writer is not merely capricious — that is, if
his images are not so remote that only he knows what they
mean — then the reader may discover the meanings for himself.
The traditional dramatic critics speak of a suspension of judg-
ment necessary for an acceptance of theatrical conventions. The
modern reader is forced to a "suspension of censor" in order that
he may explore, with his author, the devious ways of dream-con-
sciousness. Freud speaks of "secondary elaboration" as a means by
which the censor operates with respect to a dream already com-
pleted. The reader, when he says, "This is grotesque; this is
absurd," reacts in essentially the same way as the dream-self,
when it remarks, "Well, after all, it's only a dream."

At this point the analog)' between patient and reader breaks
off. So far as adopting the analyst's point of view will help make
the path to understanding simpler, the reader may do so; but he
is no more interested in "curing the hero" than a reader of
conventional fiction is interested in having the villain put to
death or the heroine enjoy a full-dress wedding. There is a point
at wliich the aesthetic and the scientific points of view part
company. Psychoanalysis may have rich suggestions for the artist,
but curing the hero is not one of them."

11 Cf. Chapter VIII, for discussion of Shcnvood .Anderson nnd psychoana-
lysis.

138 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Freud's therapy dealt with neurotic patients almost entirely,
but the intellectual of our time accepted his conclusions concern-
ing character as universally applicable, for two reasons: (1)
Freud had shown in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life and
Wit and Its Relationship to the Unconscious that the distinction
between normal and abnormal was primarily one of degree and
not of kind, and that every person was at least potentially neu-
rotic. (2) Observation of the life around him and of the world
within him led the young intellectual to much the same conclu-
sion.

The influence of abnormal psychology upon character analysis
was readily admitted. Whether the hero of our twentieth-century
novel is an analyst (as in the case of Lewisohn's The Island
Within) or a patient (as in Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Depar-
ture) , certain conclusions about his character derive their psycho-
logical quality from the analytic environment. What we speak of
as the "struggle of wills" in traditional fiction, becomes, for the
"clinical novelist," a struggle against the forces of repression.
What might have been considered an honorable submission to
fate, or the beautiful expression of filial piety is explained as an
infantile fixation or a "parental complex."^- As a result of the
introduction of psychoanalytic theory, there was a renewed inter-
est in neurotics; they were regarded as a mirror of the world. The
danger is that this preoccupation with the "abnormal or eccen-
tric" does not prove anything except that people are often neu-
rotic or abnormal. Shakespeare's fools are honorable persons,
conveying important truth in the guise of nonsense, which they
often found necessary because the world had closed the door on
"common sense." Dostoevski's Prince Myshkin is, after all, a wise
man in his way, whose sympathy and naivet^ reach depths not
appreciated by those ambitious and sensible people around him.
But the twentieth-century writer, instead of assuming that the
normal and abnormal were not isolated types — as Freud had
suggested — often took the abnormal for the normal. This pessi-
mistic view of life was part of the tradition of revolt; perspective

12 Thus, in May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (New York,
1922) , 97, Priscilla had fallen ill only as a means of holding her husband: It
was "pure hysteria. Robin wasn't in love Avith her and she knew it."

THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE • HoffmaU 139

was frequently lost. The pessimism of ilie naturalist assumed that
external forces left no room for individual free will; man was a
plaything of these forces. The pessimism of the psychological
novelist is an extension of this same naturalism. Freud explained
that no fact of the mental life was without its cause. The psycho-
logical novelist would like to regard his pessimism as of a deeper
dye. To some writers of his type, the search for life was more
accurately a "search for death." One might explain all this by
remarking that modern man held to no fixed illusions; but the
larger world-negation came to adjust desire to reality. When the
opportunity for social protest offered itself, many of these novel-
ists gladly turned to it, for it at least offered an object of attack
outside the self."

Despite the devious course which Freudianism took after it left
the clinical environment of its origins, we may sketch the main
Freudian contributions to literature. (1) The Interpretation of
Dreams, and especially the chapter on the "Dream-work,"
affected writers variously. It suggested the existence of an uncon-
scious life in which jxitterns of conduct were not superficial, but
complex. It offered the dream as a convenient summary of charac-
ter-motivation, and even as a part of the plot-structure itself. It
called the attention of writers to the need for a new language — a
language based upon the devices of condensation, displacement,
multiple determination, and secondary elaboration. In so doing,
it suggested to experimentalists tlie idea of employing "absurdi-
ties" in their writing — that is, a repudiation of what is logical
and syntactic, for what is illogical and ungrammatic.

(2) The Three Contributions to a Theoiy of Sex, together
with other books of the time, and Freud's earlier book of Intro-
ductory Lectures furnislicd a set of psychological terms which
were often applied with more facility than judgment. Among the
traditional situations which novelists have exploited for ages,
the psychological no\clist made some alterations in treatment.
The parent-child relationship, if it was allowed to extend beyond

13 In this aspect of twcnticth-ccntury fiction the popular notions of both
Adler and Jung also plavcti a role — though these were usually referred (if
they were referred to anything at all) to their sources in Freudian psychol-
ogy. The "inferiority complex" and the extrovert-introvert division of types
were both often lumped together as "Freudian terms."

140 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

the period of adolescence and caused a subsequent disparagement
of "masculine qualities," was treated as a form of oedipus com-
plex— though individual writers gave this idea their own modi-
fications. The "eternal triangle" remained triangular, but it was
often treated as a problem of modern sex-ethics. Forms of malad-
justment were often regarded as signs of ego-fixation, or narciss-
ism.

(3) Freud's monographs on social and theological matters had
only a limited and an indirect influence. The pessimistic conclu-
sion that social institutions, and the arts as well, were mere
illusions occasionally stimulated writers to underline their study
of modern pessimism. Waldo Frank, for example, regarded the
altering of an institution as insufficient for social change, since
institutions were, for the most part, "hampering illusions of
power and order." Freud's doctrine of the recurrence of certain
phylogenetic patterns, which he developed in Totem and Taboo,
influenced Thomas Mann's treatment of the Joseph story. Mann
also hopefully emphasized Freud's brief reference to the future of
analysis as a task of building and strengthening the ego by means
of making its union with culture and society more and more
attractive and its task of regulating the id correspondingly easier.

(4) The clinical situation was itself responsible for many inci-
dental sub-plots and especially for satire. The idea of resistance
claimed much interest both in discussions and in satires of such
discussions in literature. The transference situation was ideal
material for satire, and was generally treated satirically. The
psychoanalyst was himself a new fictional type — though it is
extremely doubtful that he will ever reach the status in fiction
which the kindly or courageous physician has long enjoyed.

Of the many diverse influences which affected twentieth-cen-
tury writing, Freud was an important one. He was, however, only
a single member of a large fraternity of thinkers who had some
bearing upon the thought and the fiction of the twenties. It is
now our problem to estimate the diversity and the strength of
Freud's influence, by examining in detail the works of a number
of novelists — among them, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Sher-
wood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann.

Le Frisson Nouveau

Baudelaire and the Symbolist Movement
J. M. COHEN

'Vous dotez le ciel de I'art d'on ne salt quel rayon macabre',
wrote Victor Hugo in a letter congratulating Baudelaire on
Les Fleurs du Mai of 1857, 'vous creez un frisson nouveau'.^
Hugo had himself for fifty years endeavoured to arouse new
thrills, and the supernatural was a device that had been ex-
ploited not only by himself and his generation, but by writers
as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century. Sweden-
borg had described his experiences on the borders of the un-
known, and the Gothick novelists, in their endeavour to pro-
vide 'pleasing thrills' — to use Horace Walpole's words — had set
the ghosts walking through many a deserted manor long before
Baudelaire began to write of a new kind of strangeness, which he
did not attempt to make 'pleasing'.

Baudelaire, indeed, provided a new thrill, which shocked and
horrified a Paris used to ghost stories and literary dabblings in
the occult. For where E. T. A. Hoffmann and others had de-
scribed the external marvels and perils which a man might meet
and over which he might triumph, Baudelaire presented his own
mind and heart as a ghostly limbo from which there was no
escajje into another and more comfortable world. He in fact
internalized the supernatural, substituting the thrill of psycho-

1 You have thrown an indescribable and eerie hght into the artistic sky. You
are creating a new thrill.

From J. M. Cohen, Poetry of This Age. 1908-1958 (Chester Springs, Pa.:
Dufour Editions, 1960) .

141

142 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

logical complexity for the outworn devices of hauntings and
psychic appearances.

The romantic poet — Shelley, Hugo, Byron — saw himself as a
hero, the successor to Prometheus or Hercules. Though society
rejected him, he believed that he had been chosen to bring it
great benefits, to acquaint it with the powers of inspiration, and
even to perform the labours of political leader and prophet.
Whatever his doubts about the external world, he unhesitatingly
believed in himself as a figure of undivided purpose, capable of
decisive criticism and action.

Baudelaire too was to some extent his own hero. He was, at the
same time a surgeon performing an autopsy upon himself, but
not upon society. For the subject of his poetry was invariably
himself, not as a single hero but as a divided man. One of the
most revealing of his self-dissections is to be found in 'La Voix',
not otherwise one of the more important poems in Les Fleurs du
Mai. The division is immediately stated by the conflicting voices
that speak to the child brought up on the dust and ashes of the
classical past:

Mon berceau s'adossait a la biblioth^que.

Babel sombre, ou roman, science, fabliau.

Tout, la cendre latine et la poussi^re grecque,

Se melaient. J'^tais haut comme un in-folio.

Deux voix me parlaient. L'une, insidieuse et ferme,

Disait: 'La Terre est un gateau plein de douceur;

Je puis (et ton plaisir serait alors sans terme!)

Te faire un app^tit d'une ^gale grosseur.'

Et I'autre: 'Viens! oh! viens voyager dans les reves,

Au dela du possible, au dela du connu!'-

The poet has no doubt which voice to follow. Even boundless
pleasure and equally boundless appetite to enjoy it are less attrac-
tive than a life of dreams. Byron would have accepted the sweet

2 My cradle backed on the library, a dark Babel in which romance, science
and story, everything, the ashes of Rome and the dust of Greece, were mixed.
I was the size of a folio. Two voices addressed me. The first, insidious and
assured, said: 'Earth is a cake full of sweetness. I can (and your pleasure
would then be boundless!) give you an appetite of the same size'. And the
other said: 'Come, oh come and travel in dream, beyond the possible, beyond
the known!'

LE FRISSON NOUVEAU • CollCJl 148

cake and consumed it ^vith a chosen companion among the Greek
Isles; Hugo would have feasted upon it with his family and
friends, interrupting his pleasure at times to vituperate against
some favourite enemy; Shelley would have rejected it for some
quintessential nectar on which the spirits feed. But Baudelaire
prefers a voyage of discovery beyond the frontiers of possibility
and knowledge. And this journey is not an outward exploration
of nature or society, but a descent into the depths of his own
heart. It is from this moment of choice, he says, that he dates his
'woimd' and his 'evil destiny':

C'est d'alors
Que date ce qu'on peut, helas, nommer ma plaie
Et ma fatality. Derri^re les dt^cors
De Texistence immense, au plus noir de I'abime,
Je vois distinctement des mondes singuliers,
Et de ma clainoyance extatique victime,
Je traine des serpents qui mordent mes souliers^

The poem's imagery is ill-assorted; the 'wound' is a clinical
comparison that will be repeated by many modern poets down to
\\\ H. Audcn, who in his early poetry addresses it ironically as a
pampered and rather tiresome friend, and to Eliot's 'wounded
surgeon' in 'East Coker'. But the Bacchante's snakes seem to have
crept down from the library shelves behind the infant's cradle.
The modern poet will prove not an ecstatic victim but a per-
plexed interpreter of his rare moments of clairvoyance.

Baudelaire carries his claim further, and compares himself to
the prophets who, like him, loved the desert and the sea-shore,
thus calling up associations with the Desert Fathers. But with
clairvoyance and prophecy goes also a certain naivety. So deep is
this vision tliat often the poet confuses fact witli illusion, and
with his eyes on the sky stumbles as he walks. His voice, however,
comforts him with the assurance that this too brings a benefit:

Garde tes songes;
Les sages n'en ont pas d'aussi beaux que les fous.'*

3 It is from then that there dates what can. alas, be called my wound and
my evil destiny. Behind the backcloth of vast existence, in the blackest of the
pit. I clearly sec strnntje worlds, and as the ecstatic victim of my own
clairvoyance, I drag snakes behind me that bite at mv shois.

* Preserve your dreams; fools have more beautiful dreams than the wise.

144 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Clairvoyant, prophet, fool, and dreamer, Baudelaire is, nev-
ertheless, no dweller in artificial paradises; these would be as
tasteless to him as the cloying cake of worldly pleasure. The two
themes that occur most constantly in his poetry are those of the
voyage over unknown seas, and the search among childhood
memories for some secret innocence, long ago forgotten:

le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,
Les violons vibrants derri^re les collines,
Avec les brocs de vin, le soir, dans les bosquets.®

Here once more the despised library has given the poet his
imagery. For this is the classical Arcadia, the shepherds' Sicily of
Theocritus, the Dejeuner sur I'herbe, recalled by Baudelaire's
contemporary Edouard Manet. In Manet's picture the theme of
innocence is treated more simply; the naked and the clothed sit
unselfconsciously side by side. But into Baudelaire's vision enters
the same division as in his other poems. For his is not only the
green paradise of childish lovers; it is also, paradoxically,

L'innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs.^

Poets of the past, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hugo, had looked back
on childhood as an age when intimations of the spiritual world
were clear and direct. Among lesser writers there had grown up a
sentimentality that led to the later mawkishnesses of Peter Pan.
But Baudelaire remembered not only the innocent picnics of his
childhood, but also the premature intimations of adulthood that
accompanied them.

Doubt and contradiction pervade not only the memories of the
new writer who purveys le frisson nouveau, and his own view of
himself. They also affect his attitude to the act of poetic creation.
Gautier, an elder contemporary of Baudelaire, saw the ideal
poem as one of ever increasing clarity. The more difficult the

5 The green paradise of childish loves, the races, the songs, the kisses, the
bunches of flowers, the violins thrumming behind the hills, and jugs of wine
at evening in the woods.

6 The innocent paradise full of furtive pleasures.

LE FRISSON NOUVEAU • Cofwn 145

material, the greater the need of craftsmanship. To him, a man of
uncompHcatcd attitudes, complex thought, such as Baudelaire's,
would have provided a sj^ecial challenge to clarity. For only
perfection of utterance coukl possess eternity:

Oui, I'cEuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail

Rebclle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, dmail.

Point de contraintes faussesl
Mais que pour marcher droit

Tu chausses.
Muse, un cothurne ^troit.

Fi du rhythmc commode,
Comme un Soulier trop grand,

Du mode
Que tout pied quitte et prendl^

Baudelaire aimed at no such formal perfection, and hardly any
poets since his day have attempted to conform to Gautier's ideal.
The tendency has been to make the line conform to the thought,
and reproduce the turns, obscurities and contradictions of a
comjjlex argument in language as broken and baffling. Licence
for this predominant difficulty, which has robl>ed modern poetry
of so many readers, was given by Paul Verlainc, a disciple of
Baudelaire, whose defence of his o\\n not very difficult stvle was
conceived as an answer to Gautier's call for formal perfection. Its
scorn for rhyme — though Verlaine was a master of rhyme — its
praise of imjjrecision, and its assault on rhetoric, provide a theo-
retical justification for much modern poetry which deliberately
matches imprecision of thought with imprecision of language
and, in its swift colloquial changes of mood and stress, seeks to
represent a mind reaching out towards experiences for which
satisfactory words hardly exist. These lines of Verlaine apply

' Yes, the work of art emerges more beautiful from a form which resists
working, verse, marble, onyx, enamel.

No false constraints! But to walk straight, Muse, put on a narrow buskin.

Shame on the easy rhythm, like a shoe that is too large, of a kind thnt every
foot can put on and take off.

146 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

more fittingly to the intricacies of Rilke, Eliot or the Italian,
Eugenio Montale, than to his own poetry of simple nuance:

II faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque m^prise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Ou rind^cis au Precis se joint, . . .
Prends I'eloquence et tords-lui son cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'^nergie,
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.
Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'oii?^

Baudelaire himself made no break with the formal conven-
tions; many of his lines recall lines of equal psychological sub-
tlety in Racine. His scorn for antiquity was greatly overstated. It
was in his choice of moments from the past, in his greater
sympathy for Rome's decadence than for her prime, that he
differed from the poets of previous centuries. As one of the first of
the self-styled Decadents, he felt a special affinity with the Empire
in its decadence, since he suspected that he too was living towards
the end of a cycle of civilization.

Despite the decline of classical reading and the more extensive
knowledge of history and science that have changed our culture
in the last hundred years, the attitude of the modern poet to the
Greco-Latin inheritance has certainly not been one of neglect.
The ancient myths and the literature of Greece and Rome con-
tinue to provide them with subjects, since they set out the arche-
typal situations which each poet has felt compelled to reinterpret
in terms of his own fresh insights. Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus,
Yeats's variations on Sophoclean themes, Pound's Greek and Latin
reconstructions, VaMry's refinements on Greek philosophical
thought, are examples that readily come to mind. It is in their
choice among the ancient masters that poets since Baudelaire
have differed from those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. They no longer think of the classical ideal as one of

8 Also you must be a little mistaken in choosing your words: there is
nothing more precious than the grey song where indecision is joined with
precision. . . . Take eloquence and wring its neckl You will do well while you
are about it to give Rhyme a little correction. To what lengths will it go if we
do not watch it?

LE FRISSON NOUVEAU • CoIlCH 147

faultless perfection; a grinning Tanagra figurine seems to them
to represent the Greek spirit more perfectly than a Laocoon in
the formal agony of his battle with the serpents.

One of the last French poets to accept the older classical values,
and to remain unaffected by the modern division of mind and
purpose, Jose-Maria de H^redia, Avrote sonnets of a technical
perfection that conformed to Gautier's ideal, in each of which he
drew, as on a medal, some scene to typify an aspect of tlic ancient
j)ast. It is noteworthy that he came to this past almost as a
stranger, having been born in Ctiba. His sonnet 'Antoine et
Cltopatre' presents, therefore, an outsider's view of a historical
moment seen as a picture, into which feeling and movement
hardly enter before the last line:

Tous deux ils regardaient, de la haute terrasse,
L'Egypte s'endormir sous un del etouffant
Et le Fleuve, a travcrs le Delta noir qu'il fend,
Vers Bubaste ou Sais rouler son onde grasse.

Et le Romain sentait sous la lourde cuirasse,
Soldat captif bercjant le sommcil d'un enfant,
Plover et defaillir sur son coeur triomphant
Le corps voluptueux que son etreinte embrasse.

Tournant son tete pale entre ses cheveux bruns
Vers lui qu'enivraient d'invincibles parfums,
Elle tendit sa bouche et ses prunellas claires;
Et sur elle courbe, I'ardent Imperator
Vit dans les larges ycux ctoil^s de points d'or
Toute une mer immense ou fuyaient des galores.'

The poet seems to stand aside from his subject. The classical
names, the Latinate conventionality of the adjectives, the deliber-

^From the high terrace, they both watched Egypt sleeping beneath a
stifling sky. and the river rolling its oily waves towards Bubastis or Sais,
through the black Delta that it divides.

.And beneath his heavy armour, the Roman, a captive soldier cradling a
child's slumber, felt the voluptuous body grasped in his embrace yielding and
fainting on his triumphant heart.

Turning her head, pale amid her dark hair, towards him who was
maddened bv irresistible perfumes, she offered her mouth and her clear eyes.

And bent over her, the passionate Imperator saw in her wide eyes, starred
with golden specks, a whole vast sea on which galleys were in flight.

148 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

ate introduction of the ancient word Imperator, all remove the
poem from its own century into a past so remote that even the
prophecy of its last line hardly brings it nearer to the present day.
Shakespeare's Cleopatra, by contrast, requires no archaeological
substantiation; she is contemporary and timeless; the gods are
introduced only to be eclipsed:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold.

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver.

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster.

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar'd all description; she did lie

In her pavilion — cloth-of-gold of tissue —

O'er-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature: on each side her

Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks, which they did cool.

And what they undid did.

While the H^rMia sonnet is lifted out of realism by the sudden
widening of the panorama and the hint of magical divination in
its conclusion, Enobarbus's speech attains the same effect from
the beginning by the use of luxuriant metaphor. These are
respectively the Classical and the Baroque way of arousing that
thrill which Hugo admired in Baudelaire. The modern poet,
however, in building up a similar scene, presents it on two levels
at once. True to the division which he has recognized in his own
mind, he is painter and commentator at once; the scene is pre-
sented, and with it, as an ironic frame, a statement of the context
in which he sees it. The second section of T. S. Eliot's 'Waste
Land' begins with a reference to Enobarbus's opening.

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble.

This, like the recital of place-names in H^r^dia's first lines,
suggests the timeless majesty of the scene. Virgil produced a

LE FRISSON NouvEAU • Cofien 149

similar effect by writing lines that recalled passages from Homer.
But Eliot is not describing heroic actions; he is presenting a
modern situation of uncertainty, contradiction and doubt.
Therefore, ironically, he introduces references to a number of
poets of the past, building his scene out of acknowledged borrow-
ings from Milton, Virgil and Ovid. But where H<^r(^dia and Virgil
are certain of their respectful attitude to the past, Eliot uses
legend as a comment on actuality, and the patter of the everyday
pub and street-corner as a method of casting disrespect on the
present. He portrays a kept woman's luxury in terms of Cleopat-
ra's barge, and introduces only the representation of a classical
scene in a tapestry on her wall, to hint at a different set of values
that cannot make its voice heard at the present day:

Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

The strength of the poem lies in its contrasts and parallels.
This is the same world as that in which Ovid wrote the tale of
Philomel, but it is also the world of a perplexed woman who lives
in luxury and can understand nothing:

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

Contrast and parallel also heighten the effect of Lorca's poems
aI)out the feud between the Gipsies and the Civil Guard, sordid
squabbles that are raised to poetry by their primaeval quality.
For similar bands have fought similar knife-battles in Andalusia
ever since the Punic wars, and the judge who rides down to count
the dead and record the event is so timeless a figure that he
cannot remember what parties it is that have been fighting:

El jucz, con guardia civil,
por los olivares viene.

150 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

Sangre resbalada gime
muda canci6n de serpiente.
— Senores guardias civiles:
aqui pastS lo de sienipre.
Han muerto cuatro roraanos
y cinco cartagineses.^"

This Lorca passage illustrates another deliberate confusion in
modern poetry: the substitution of one kind of sense perception
for another. The spilt blood becomes audible, thus suggesting the
groans of the dying men, which are not otherwise heard; and the
red trickle on the ground is described not by its colour but by its
imaginary silent song, by its failure in fact to make any sound at
all. This exchange between aural and visual impressions is a sign
of the exhaustion of language. Had Lorca described the blood of
the dying men as red, and its trickle as snakelike, he would have
been repeating a conventional effect, and would have failed to
strike the reader's imagination. A similar device or conceit, was
used in the seventeenth century, especially in Spain, by poets
trying to rival the hyperbole of the great masters of the Renais-
sance. This is one of the features of the Gongoristic style. Thus
the minor poet Gabriel Bocangel compares a trumpet's sound
over the sea to the flight of an invisible metal bird.

Clearly in a poetry concerned with comment rather than de-
scription, the mind, which co-ordinates the findings of the senses,
can be permitted to draw on all four indiscriminately, and to
jumble their messages. Some modern poets — Edith Sitwell and
Wallace Stevens in particular — have attempted to develop the
idea of correspondances , first put forward by Baudelaire, and to
make sound alone suggest associations and feelings. Rimbaud, in
his sonnet 'Voyelles', drew up a list of supposed universal rela-
tionships between colour and sound:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu^^

10 The judge comes with the civil guard through the olive plantations. . , .
Slippery blood groans its silent snake's song — Gentlemen of the civil guard,
this is the same old story. Four Romans have been killed and five Carthagini-
ans.

11 A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue

TF. FRISSON NOUVEAU • Cokcn 151

and concluded by assigning to the long O of the Greeks a mysti-
cal significance like that attributed by the Hindus to the divine
syllable AUM:

O, supreme clairon plein de strideurs ^tranges,
Silences traverses des Mondcs et des Angcs:
— O rOmega, rayon violet de Ses Yeuxl^^

More recent poets, however, have resorted to this confusion of
the senses only sporadically using it as a means of avoiding a
stock association between noun and adjective or in order to
administer a special shock to the reader.

The poet's divided mind, his political disillusion, his claim to
clairvoyance, his changed attitude to the past, his different ideal
of artistic perfection, and the confusion of his senses all contrib-
ute to the frisson nouveau, which poetry has continued to arouse
in its readers from Baudelaire's time to that of Eugenio Montale,
Dylan Thomas, and even younger poets of the present decade.
But two even more revolutionary changes have occurred since
Baudelaire's time, which have carried modern poetry far beyond
the point at which Hugo saw it when he so generously welcomed
Les Fleurs du Mai. In the century since 1857, the poet's attitude
both to language and to time have fundamentally altered.

Baudelaire's poetry, as has been noted, was both formally and
in its vocabulary completely traditional. Even his prose poems,
Le Spleen de Paris, do not advance beyond the stage of lyrical
prose already reached by de Quincey and Poe and by sundry
minor writers of prose poems in France. It was principally in
England that the demand was heard for a poetic diction close to
that of popular speech. Wordsworth had advocated it, but failed
to find it. Byron had often found it, but failed to advocate it.
Tennyson and Arnold had returned to the grand style, and
Browning, anxious though he was to extend the resources of his
medium, was fatally hampered by his addiction to the Elizabe-
than blank verse line. Even when he is most inventive, his verse
follows the rhythms of literature, not of speech.

120, highest trumpet, full of strange stridcncics. silences crossed by Worlds
and Angels: O Omega, viokt beam of His Eycsl

152 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

The one example of a poet who had broken with the forms, the
rhythms and the language of tradition was Walt Whitman, whose
freedoms greatly attracted various minor French poets of the
generation that followed Baudelaire. But his style could not be
aped. Though it acted as an encouragement to the inventors of
vers-libre, which has been the predominant measure of modern
poetry. Whitman's example could only have been followed by a
poet sufficiently convinced of his message to let it dictate its own
rhetoric.

Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,

America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and

pass'd to other spheres,
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

A new poetry that saw itself to be at the end of an epoch could
not use a voice of stich confidence. Whitman was too little con-
cerned with half-lights and contradictions, too insensitive to the
details of poetic texture to be a fit model for the new poets of
France, w'hich had been humbled and depressed by the war of
1870, or of a Europe moving towards an epoch of disastrous wars
and revolutions. Only two twentieth-century poets ow^e any con-
siderable debt to Whitman, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Pablo
Neruda, and both, as Communists, have believed themselves to
be, like Whitman, heralds of a new age.

The new poetic language and rhythms owe far more to the
lesser French poet of the 'eighties, Jules Laforgue, than to Brown-
ing or "Whitman. Laforgue, a sensitive ironist with an ear for
folk-song, music-hall patter and the new slang of the cities, per-
fected in his last poems the subtly cadenced line that Eliot took
over from him for Trufrock', and that was adapted also by such
French poets as Guillaume Apollinaire a year or two earlier.

Laforgue's is the strength of a sound compromise. Neither
rhyme nor rhythm is abandoned. But the rhyme is no longer part
of a regular scheme, and sometimes yields to assonance or allitera-
tion. The pattern of sound, in fact, is applied evenly to a whole
passage rather than at certain fixed points in it: and this practice
has been developed by subsequent poets as various as Neruda and

LE FRISSON NOUVEAU • CoflCH 153

Dylan Thomas. But this tendency has been greatly strengthened
in England by the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and of
the alliterative Anglo-Saxon and Middle English verse from
which he developed his techniques. Laforgue's strictly cadenced
vcrs-Ubre, however, with its train of allusions and broken
rhythms, still appears as original and contemporary as it did
when it was written. No innovators have succeeded in making his
magnificent poem on tlie coming of winter appear less exciting.

Allons, allons, ct hallali!

C'est THiver bien connu qui s'am^ne;

Oh! les tournants des grandes routes,

Et sans petit Chaperon Rouge qui chemine! . . .

Oh! leurs emigres des chars de I'autre mois,

Montant en don quichottesques rails

Vers les patrouilles des nu^es en deroute

Que le vent malm^ne vers les transatlantiques bercails!

Accdlerons, accdlerons, c'est la saison bien connue, cette fois.

Et le vent, cette nuit, il en a fait de belles!

6 ddgats, 6 nids, 6 modestes jardinetsi

Mon cceur et mon sommeil: 6 (^-chos des cogn^es! . . ."

It is the same sound of axes as in the last act of The Cherry
Orchard. Laforgue is a poet of endings and memories. He looks
back to childhood with the same divided feelings as Baudelaire.
He remembers a freshness of vision, but with it the boredom of a
recurrent refrain, the constant repetition of tuneless scales prac-
tised behind closed shutters on hot Simday evenings. His prevail-
ing mood is ironic, his habitual gesture a shrug and a wr)' smile.
Yet philosophically, he is a courageous poet, able to accept the
nothingness of much that is generally accepted as reality, and yet
to pursue some ultimate meaning behind that blank facade.

Laforgue's vision of time is of some cyclic repetition in which

"Forward, forward, and away! It is the usual winter coniinp on. O bends in
ilie high roads, without Little Red Riding Hood walking there! Oh their ruts
of last year's carts, climbing like quixotic rails towards the retreating cloud
patrols, that arc harried by the wind towards transatlantic folds! Hurry,
hurrv, this time it is the familiar season, and tonight the wind has done some
fine work! O destruction! O nests, O modest gardens! Nfy heart and my
slumber: O echoes of axes! . . .

154 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

the same events, recalling the same incidents from literature,
fairy tale or childhood, return and return, bringing ever increas-
ing boredom. The panorama of time has closed in on the modern
poet. There is for him only the moment of intense experience; all
the rest is memory or foreboding. A sonnet by Edwin Muir
crystallizes a situation that owes something of its intensity to
familiarity with the new physics of relativity, but more to the
modern poet's inability to believe, as Hugo or Tennyson be-
lieved, in a possible betterment of human conditions by means of
man-guided progress. Muir describes man's situation as one in
which — to quote the title of his poem — 'There is Nothing there
but Faith':

Nothing, it seemed, between them and the grave.

No, as I looked, there was nothing anywhere.

You'd think no ground could be so flat and bare:

No little ridge or hump or bush to brave

The horizon. Yet they called that land their land,

Without a single thought drank in that air

As simple and equivocal as despair.

This, this was what I could not understand.

The reason was, there was nothing there but faith.

Faith made the whole, yes all they could see or hear

Or touch or think, and arched its break of day

Within them and around them every way.

They looked: all was transfigured far and near.

And the great world rolled between them and death.

The landscape and the situation echo those of Browning's
'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came'. Yet here the incidents
of the knight's journey, the hideous scapegoat horse, the brothers
who had been overthrown in the same ordeal, even the hint of a
spectral adversary, are absent. What remains is a timeless mo-
ment in the experience of a nameless they, in which the posses-
sion of faith turned defeat into victory. This is the moment that
most concerns contemporary religious poets. They do not treat of
belief and disbelief as Browning did in 'Christmas Eve' and
'Easter Day', but of the sudden presence or absence of faith or
vision. T. S. Eliot's glimpse of a hidden reality in 'Ash Wednes-

LE FRISSON NOUVEAU • CoflCH 155

day', %\hich foreshadows a similar moment in the rose garden in
'Burnt Norton', may seem to express a positive and unshakable
faith acquired in an instant:

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god.
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed
but spoke no word.

Yet a line or two later comes the return to the unenlightened
level of common living:

And after this our exile.

In the same way the departure of just such a vision leads the
Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno to ask his despairing question
at the end of his poem 'Hermosura':

La noche cae, despierto,

me vuelve la congoja,

la espl^ndida vision se ha derretido,

vuelvo a ser hombre.

Y ahora dime, Sefior, dime al oido:

tanta hermosura

I matard nuestra muerte?^*

Neither poet is concerned with dogma, or with questions of belief
and disbelief. "What matters to both is the glimpse of the 'still
point of the turning world', the central experience of the mystic.
To Eliot it brings assurance, followed by a resigned return to the
common level of living, while Unamuno's moment of insight
only plunges him deeper into the anxious questionings of the
divided man. But the preoccupation of both is with the mystical
approach, whereas that of the nineteentli-century poet was with
institutional religion.

The frisson noiweau has thus brought not only a new way of
feeling, a new attitude of the poet to himself, but also a new

1* Night falls, I awake, my anxiety returns, the splendid vision has melted
away, I am a man once more. .'\nd now tell me, Lord, tell me in my ear: Will
our death abolish all this beauty?

156 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

attitude to religious truth. Though many contemporary religious
poets belong in name to the Roman Church, their standpoint as
poets is essentially a Protestant one. What most preoccupies them
is the individual's experience of God outside time, and without
reference to theology or creed.

The Cubist Perspective

The New World of Relationships:

Camera and Cinema

Philosophy, Science, and the Arts I
WYLIE SYPHER

"In the museum," Cezanne remarked, "the painter learns to
think." By 1890, when he was painting The Basket of Apples,
Cezanne was thinking hard, spilling these thoroughly realized
apples across the top of a table that is speculatively broken
upward on the right, tipping the surface until the fruit would, in
nature, be rolling off, treating the napkin as a single white plane
even if it droops over the edge of the table. The plate and other
objects are warped into new gravitational fields of vision like
those in Lautrec's scenes, where figures are buoyed up by steep
graphic perspective.

This painting reminds us that a century earlier, at the close of
the enlightenment, Immanuel Kant wrote that human experi-
ence is possible only when we have "a concept of an intelligible
world." Dare to tiiink, urged Kant: sapere aiide. However faintly
Pope thought, he had a concept of an intelligible world and
could utilize the Newtonian world order in his verse. The nine-
teenth-century poet like Tennyson often dreaded to follow the
scientist — perhaps because the scientists who most nearly affected
men "as enjoying and suffering beings" were now biologists, not

From Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York:
Random House. 1960) .

157

158 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

mathematicians. During the nineteenth century, art and science
became ahenated as they had not been ahenated in the enHghten-
ment; thus the intellectual roots of art were cut. Experiments
such as impressionism and the naturalistic novel adapted certain
methods from science; yet on the whole art and science seemed to
be two incompatible kinds of experience or knowledge, and
scientific theory and aesthetic theory seemed contrary. Matthew
Arnold despairingly asked in his essay on "Literature and Sci-
ence" how poetry can "exercise the power of relating the modern
results of natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his in-
stinct for beauty?" He was forced to admit, "I do not know how,"
He was in any case sure that science without poetry did not
suffice. On an earlier page we have noted the effects of this
alienation on poetry, for in his essay written in 1926 I. A. Rich-
ards asked whether the modern poet can be expected to deal
with a God who is subject to a theory of relativity. Significantly
enough, T. S. Eliot, whom Richards takes as an example of the
plight of the modern poet, helpless before the science that has
destroyed his beliefs, makes his maturest poetic statements by
writing verse that is an "act of the mind" as well as a confession
of faith:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.

And time future contained in time past. . . .

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

("Burnt Norton")

Eliot is more intelligent than Pope, and has, perhaps uncon-
sciously, made our most conceptual scientific theory — a theory of
relativity — apposite to poetry now that this theory is "manifestly
and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings."

Wallace Stevens is another who insisted that the great feat of
poetic imagination "lies in abstraction. The achievement of the
romantic, on the contrary, lies in minor wish-fulfillment, and it is

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • SyphCT 159

incapable of abstraction." Stevens does not of course mean ration-
alism; nevertheless he proposes that "we live in the mind." We
have just noticed also how Paul Valery argues that "the clear
distinct operations of the mind" are not opposed to poetry;
rather, poetry requires "our will to intelligence, and exercising to
tlie full our powers of understanding." Valery's hero is M. Teste,
who iiolds, like Stevens, that "it is by a sort of abstraction that
the work of art is constructed." The poem as a work of abstract
thought demands what Stevens calls "liberty of the mind." Ste-
vens goes on: "The truth seems to be that we live in the concepts
of the imagination before the reason has established them." Im-
manuel Kant would have understood this statement. For Kant, at
the height of the enlightenment, would have assumed that imagi-
native activity sometimes coincides with conceptual activity.
Have we not been misled by the nineteenth-century romantic
belief that the imagination means either emotional power or the
concrete image, the metaphor alone. We have not supposed there
is a poetry of ideas.

Cubism is above all an "art of conception," and it was born of
thinking done by Cezanne and by Nabis like S^rusier, who said,
"A painter must be intelligent." Gleizes and Metzinger repeat:
"Without denying either sensation or emotion, the cubist has
raised painting to the level of the mind" — La peinture exigeait
done les connaissances solides. This solves Baudelaire's problem
of transposing voluptc to connaissance. T. S. Eliot, speaking for
the moderns, has said, "The only method is to be very intelli-
gent."^ We know what Eliot owes to the symbolists and the artists
of the late nineteenth century who freed the motif from the
anecdote, the illustrative, the weight of the object in its ordinary
guise. Gleizes and Metzinger underscore the importance of this
heritage of abstraction, to which Gauguin and the Nabis contrib-
uted so much, when they remark that "the visible world does not
become the real world except by the operation of thought." Tliey
add: "It is not enough for a painter to see a thing; he must think
it."

The fauvist painters, too, were able to abstract both line and

1 Alfred Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit. 1958, 21.

160 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

color, and it is hard to say whether Picasso's Demoiselles
d' Avignon (1907) is fauvist or cubist; yet it remains true that the
cubists did what the fauves did not: they developed a theory — a
theory that has the closest agreement with the theories of our
science. Fauvism and cubism are alike quests for style, but the
analysis of the world was pressed further in cubism, which under-
took to represent the object in its "total existence."^ In his
Theory of Figure Painting Andr^ Lhote stresses what demands
cubist art made on the mind: "The more the intelligence enters
into the creation of a work of art, the more the painting can be
said to have a maximum of existence." I. Rice Pereira, one of the
neo-plastic painters, has said, "Every space has its own geometric
structure and dimensions and belongs to different levels of ex-
perience." This sounds like a sentence from Alberti or another
renaissance theorist; for in the renaissance, science was an aspect
of art, and the painter, like the cubist or post-cubist, was aware of
the mathematic of his day. The renaissance was creative partly
because, like the enlightenment, it was eager to assimilate science
to art.

Among the blockages in nineteenth-century art was the inabil-
ity, or unwillingness, of the artist to utilize science intelligently,
to make art genuinely contemporary. Or, worse, the science that
most readily aroused a response was Darwinian biology, which
seemed to sanction strong impulse and romantic feeling rather
than intelligence.

Rodin's failures as an artist are informative. Temperamentally
he was kin to Delacroix, and had a Wagnerian need to express
energy, the ninteenth-century dynamism that disturbed Henry
Adams and sent him, for refusfe, to Chartres. To find an idiom
for the titanic, Rodin experimented with wave-motions in his
sculpture — the romantic motion that drove the great breaking
billow in G^ricault's Raft of the Medusa. Rodin's groups of
figui'es curve inward, then are thrust horizontally outward in a
surge leaping out of the block, like the head of La Tempete
crying out in direct emotive attack. Rodin also specialized in the
anatomical fragment — the hand, the head, the muscular body

2 Andr6 Salmon, La Jeune Peinture Frangaise, Paris, 1912, 50.

THE cLuisT PERSPECTIVE • Sypher 161

emerging from the unfinislied marble. This is a brand of symbol-
ism, for only a few details are stated. The Last Vision derives
from Michelangelo's unfinished giants as well as from the tech-
niques of symbolism — only a head, a suggestion of crossed hands,
a translation of sculptural volumes into dim pictorial terms. It is
significant that the Rodin Museum is hung with Carri^re's gray
misty paintings, for Carri^re blurs everything he touches. Rodin
substitutes vagueness for sculptural realization except in a few
items like La Femme Accroupie, a massive simplification almost
Egyptian. This evasive poetic technique is in sharp contrast to
the sculptural value of Cezanne's proto-cubist planes. Rodin, in
fact, never found his style, and there is an abiding conflict between
his cloudy implications and his inherent fleshliness, a conflict
from which Wagner also suffered. The vagueness reminds us of
Maeterlinck; the mass reminds us of Michelangelo and the ba-
roque. Rodin never reached any such conciliation as Renoir's
sculptural abundance; and at moments he becomes a kind of
John Singer Sargent in stone. Some of the Wagnerism is due to
Rodin's quest for myth, leading him to subjects like Eve, Or-
pheus, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, the archetypal huge Man
Walking, and the pompous cliche of The Thinker. Much of this
titanism is merely emotional luxury, like The Gates of Hell.
Some, like The Kiss, is simply vulgar.

Rodin's technical device is the intertwining of his figures, a
tactic that gives the stone mobility and opens his volumes into a
sculptural space later explored by Henry Moore. But Rodin
never discovered the simultaneous space of an authentic modern
like Cezanne or Calder, who uses the mobile as a solution to the
problem of activity in sculpture. Instead, Rodin only complicates
the old three-dimensional scenographic space: we must pass
around his figures in spite of their intertwining and wave-mo-
tions; we do not see them in the cinematic perspective of cubist
painting or abstract sculpture, a poly-dimensional space where
time is "flattened" as it is in the montage-vision of Boccioni's
Bottle Developing in Space, or Archipenko's openwork figures.
Since Rodin's episodes develop in a Euclidean space-time system,
the romantic forms of Chute d'un Ange, Oceanides, or Fugit
Amor move within a space that is volumetric but not simulta-

162 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

neous. Rodin can render one profile at a given instant, episodi-
cally, and his surfaces appear, burst, and change within a succes-
sion of instants no matter how they intertwine. His work is
endowed with the nineteenth-century sense of force; there is
something Bernini-like in the explosion of his masses. But he
lacks the architectural context of baroque sculpture, and his
figures exist in a formless romantic infinity, not the framework of
the baroque theatre. The Gates of Hell violates the architectural
notion of a portal: their extreme mobility should have been
expressed by a revohnng door, and they are not baroque but
picturesque. Rodin rebelled against the confines of Euclidean
space without conceiving any other structure. He needed a rela-
tivity theory to make time another dimension of space, treated
simultaneously as a field in which sculpture moves. He needed
not the mythical poetry of the romantics and Wagner but the
geometric constructions of Antoine Pevsner or Naum Gabo,
who take motion in space as an aspect of contour in time.

With cubism these blockages disappear. They disappear in
Cezanne, who was intelligent as Rodin was not. It is not desirable
to depend heavily on Cezanne's often-quoted statement, "Repre-
sent nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. . , ."
There are few cylinders, spheres, or cones in his painting. But
there is a new occupation of space, for Cezanne was instinctively
contemporary and somehow able to cope with the deeper prob-
lems behind the brushwork of Courbet and the early tachism of
the impressionists, who broke up time by light, and space by their
modular constructions. So in Cezanne the problem of sensation
yielded to the problem of representation, which is the problem of
Cezanne's conception of the world. It is a problem he attacks
directly, without evasions. He did not read science or philosophy;
like many great painters he seems to have been almost illiter-
ate— certainly inarticulate. Nevertheless he was, in Gertrude
Stein's sense of the word, contemporary because he felt strongly
the new world of relationships in space being discovered in the
philosophy of F. H. Bradley and the predecessors of Einstein —
Riemann, Clifford, and Gauss.

In 1875 Clifford was waiting that our ordinary laws of geome-
try do not apply to small portions of space, that these portions

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • SypflCV 163

are comparable to little hills on the surface of a plane, and that
distortion passes like waves from one portion of spate to another.
\'an Gogh must have felt this motion when he painted the
enormously powerful curved local spaces in ravines and water;
much as Cezanne felt the dislocations of space in representing the
masses of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which appear to model the
dimensions around them. In his landscapes Van Gogh forces the
synthetist designs invented by Gauguin to bulge into the con-
tours of a new topography that is nearly magnetic in direction.

In retrospect we can see the full significance of the cubist
movement that made art contemporary and found a style. Cub-
ism is a fruition of modern thought; for it was based, as Francas-
tel states, on new conditions of life, on new formal techniques,
and indirectly on a whole fund of scientific and philosophical
speculation. I. Rice Pereira has said that modern painting is an
image of our cognition, and that space is a symbolic extension of
man's being. So it is with the cubists and their followers, since
cubism is an art that expresses the condition of modern man, who
has been forced to live in a world where there are, as Whitehead
put it, no longer any simple locations, where all relations are
plural.

Technically cubism is a breakdown of three-dimensional space
constructed from a fixed point of view: things exist in multiple
relations to each other and change their appearance according to
the point of view from which we see them — and we now realize
that we can see them from innumerable points of view, which are
also complicated by time and light, influencing all spatial sys-
tems. Cubism is an attempt to conceive the world in new ways,
just as renaissance art was an atttempt to conceive the world in
new ways. Thus the modes of abstraction that have grown from
cubism have involved the intelligence. In a passage on "Art and
Science" Naum Gabo indicates how these two are now interde-
pendent:

Whatever exists in nature, exists in us in the form of our awareness of
its existence. .-Ml creative activities of Mankind consist in the search for
an expression of that awareness. . . . The artist of today cannot possibly
escape the impact science is making on the whole mentality of the
human race. . . . The artist's task is not so pragmatic and straightfor-

164 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

ward as the scientist's; nevertheless, both the artist and the scientist are
prompted by the same creative urge to find a perceptible image of the
hidden forces in nature of which they are both aware. ... I do not
know of any idea in the history of man's culture that developed in a
separate and independent compartment of the human mind. . . . To
my mind it is a fallacy to assume that the aspects of life and nature
which contemporary science is unfolding are only communicable
through science itself. . . .^

Cubism may go beyond the modernity of science, for as Braque
saw, "Art disturbs; science reassures." The truly contemporary
artist is always slightly in advance of science for he is conscious of
the atmosphere about him in a way the scientist or critic is not.
Picasso painted Guernica long before Hiroshima was annihilated.
Dostoevsky plumbed the unconscious before Freud. Braque and
the early cubists eagerly accepted the challenge to deal with the
object in all its new ambiguities: to disturb our vision of things,
because as Braque remarks, "It is always desirable to have two
notions — one to demolish the other."

The ideas behind cubist painting are reflected in all the mod-
ern arts. In writing on the music of poetry Eliot has seen that
verse can suggest new "correspondences" in an age of relativity:
"The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it
arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding
and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and
from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that
context to all the other meanings which it has had in other
contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association." Hence, also,
the art of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, where each portmanteau
phrase is an intersection in multidimensional meaning. Adrian
Leverkuehn, the Faustian hero of Thomas Mann's novel, experi-
ments with modulations between distant keys, "using the so-
called relation of the third, the Neapolitan sixth," finding that
"relationship is everything. And if you want to give it a more
precise name, it is ambiguity."

Cubism exploited the rich ambiguity of the modern object

3 Quoted in Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape, 1956, a book that has
proved vahiable throughout the entire chapter, especially his study of "lami-
nated" space.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • SyphcY 165

exactly while science and the cinema were also discovering ambi-
guities in the modern view of things. The theoi7 of relativity that
evolves through F. H. Bradley, \\'hitehead, Einstein, and modern
mathematics is only the scientific expression of "the new land-
scape" of the twentieth century, a landscape revealed for the first
time in cubist painting and the cinema. Describing this land-
scape, Charles Morris has wTitten: "Contemporary man must be
able to move among and between diverse perspectives, cultural
perspectives on the earth, spatial and temporal perspectives in
the cosmos." Ortega y Gasset has furnished us with a philosophy
of "perspectivism," which represents the complexity and ambigu-
ity of our existence.

The changing perspectives on which we build our existence
appear in the cinema, a modern form of illusion that relates
motion, time, and space in a new kind of composition. It may
well be that according to the law of technical primacy — the
theory that in each era all the arts fall under the influence of one
of the arts — the cinema has technical primacy during the years
between the rise of cubism and the present. By the cinema one
naturally means not Hollywood, which ordinarily uses the cam-
era merely to record a nineteenth-century plot, but an artistic
technique of presenting things as they exist in time by means of a
composite perspective. The daguerreotype arrested things in space
and time and used the old renaissance perspective, the closed
scene, witli posed figures, seen from a fixed angle. This rather
documentary' technique had its influence on the realistic novel,
trompe I'oeil, and Degas' angle of vision. But the technique of
the camera never produced a style until photography broke away
from the old renaissance laws of composition and dealt with the
problems of changing appearances in time and space. Then the
camera, used with artistic consciousness, became the cinema and
revised the stylizations of the daguerreotype into the multidimen-
sional art that is deeply congenial to cubist painting. Whenever a
technique produces a theory — that is, when a technique like
photography becomes conscious — the groundwork for a style is
laid. Bv 1912 Delaunay seems to have been conscious of a basi-
callv cinematic technique when he studied the nthmr tourbiUnnt
of his colored disks. Gertrude Stein, with her sense that art must

166 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

"live in the actual present," described all the modern arts as
cinematic, although she doubted she had "ever seen a cinema"
when she wrote The Making of Americans and claimed that "this
our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series
production." "I was doing," she says, "what the cinema was doing,
I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what
that person was until I had not many things but one thing." Her
early stories were "made up of succession and each moment
having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there
was the moving and the existence. . . ."

By its revolution in thought and method of representing the
world cubism created a cinematic style. The cubists began by
rejecting the renaissance illusions of three-dimensional space and
a closed orthogonal perspective. They renounced the figment of
chiaroscuro along with the subterfuge of arranging solid volumes
in a false distance. Andr^ Lhote boldly said he rejected "all the
precautions which Old Masters took to cover up the arbitrariness
of their chosen methods." So too, Ortega asked whether anything
could be more artificial than Euclidean geometry — on which
painting had been based. The cubists created a new flat perspec-
tive; they broke open the volumes of things by spreading objects
upon shifting interrelated planes that did not violate the surface
of the canvas, the space at the disposal of the painter as painter.
This flat perspective meant also that painting could reintegrate
itself with the wall, which could be treated like a cinematic
screen. By representing the several faces of things simultaneously,
the cubist dealt with the old problem of time and motion in new
ways; objects "moved," but they were also immobilized in a
complex design, offered to us in their calm being, their plural
aspects conceived together. If the cubists "assassinated" objects,
"so much the worse for objects" — as Picasso said to Zervos. This
destruction was actually the reorganizing of the world by the
mind. When Gleizes and Metzinger claim that the visible world
becomes real only by the agency of thought, they are merely
following Gauguin's principle that "art is an abstraction drawn
from nature."* The cubist object no longer has a single or simple
identity.

4 Andr6 Lhote, La Peinture Liberie, Paris, 1956.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Syplu'T 167

Yet this assassination of the object was not like the symbolist-
expressionist distortion of things, for the cubists were nearly
scientific in their destructions, loving the object and seeking to
study it in its silent, dynamic power. In his talks with Zervos,
Picasso said, "There isn't any such thing as abstract art. You must
always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces
of actuality. There's no danger then anyway, because the idea of
the object will have left its indelible mark." The cubist object
remains even after it "is no longer discernible." The cubist found
his reality among the shifting appearances of things. Gleizes and
Metzinger saw in an object a multiple reality that can be defined
only by multiple images: "An object hasn't any absolute form. It
has many: as many as there are planes in the domain of meaning
. . . Autant d'yeux a contempler un objet, autant d'images essen-
tielles." In the same way Picasso took the painter's task as record-
ing line impression miiltidimensioncUe. Daniel-Henry Kahn-
weiler says that the main interest of cubists was to state in two
dimensions what seems to have three — a form of polyphonic
vision counterpointing the many facets of objects into a whole.
Therefore, Kahnweiler insists, cubist painting is close to the new
music of Satie and Schoenberg, which is horizontal in melody and
vertical in harmony.

Cubist painting resolves the old conflict, disturbing to Des-
cartes and John Locke and the academicians, between the "pri-
mary" qualities of an object (those features known to abstract
thought — its mathematical properties) and its "secondary" quali-
ties (those felt by the senses — its material properties) . For the
cubist both are aspects of the object, and neither is the ground of
its reality. The cubist object is a point at which thought about
the object (our conception of it) penetrates and reorders sense
impressions and feelings. In its purity cubist painting refuses to
attract us by appealing strongly to the eye or the emotions. It uses
low hues and restrained lines; it breaks up the potent rhythm of
the romantic line and confines itself to neutral greys, greens, tans,
blues, black, and white. The cubist painter does not make a
violent attack upon the object or upon us; he reduces the glaring
fam ist color and surging line to an idiom of transparencies and a
pictorial, instead of a spatial or emotive, depth. It is noted that
the influence of Cezanne eventually killed fauvism.

168 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

At its extreme purity — in Braque's painting — cubism is a study
of the very techniques of representation — painting about the
methods of painting, a report on the reality of art. With Braque's
intelligent and lyrical vision cubism devoted itself to what the
French call the tableau-tableau — the painter's painting — which
investigates both the object and the means of painting this ob-
ject. As a tableau-tableau cubism reaches its most refined intro-
spections, its most acute self-consciousness. Yet cubism was not at
first doctrinaire; its relation to the world was too genuine.
Braque's painting is a formal but not, however, an abstract
world, since he never loses contact with the texture of objects he
studies and destroys, the bottles, violins, fruits, and musical scores
he fixes in the "luminous silent stasis" which James Joyce be-
lieved is the artistic triumph. Braque has a deep, long attachment
to the still life, but the still life becomes for him a "poetic
creation": "The painter," he explains, "doesn't try to reconstruct
an anecdote but to establish a pictorial fact."^ The fait pictural
— the tableau-object — has complex and ambiguous modes of
existence, belonging to different orders of reality, different levels
of being, between the worlds of art and life. Sometimes to show
how his painting adjusts to any level of reality the cubist assimi-
lated into his pictorial world the very elements of actuality alien
to painting — fragments of cord, cloth, newsprint, wood. Indeed,
to show the equivocal relationships into which his work could en-
ter— and also to affirm the existence of a world of art — the cubist
needed collage, the texture of objects themselves, to underscore
the points of intersection. The device of collage is one of the
guarantees of the integrity of cubist art, its refusal to accept
subterfuge, its denial of the single identity of things.

To prove that art and life intersect, that thought enters things,
that appearance and reality collide, or coincide, at the points we
call objects, the cubist relied on certain technical devices: a
breaking of contours, the passage, so that a form merges with the
space about it or with other forms; planes or tones that bleed into
other planes and tones; outlines that coincide with other out-
lines, then suddenly reappear in new relations; surfaces that

^ "Pens^es sur I'Art," Confluences, May, 1945.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sjpher 169

simultaneously recede and advance in relation to other surfaces;
parts of objects shifted away, displaced, or changed in tone until
forms disappear behind themselves.* This deliberate "oscillation
of appearances" gives cubist art its high "iridescence." However
we describe it, cubist painting is a research into the emergent
nature of reality, which is constantly transforming itself into
multiple appearances, at once fact and fiction. Cubism is a mo-
ment of crisis in the arts when "description and structure con-
flict" in a world of plural vision and classic form. Above all
cubism refused any melodramatic stress, the literary subject, the
"big" anecdote; it was not interested in the isolated episode, or
the climax. Instead cubism was an ingenious examination of
reality in its many contingencies, an experimental painting with
the hardihood of modern science and thought.

Thus cubists gradually disengaged the object from three-di-
mensional space, from a limited, fixed point of view, and "dis-
mantled" it into planes which give an illusion of closure and
depth but which are always moving and readjusting themselves
to one another. The cubist world knows both change and perma-
nence; it is a region of process, arrest, transition, where things
emerge into recognition, then revise their features; an Uncer-
tainty Principle operates here as it does in the new science.

"While the cubists were living in the Bateau Lavoir on the
Montmartre slope their friend Princet, an amateur mathemati-
cian, used to talk with some of them about the science that has
conceived ovir world as a structiue of emergent relationships
determined by one's point of view. The cubist world is the world
of a new physics, of F. H. Bradley, who in 1898 in Appearance
and Reality stated that reality can have no absolute contours but
varies with the angle from which one sees it: "We have to take
reality as many, and to take it as one, and to avoid contradic-
tion." Anticipating A\'liiichcad's theory of the essential relevance
of every object to all other objects in the universe, Bradley

8 My r^sum^ of cubist techniques is drawn from Winthrop Judkins' article,
"Toward a Rcinterprctation of Cubism," Art Bulletin, XXX, December, 1918,
270-278. and from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, 1949. See
also John Golding, Cubism, \iB9, which appeared while this book was in
press.

170 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

defined the identity of a thing as the view we take of it — what
Whitehead later called our prehension of it. Appearances belong
to reality, and reality is intrinsic in varying appearances. Space is
for Bradley only "a relation between terms which can never be
found." Like Whitehead and the relativists, Bradley accepts the
"irreducible plurality of the world" and affirms that "plurality
and relatedness are but features and aspects of a unity." The
absolute manifests itself in change, and changes reveal the nature
of reality: "appearance without reality would be impossible, and
reality without appearance would be nothing." Bradley's ingen-
ious diagram makes this notion clearer than Whitehead ever did:
many relations are possible within reality, which allows us to
construct appearances from many points of view —

A B C D

B A D C

C D A B

D C B A

If these terms are given, we may read them in many directions
and make contrary senses. The appearance of any item like A
makes a design, though this design has no independent existence
apart from the whole situation in which it appears. If we see only
diagonals, then our reality will be limited to a pattern of A and
D. But the configuration of the A items as a diagonal takes
meaning only in relation to the other items B, C, D, which are
relevant to any patterns we are able to select. In fact, any shifting
of B, C, or D at once alters the appearance of A. Bradley lays the
foundation for an existentialist approach, since each of the fea-
tures of a situation is engaged in a total complex.

Whitehead expanded this theme of the essential relevance of
all aspects of reality to reality itself: "all entities or factors in the
universe are essentially relevant to each other's existence" since
"every entity involves an infinite array of perspectives." In theory
there is no such thing any longer as "simple location" in a
universe where nothing can be located without involving every-
thing else. By the same token there is no such thing in theory as
an isolated instant in time, which becomes a function of motion:

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sypher 171

things cannot be placed by simple here and now when all speeds
seem to be the same in relation to the speed of light. Thus

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature through-
out the centuries is the notion of "independent existence." There is no
such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms
of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the
Universe. {Essays in Science and Philosophy)

The world is a structure of variable relationships and multiple
appearances.

To see wliy perspectives in cubist painting were "inquisitorial"
and why the cubist world was a complex of shifting planes, we
need to consider what Whitehead means by an event, which is the
ultimate concrete entity in reality. A thing is an event which
focusses out of process a certain complex of relations from a
certain point of view; but every event or thing involves the rest of
the universe — all other events and all other points of view. "An
event," ^Whitehead remarks, "has to do with all that there is." It
seems to be independent, but it is not; its independence is seen
only by cutting away its relations to everything else and regard-
ing it in isolation — that is, taking a very limited view of its
actuality:

The e%'ent is what it is, by reason of the unification in itself of a
multiplicity of relationships. The general scheme of these mutual rela-
tionships is an abstraction which presupposes each event as an inde-
pendent entity, which it is not, and asks what remnant of these forma-
tive relationships is then left in the guise of external relationships. The
scheme of relationships as thus impartially expressed becomes the
scheme of a complex of events variously related as wholes to parts and
as joint parts within some one whole . . . the part evidently is constitu-
tive of the whole. Also an isolated event which has lost its status in any
complex of events is equally excluded by the very nature of an event. So
the whole is evidently constitutive of the part.

{Science and the Modern World)

Nature is therefore a structure of "emergent relation-
ships"— emerging, according to our point of view, from the sub-
strate neutral activity which must be called process because it has
no features of itself and is like a fog out of which appear the

172 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

various objects taking form for us depending on our prehension.
Forms will differ as our prehensions change. And our prehensions
change according to our situation in time and space. Things are
merely an area of tension in constantly emerging conditions. An
object or a fact is only a residue from the process continually
under way in our universe.

In such a universe where things have no simple locations the
old Newtonian values of absolute space and absolute time have
gone. The only constant left is the speed of Hght, which is so
nearly instantaneous that all spaces, times, and motions seem
levelled when measured against it. The speed of light consumes
differences in space and time until each location seems to be only
an illusion depending on a local point of view. Suppose, for
example, the eye could move with the speed of light and see,
instantaneously, all the separate still shots along the outspread
reel of a movie: these separate still shots, which appear extended
in time and space when they are projected on a screen, would
appear together, simultaneously, in a configuration that is static
— as if the reel were run off instantaneously. Then we should be
able to take in the total course of events at a glance; the sequence
of episodes on the film would not be a plot unfolding in time or
even by cause-and-effect, but a certain pattern of relationships
that was there all the while, as a "given" in the first place. But for
any eye unable to take in the total situation with the speed of
light, the various events will emerge in time and space and motion
according to the speed with which the still shots are projected. At
either end of the scale of motion, there is no motion — and the
time of the unfolding of these events is an illusion created by the
rate at which the reel is run off.

Furthermore, the total configuration would have no meaning
apart from the individual shots, each of which is an event in
which all the other events are involved. The concrete event — the
individual shot — is one aspect of a total configuration, which
becomes only an abstraction without the individual shots or
events of which it is composed. The film has no meaning apart
from its separate shots; yet the meaning of tlie separate shots
derives from their situation within the abstraction of the total
film. Permanence has no meaning apart from change; the ab-

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Syphcr 173

stract and the concrete are two facets of a total structure. In
Bradley's phrase, we must take this reality as many and as one,
and avoid contradiction. But as Whitehead also says, "the very
character of what is real is the transition of things, the passage
one to another." Our w^orld is a manifold of changing relation-
ships which expresses itself as a "community of occasions" where
every concrete actuality takes its place as an "irreducible stub-
born fact" in an emergent total design.

If we assume, therefore, that abstract ideas are the basis of
reality, we "misplace our concreteness" because all values are
rooted in "matter-of-fact events" which are real enough but do
not exist independently of other events. "The actuality is the
value." Once again Whitehead foreshadows the existentialism of
Sartre or Camus, who believe that individual man's existence is
the ultimate reality of human experience, and that each man is
inalienably free to act; yet in acting he involves himself in an
engagement or commitment with all the Others. Whenever I
choose, as I must, I choose for yoii also. Sartre says that "the
destiny of man is placed within himself" since each must choose
for himself and the value of one's life is generated by these
choices. In this sense existence precedes essence. Yet by a contra-
diction inherent in reality when a man acts he commits himself
to all other men, "deciding for the whole of mankind" and
taking on "complete and profound responsibility." As with
"Whitehead, the concrete and the abstract are only two aspects of
the same situation. The reality of human experience is always
singular; but in choosing for myself I make history by choosing
for others who impinge upon me. The existentialist says: I define
myself by my relations with others who are not me; the Other is
not the Self, but the Self needs the Other to realize the identity of
tlie Self. Existentialism, then, is a philosophic extension of
^\'hitehead's notion that the salvation of reality is the concrete-
ness of the actual event, which loses meaning, however, apart
from all events that have ever been or will ever be. The sum of
Whitehead's relativity and our existentialism is that there is no
simj)le location or independent existence in the sense of isolated
existence. The essence of reality is in the relations entered into by
each concrete event, each thing and person.

174 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

In all these ways cubism was modern since it was an analysis of
the multiple identity of objects, their emergent relationships and
engagement with other objects and events. Theo van Doesburg
wrote: "A style comes into being when, after achieving a collec-
tive consciousness of life, we are able to set up a harmonious
relationship between the inner character and the outward ap-
pearance of life."^ Or as Gertrude Stein put it, "the composition
in which we live makes the art which we see and hear." The
cubist was not only contemporary; he was prophetic. The tech-
niques of passage, transition, and transformation within and
about the object expressed the collective consciousness of modern
experience as nineteenth-century art did not. In Delaunay's Tour
Eiffel (1910) the oscillations of the modern movement, the flick-
ering consciousness of the new century with its cinematic eye and
its laminated space were apparent. The atmospheric continuum
of the impressionists was broken up into a dynamic collision of
shots taken from different angles.

Delaunay uses the simultaneous perspective which finds its
technique in the cinema and is common to all the modern arts,
being adapted after cubism to the methods of abstract and non-
objective painting and sculpture and reappearing as tachism.
Eisenstein notes that while cubism was flourishing in France,
montage was thought to be "everything" in the cinema. In his
words, montage is "a complex composed of film strips containing
photographic images" so arranged that two or more shots are
seen together, or nearly together, in a compound image. Thus
"the polyphonic structure achieves its total effect through the
composite sensation of all the pieces as a whole." Based not on
sequence but counterpoint, montage compels us to see things in
multiple perspective, telescoping time and fixing representation
in a spliced image like the flattened cubist perspective.

Eisenstein explains the montage principle by quoting from
Rene Guiller^'s article on the jazz age, which equates the cine-
matic technique with syncopation:

In both art and literature creation proceeds through several perspec-
tives, simultaneously employed. The order of the day is intricate syn-

7 Quoted in Dictionary of Abstract Painting, ed. Michel Seuphor, 1957, 43.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sypher 175

thesis — bringing together viewpoints of an object from below and
viewpoints from above.

Antique perspective presented us with geometrical concepts of ob-
jects—as they could be seen only by an ideal eye. Our perspective shows
us objects as we see them with both eyes — gropingly. We no longer
construct the visual world with an acute angle, converging on the
horizon. We open up this angle, pulling the representation against us,
upon us, toward us. . . . That is why we are not afraid to use close-ups
in films: to portray man as he sometimes seems to us, out of natural
proportions. . . .

In other words. in our new f>erspective — there is no
perspective. (Quoted in Film Sense)

Guillcrc means there is no one perspective, but synchronization or
jazz syncopation with rhythms stated in sharp profiles brought up
into the foreground.

Cezanne's still lifes had already synchronized perspectives in
this way, tipping surfaces and breaking the horizon, bending the
edges of plates and deforming curves into flat patterns. The
deformation takes on a cinematic motion in Picasso's Demoiselles
d' Avignon (1907), showing how the expressionistic distortions
invented by Gauguin, Lautrec, and Art Nouveau w^ere adapted to
the cubist analysis of space. Whether or not under the influence
of African sculpture, the Demoiselles proves that expressionism
was influenced by the analysis of perspective in early cubism; and
this analysis led to the filmlike montage passages at the right of
Picasso's painting. The fragmented bodies of the Demoiselles
flicker into multiple vision, the sliding planes of Braque's chess-
boards and tables. Cubism absorbed much of the disturbance in
fauvist painting and theorized it into a style, a representation of
modern time and space which could be treated only by means of
the compoimd image with its simultaneous changing relation-
ships. If Art Nouveau led toward fau^'ism and abstract art, cub-
ism after the Demoiselles transcribed both Art Nouveau and
fauvism into contemporary cinematic statement.

The intricate synthesis of the cinema was used with great
virtuosity in Picasso's Atelier de la Modiste in 1926, a painting
that seems to be projected on a screen in black and white in
mobile complications adapting the double outline {Wasscrspie-

176 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

gel) technique of Art Nouveau to a jazz syncopation. The paint-
ing is nearly a full illustration of the cinematic perspective
defined by Eisenstein: there is even the effect of the close-up, the
representation being pulled upon us, with flattening and distor-
tion of outlines. These involved and shifting silhouettes give a
new dimension to the graphic art of Beardsley, and they have the
expressive foreshortening of Matisse's fauvist space. They are also
closely related to the biomorphic forms of Joan Miro. The three
figures and their reflected images, the mirror (or the doorway) ,
the table, the chair are seen "with both eyes" in several perspec-
tives— a montage study of activity held "close to the wall." As in
a movie, the third dimension is reduced to an optical illusion,
and space becomes an ideogram, losing its realistic value to enter
a pictorial composition. There is, of course, an ingenious trip-
tych-like basic organization, although the extraordinary passage
of the images over the entire surface is another result of impres-
sionist experiments with the fleeting appearances of things. All
these cinematic techniques are carried over into Guernica
(1937) , which adds to the montage of the Atelier the implication
of being a cartoon, thus bringing a note of contemporary journal-
ism. Again Picasso works in black and white, perhaps suspecting
that the cartoon-strip in the press is like the movie. The syncopa-
tion is much more frantic in Guernica, convulsing and com-
pounding the jazz of the Atelier to a progressive phase.

Picasso's use of montage is increasingly learned, as it is in
James Joyce. He extracts, for example, a mythical dimension
from his montage in Girl Before a Mirror (1932) . Resorting to
the archetypal theme of Vanity — the mediaeval motif of Beauty
regarding her own image — he treats his Girl in a stained-glass
technique, adapting to boudoir uses a Belle Verriere diapered
background as basic geometry along with the leaded mediaeval
medallion. Who is this Girl? If we "read" the two parts of the
painting — the Girl and her Image — we discover that she is a
contemporary Mary who is also Isis, Aphrodite, the Adolescent
before her Mirror. There is also a Freudian image of the self, the
daylight or conscious self at the left echoed in the Id-image on
the right, the dark self. So the Virgin or Vanity or Venus here
presents herself under two more guises: Diana and Hecate, the

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sypfier 177

light and dark phases of the moon-goddess; or, perhaps, Perseph-
one, the goddess who leads a double existence during the
fertility-cycle. The dark self also suggests the savagery of the
maenad; or the figures on a totem pole; or the shrouded body, the
mummy, about to be laid in the grave; or the Fayum portraits on
Coptic sarcophagi. The shrouded figure, in turn, suggests the
veiled image of the nun who has died to the world, to vanity.
And the breasts are not only breasts but apples; so here is a
modern Eve, her womb seen in two different perspectives. Antici-
pating the X-ray technique of Tchelitchew, Picasso has analyzed
the organs of the two images by a roentgen-view; there is an
X-ray of the skeleton, the ribs, in the darker image; then the ribs
become a quite different motif in the Girl herself, who seems to
be wearing a striped bathing suit and thus becomes a bathing-
beauty — again the modern Venus. The multiple images of the
full and crescent moon, the full and profile body and face, the
skeletal and fleshly features create a montage that has psychologi-
cal, religious, and legendary meaning as well as abstract design in
line and color. The fauvist distortions have been intellectualized
into a cinematic style that synchronizes.

The principle of synchronization has been the basis of even the
mechanical devices of the new century — the synchromesh gear is
a means by which varying speeds and parts are brought into
adjustment. Gertrude Stein suspected that the cinema is the
primary art of the twentieth century because it synchronizes. If,
she says, the artist is to be contemporary he must have the
"time-sense" of his day; and the time-sense of this century is
symbolized in the American assembly-line method of production;
the automobile is conceived as a whole and assembled from its
parts by a process of prefabrication. In the nineteenth century,
with its historical and evolutionary time-sense, its plotted novels
with their cause-and-effect sequence of events, their climactic
scenes, their logical denouements, there was "the feeling of begin-
ning at one end and ending at another." Now there is a "con-
ception of the whole," the synchronization corresponding to
cinematic montage or juxtaposition of elements. The twentieth-
centun.' mobile design synchronizes changing forms into patterns
where time is a function of space; not only in Calder's mobiles,

178 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

but as early as 1912, when Boccioni's sculpture Bottle Developing
in Space opened up composite views of the solid object by means
of syncopation, which is jazz movement and the inherent tempo
of the early twentieth century.

Gertrude Stein remarks that melodramatic events have lost
their meaning for us; there are no longer "decisive" battles but,
instead, total wars during which the irreducible concrete fact is
the G.I. standing on a street corner waiting for something to
happen. Our perspective has been flattened even historically.
"And so what I am trying to make you understand," Gertrude
Stein wrote, "is that every contemporary writer has to find out
what is the inner time-sense of his contemporariness." Our time-
sense is cinematic because, as she says, "In a cinema picture no
two pictures are exactly alike each one is just that much different
from the one before." There is a writer's "building up" of an
image from recurrent statements each a little different from the
one before and after.

Whitehead has pointed out that what looks like permanence is
actually only recurrence. Therefore from our sense of movement
emerges a total pattern, the montage that brings Representation
A into counterpoint with Representation B in a design that is at
once mobile and static. Gertrude Stein remarks, "The better the
play the more static." This strange opinion is due to her contem-
porary sense of a total configuration — a modern law of fatality
that has some resemblance to a Greek sense of fatality in a drama
where man suddenly finds himself in a certain situation. The
cubist-cinematic time-sense is classic in this way, for all classic art
has a certain stillness that is a synoptic view of action.

In some of her short stories Gertrude Stein attempted to catch
the time-sense of the cinema to illustrate the notion that there is
no such thing as repetition and that recurrence is the genuine
modern movement, the recurrence of separate "shots" in the
film-— images differing from each other only minutely but giving
a sense of existence in time and space. Nothing happens in these
stories, which are static and must be read as if they presented in
"flattened" form a situation to be taken only in its total configu-
ration. "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" (1922) is this sort of experi-
ment in a cinematic mode:

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sypher 179

Helen Furr had quite a pleasant home. Mrs. Furr was quite a pleasant
woman. Mr. Furr was quite a pleasant man. Helen Furr had quite a
pleasant voice a voice quite worth cultivating. She did not mind
working. She worked to cultivate her voice. She did not find it gay
living in the same place where she had always been living. She went to a
place where some were cultivating something, voices and other things
needing cultivating. She met Georgine Skeene there who was cultivating
her voice which some thought was quite a pleasant one. Helen Furr and
Georgine Skeene lived together then. . . .

They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay
there. They were both gay there, they were regularly working there
both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there.
Georgine Skeene was gay there and she was regular, regular in being
gay, regular in not being gay, regular in being a gay one who was not
being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one.
They were both gay then there and both working there then.

The last paragraph suggests "WTiitehead's idea that events are a
form of recurrence taking place in process. Indeed this prose gets
as close as it can to the process from which events emerge.

Eisenstein intends, like Gertrude Stein, to do away with theatre,
the nineteenth-century story. Instead, he bases his cinemato-
graphic technique on the Japanese ideogram, which he sees as a
form of montage. Once again, then, we come to Pound's use of
the ideogram for "superposition" — "that is to say it is one idea
set on top of another." If Eisenstein seems to have taken some of
his notions about montage from the Japanese kabiiki, a stylized
dramatic form, Pound, we know, took his "superpository images"
from Fenollosa's studies of the ideogram. Apollinaire developed
his "calligrams" almost at the same hour while Pound, Eisenstein,
and the cubists were using the same perspective. The short poem
known as the haiku also led imagist verse toward a cinematic
technique, which appears in the synchronization and syncopation
of Eliot's Waste Land, in turn indebted to Pound's ideogrammatic
methods. In effect both Pound and Eliot began writing as
imagist poets who developed a technique much like Eisen-
stein's in the film; for Eisenstein says he wanted to "dismember"
events into a montage of various shots, and "by combining these
monstrous incongruities, we newly collect the disintegrated event
into one whole." He uses an "optical counterpoint" like tiie

180 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

counterpoint in the traditionalist verse of Eliot, who closes The
Waste Land with a syncopated passage resembling the syntax of
the film — a "graphic conflict" — or the collisions in Japanese thea-
tre, where two features or sides of an actor are sharply posed:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi /as cose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon — O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then He fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Darayata.
Shantih shantih shantih

In his essay on the cinema Malraux says that the nineteenth
century had a fanatic need of the Object in painting which went
along with the plotted narrative in literature. The new method
is, instead, decoupage, truncating the object and making a sym-
bol of it in cinema and literature. The decoupage in Eliot's
passage is really the method in Pound's Cantos, which are built
about certain motifs treated by superposition of images excerpted
from Eastern and Western history and literature. These superpo-
sitions— an extremely complex montage — are striking in Pound's
use of Chinese history in Cantos LII-LXI, and in the Chinese
ideograms embedded throughout the later stretches of his ambi-
tious work with its flattened and timeless perspective or syncopa-
tion. In Canto LXXV the mention of Buxtehude and the
"Stammbuch of Sachs in yr/luggage" is followed by a musical
score, serving for the rest of the Canto. Thus Pound and Eliot
create a multidimensional vision, and even their irony is due to a
montage-principle of placing together statements having an en-
tirely different poetic tone, as when Eliot opens the third section
of The Waste Land by complicated and most divergent refer-
ences and images, causing incongruities that are like the inten-
tional discords in our music or painting.

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Sypher 181

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers.
Silk, handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. . . .

The lines show that Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry is also
a form of montage, for, as he says, the contemporary poet works
with the poetry of the past, employing it in new relations for new
effects. He exploits traditional motifs, as Picasso did in Girl
Before a Mirror; he has only a medium to use, not a
personality — and in this he parts from the symbolists, and the
fauves. So Eliot uses Marvell's lines

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged cliariot hurrying near

in wholly unexpected relations:

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

This is what Eliot calls, in his essay on Joyce, the "mythical"
method of the novel: "manipulating a continuous parallel be-
tween contemporaneity and antiquity." It is Eliot's own means of
"making the modern world possible for art."

Joyces Ulysses illustrates the montage principle in its widest
application. Leopold Bloom is a modern Ulysses who during his
day in Dublin re-creates in "mythical" episodes the events of the
Odyssey, meeting his Telemachus in the young Stephen, con-
fronting the Sirens and Circe, descending to the underworld
when Paddy Dignam is buried, returning to that unfaithful
Penelope in the person of Molly Bloom, who, like Picasso's Girl,
is an archetypal image of the great goddess debased by Joyce's
composite vision. The portmanteau language here and in Finne-
gans Wake gives instantaneotis cross references between myth,
philology, psycholog)', and music; and it adapts itself to stream-
of-consciousness, which is likewise montage. As Leopold Bloom
walks through the cemetery after Paddy's funeral he invents a
new "eulogy in a country churchyard":

Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well,
the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep
it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrand-

182 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

father KraahraarkI Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullyglad-
aseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice hke
the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remem-
ber the face after fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some
fellow that died when I was in Wisdom Hely's.

The montage at Paddy's grave is more simultaneous, since Leo-
pold is aware, instantaneously, of the need to take off his hat, the
sickening plunge of the coffin, the chap in the mackintosh he
doesn't know, Ned Lambert's nice soft tweed, his own dressy suits
when he lived in Lombard Street, the spatter of rain. The port-
manteau texture is most complex in Finnegans' multiple layers of
language, an X-ray technique applied to syntax as well as con-
sciousness.

As early as Portrait of the Artist Joyce was doing away with
conventional perspective, opening up the narrative in Eisen-
stein's sense, pulling it against us in a new immediacy like a film
close-up, shifting its language from prose to poetry and giving an
impression of the various facets of consciousness, changing from
the texture of the diary to the sermon to dialog to meditation —
devices already exploited in that freakish eighteenth-century
novel Tristram Shandy^ one of the first experiments in montage,
dislocations in time, double exposures of sensibility.

Even the "metaphysical complexities" admired by the New
Critics are cinematic, for "ambiguity" and "irony" are said to
bring together conflicting moods, and do not arise from alterna-
tions of mood, as in comic relief, but from juxtaposition. We now
see that Shakespeare had his own montage; he did not alternate
comic and tragic (as the nineteenth-century critics used to ex-
plain) but fused his comic and tragic meanings in a truly modern
way in his intenser plays like Hamlet, where the Prince's antic
disposition makes his jesting with Ophelia and Polonius a sign of
disgust nearly unbearable, as it is in the graveyard when he asks
Horatio, "Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of
Alexander till 'a find it stopping a bunghole?" Similarly Eliot's
Prufrock by a wrenching irony says he should have been a pair of
claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas.

Montage effects are deep in the absurdist themes of our existen-
tial thought. Man's existence as we now see it is a conflict or

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Syphcr 183

collision of opposites. These contradictions in present exf)erience
are not reconcilable by logic; yet they are, as Kierkegaard said,
reconciled in me. Man is free only when he is engagetl; he is
heroic but comic; he must act rationally without having any
rational premises to stand on; he finds his self only in the face of
"the others"; his being is grounded in nothingness; his very con-
sciousness is a form of dedoublement, a splitting open of experi-
ence by an awareness that he is aware, a dissociation of the self
watching the self. One's personality dissolves into changing pro-
files, which must be seen together. Existentialism is an "ethic of
ambiguity."

Ortega y Gasset, like the cubists, supposes that the structure of
reality depends on the view we take of it: there are as many views
as there are modes of consciousness. His philosophy of perspectiv-
ism is an attempt of the contemporary mind to cope with contra-
dictions between doubt and belief, between the mind and reality
outside the mind: "Perspective is the order and form that reality
takes for him who contemplates it," Ortega writes. The grave
philosophic error is to suppose there is an absolute perspective.
That is to do in pliilosophy what renaissance perspective did in
space — to presume there is only one system. There is no absolute
space because there is no absolute perspective. To be absolute,
space would cease being real and become only an abstraction;
and thus Ortega accepts the premises from which Bradley and
Whitehead began, namely, that many differing perspectives co-ex-
ist in reality:

Perspective is one of the component parts of reality. Far from being a
disturbance of its fabric, it is its organizing element. A reality which
remained the same from whatever point of view it was observed would
be a ridiculous conception. . . .

Every life is a point of view directed upon the universe. Strictly
speaking, what one life sees, no other can. . . . The persistent error . . .
is the supposition that reality possesses in itself, independently of the
poiiu of view from which it is obser\'ed, a physiognomy of its own. . . .
But reality Iiappens to l)c, h'ke a landscape, possessed of an infinite
number of perspectives, all equally veracious and authentic. The sole
false perspective is that which claims to be the only one there is.

(The Modern Theme)

184 THE PRESSURE OF OTHER IDEAS

To confine a view of reality to a single or orthodox conception
is to empty it of meanings. To suppress the individual is to
amputate the content of reality and impoverish it for all of us.
That is why Ortega defines liberalism as the supremely civilized
virtue, the capacity to live with the enemy. Once Ortega re-
marked that no two cameras can take the same photograph of a
scene. As man changes his point of view, reality changes its
nature for him. In a world of private and changing perspectives
"the reality of the object increases as its relationships increase."^
The meanings of reality emerge within reality itself. Or, as Ozen-
fant put it, "Cubism is painting conceived as related forms which
are not determined by any reality external to those related
forms." Ortega and the cubists yield us a fuller vision of reality
than was possible in any art based on a single angle. If one of the
properties of reality is to reorganize itself from different points of
view, then the cubist dismantling of the object is one of the
amplest readings of reality in Western art.

The cubist painter never deceived himself that his images
represented the world as it "is," or that his imitation was issued
on any gold standard of reality. For the cubist, reality is at once
actual and fictitious, depending on our approach to it and our
situation within it. During his cubist phase Picasso said, "From
the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms,
but only forms which are more or less convincing lies." Our
illusion conditions the nature of reality, and reality produces our
illusions. As Bradley once remarked, without reality there is
nothing to "appear" although these "appearances" are not real-
ity. Thus cubists accepted the object; for them the world exists as
it did not for their forebears the symbolists. Cubist painting is a
scene of conciliation between the naive opposites of nineteenth-
century art — realism and symboHsm. The cubist destroyed the
solid factual world of photography, penetrating this world by
thought, making it real, as Gleizes and Metzinger said, by the
impact of the mind upon it, by studying its relation to conscious-
ness. He achieved what Cezanne hoped to achieve, something

'^ On Ortega's perspectivism I am generally indebted to Leon Livingstone's
article "Ortega y Gasset's Philosophy of Art," PMLA, LXVII, 1952, 609-655.

THE CUBIST PERSPECTIVE • Syphcr 185

solid and artificial. Kahnweiler said that the cubist object ap-
pears "simultaneously," its multidimensional existence signified
by intersections of planes on the surface of the canvas. The cubist
painted object is reconstructed into another order of being, re-
moved from the injuries of time and space, for depth is no longer
equated, as it was in renaissance vision, with the time it takes to
enter that depth. Yet the cubist does not deny the value of time,
for it is time that causes changing appearances. The time in
which cubist objects exist is a new co-ordination — inherent in
space. The cubist object has an ambiguous contemporary mode
of being, a plural identity apparent only as a passage between
thing and idea, fact and fiction. Cubism is a structure emerging
from process. It has literary as well as painted and sculptured
forms.

Ill

Views and Theories of the
Modernist Movement

GRAHAM HOUGH

Imagism and Its Consequences

PHILIP RAHV

The Cult of Experience in American Writing

STEPHEN SPENDER

The Modern as Vision of a Whole Situation

GEORG LUKACS

The Ideology of Modernism

J. HILLIS MILLER

The Poetry of Reality

Imagisiu and Its Consequences

GRAHAM HOUGH

Literature, by a fortunate dispensation, does not reflect very
accurately the convulsions of the social order. Its revolutions
sometimes precede the social ones, sometimes follow them, some-
times, it would seem, overlap them quite pointlessly. In any case
the cultural historian has no difficulty in finding the relations he
is disposed to find. He deals in large masses of material; the
phenomena are so numerous that they can surely be connected in
more ways than the ingenuity of a commentator can devise. But
as soon as we begin to look closely at a particular patch of
literature we are likely to see it developing according to its own
principles, which have their own interest, and are likely to be at
least partly fortuitous in their relations to the wars, technologies
or movements of classes that are their temporal accompaniments.
The dispensation is fortunate, for it is a happy instance of what
we mean by the freedom of the spirit.

Looked at in a sufficiently apocalyptic light, the extraordinary
outbreak of genius and novelty in the literature of the early part
of this century can be seen as the response of the imagination to
the appalling moral and political history of our age. And so no
doubt it is, and all the l)Ooks with crisis, revolt, dilemma and
hazard in their titles are right. But part of the imaginative
response has always been to occupy itself with other things than
crises and hazards. "I particularly admired your use of tlie plu-

From Graham Hough, Reflections on a Literary Revolution (Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1960) .

189

190 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

perfect subjunctive," as Claudel once remarked to Gide. The
imagination has its own procedures and its own stratagems, dif-
ferent for every art in which it expresses itself. In the visual arts
and in music the devices may be of international range. In
literature they can hardly be that, for each language has its own
procedure, never held quite in common with that of any other.
The closer we come to a particular literature the more closely its
features will be seen to depend on the state of the language at the
time, the state of previous writing in it, the prestige or the
declining fortune of special forms. In short, a literary revolution
must be a literary revolution if it is to be anything. It may
accompany or be accompanied by almost any other kind of
revolution, at almost any distance. But unless we are looking at
literature as a symptom of something else (a possibly respectable
occupation, but not that of the literary critic) what must be
attended to is the behaviour of literature itself.

The years between 1910 and the second world war saw a
revolution in the literature of the English language as momen-
tous as the Romantic one of a century before. It is an Anglo-
American development that is itself part of a whole European
affair. Beside the names of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot and Pound we
should wish to place those of Gide, Valery and Thomas Mann,
perhaps Proust and Rilke from an earlier generation. Here is our
identification parade for the modern spirit in letters. But here
too we have such a huge and various collective phenomenon that
almost anything we care to say about it would be true of some
part or other; the target is so large that any chance-aimed shot
would be sure to hit it somewhere. If we look at it en masse we
shall soon find ourselves speaking of crisis in Western values, of
dissociation of sensibility, of alienation, and disinherited minds.
Looking from this vertiginous height we shall surely be able to
make many observations that are true, the more easily since they
are not liable to the contradictions of particularity. Let us de-
scend and recover balance by observing a fixed spot — London in
the years just before 1914. It was there that the English cell of an
almost world-wide poetic conspiracy was being incubated — the
first plot against the literary establishment for over a hundred

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 191

years. Of course foreign agents were at work; there had been
correspondence with France and the Orient; a person from Idaho
and one from St. Louis were actually present.

So in the next few years "modern poetry" came into being.
Strangely, it is still modern poetry, the same article, sold under
the same name. The revolution is long past. Of the central
re\olutionary quartet — Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis
— "the men of 1914," as Lewis liked to call them (it is charac-
teristic that the turn of phrase should be borrowed from
European revolutionary politics) two are dead, one legally irre-
sponsible, and the fourth is happily still with us, the greatest
living man of letters.* A generation has had to pass to bring
about this change of aspect. But nothing has happened to dispute
with their productions the title of modern letters. No avant-garde
has advanced any farther. There is no avant-garde. When I was a
boy "modern poetry" was to be distinguished from poetry simple.
Poetry was inherited from parents and learnt at school; it was the
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "The Solitary Reaper." Modern
poetry was read in a different context; neither one's parents nor
anyone at school knew anything about it. Modern poetry is now
academically respectable. It is taught in college courses, and the
exposition of it gives employment to many worthy persons. But it
is still almost as distinct from "poetry" as ever. Distinct in the
general imagination, and not only in that; even among those who
seriously profess the arts there is a feeling of the discontinuity
between the literature of our century and that of any previous
one. The singularity of modern poetry, for example, is one of the
argimients used by C. S. Lewis to support liis hypothesis of a great
rift in our culture just before the present age.

Tliis consciousness of modernity is a distinctively modem
thing; it is largely the work of the revolutionary generation itself.
Pound's essays were called Make It Nexu. In the stream of advice
and exhortation he offered to young writers there is a continual
insistence on novelty and on being up-to-date. "No good poetrv is
ever written in a manner twenty years old." "The scientist does

• [T. S. Eliot died in 1965.]

192 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has
discovered something."^ In both his and Eliot's criticism we are
always hearing about "what remains to be done," "what is to be
done next." A curious instance of this acute period-consciousness
occurs quite recently, in Mr. Eliot's introduction to Pound's
Literary Essays. He cites as one of the tricks of malevolent crit-
ics— "to quote what a writer said twenty or thirty years ago as if
it was something he had said yesterday."^ It is hard to imagine
Johnson or Coleridge or Arnold finding it "malevolent" to quote
a twenty-year-old dictum without the appropriate date. Lest I be
suspected of malevolence may I add that the date of this remark
is 1954, a date far removed from the dust of revolutionary con-
flict. Plainly the instigators of the late poetic innovation were
badly frightened by a Zeitgeist, and the effects have been lasting.
The new poetry was new in the twenties, and it is still new, in
the sense that we have nothing newer. As early as 1935 we find Sir
Herbert Read, in an essay called Form in Modern Poetry, com-
plaining of backsliding, of a decline in revolutionary and experi-
mental ardour. It might be that the new tradition had estab-
lished itself, that we now have a body of followers working in an
accepted mode. But this is not true, or true only in a very
restricted area. The revolution of 1914 was quite as momentous
as the Romantic one of over a century before, but it was different.
The Romantic change was not at all antipathetic to ancient and
deep-rooted tendencies. In many ways it was a return to them;
the old textbook term is after all the Romantic Revival. The
result is that its habits of feeling and expression are a model for
the next hundred years. The nineteenth-century shelves are
stuffed with Wordsworthian poems, Keatsian poems and Byronic
poems. The modern revolution has had a different fate. In one
direction, in the establishment of a modern colloquial poetic
idiom, the younger writers have certainly learnt the lesson of
their elder contemporaries. All that purgation of poetic diction
that has been so carefully and beautifully worked out, both in
theory and in practice, by Mr. Eliot has become an almost abso-

''^ Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, 1954) , pp. 6, 11.
2 Ibid., p. xi.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 193

lute critical rule. The rule has been formulated, with somctliing
less than complete approval, in a recent essay by John Crowe
Ransom: "That is simply a bad poem whose unfashionable or
dated diction the plain reader spots at the first reading." But
other parts of the newly-conquered territory are being little culti-
vated. A belated critical posse in full jungle kit still hacks its way
through these no longer very forbidding areas, in the pages of the
semi-academic reviews; and that is about all. The influence of the
generation of 1914 was always of a peculiar kind. On taste, ideas
and feelings about literature it was dynamic, radical, and in the
end largely triumphant. A diluted version of Mr. Eliot's critical
doctrine (and that includes, at one remove, a great deal of the
doctrines of Hulme, Pound and Lewis) is by now the possession
of undergraduates and schoolboys. Mr. Eliot's version of English
literary history is as much an orthodoxy as Matthew Arnold's was
a generation before. Yet the direct effect on literary practice has
been strangely small. There is no other poem of any significance
remotely like The Waste Land; the metrics and the ordonnance
of Pound's Propertiiis have had no successors whatever; no one
has ever seriously attempted to emulate Joyce's most characteris-
tic experiments; and the extraordinary bundle of detestations
that go to make up Wyndham Lewis are so arbitrary that they are
a monimient to nothing but himself.

A rich and vigorous body of literature has established itself,
but has not established a workable tradition. A possibility (it has
been faintly entertained by Mr. Blackmur) ^ is that it is not
through this self-consciously "modern" literature that the main
road runs; that these writers are not the transmitters of the most
vigorous poetic life of our time. Perhaps the authentic torch has
been borne by writers of a more traditional cast — shall we say by
Robert Frost, Robert Graves and E. M. Forster? But this is not
really a possibility. It is not the admirable workers in traditional
modes who have given the twentieth century its peculiar kind of
vitality. The suggestion is entertained only to be dismissed. As I
show it to the door I become aware of one of its relatives faintly
demanding admittance. Deep in the folk-memory of English liter-

8R. p. Blackmur. Anni Mirabiles, 1921-25 (^Vashington, 1956), p. 41.

194 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

ary critics is the echo of a time when it was possible to speak of
something called "the English spirit." Few, in a state of full
vigilance, would allow this faded trope to escape their lips now.
But I intend to employ it, not meaning whatever Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch would have meant by it, but meaning something
like the spirit of the language, the whole drift and pressure given
by the whole body of poetry written in English. The suggestion
that knocks at the door is that specifically "modern" poetry is
hostile to this spirit and has tried to move against that pressure.
A few very powerful talents succeeded in establishing idiosyn-
cratic positions. No one since has been powerful enough to take
up the same stance or sufficiently supple and adaptable to go back
and take up the old path where it left o£E. This is at least
plausible as far as English is concerned, though in America it
may be less so. It need not surprise us when we consider that two
of the "men of 1914" were Americans, one an Irishman, and the
origins of the other shrouded in mystery.

The suggestion may be allowed to stand in the doorway, for we
are not yet in a position to examine its credentials. We have not
yet asked what the nature of the twentieth-century revolution is,
so we cannot yet know how it is related to the English poetic
tradition. It is notable that whatever was happening in those
years has not yet acquired a name. Mr. Blackmur has leferred to
the whole European movement, with which the English one
belongs, as Expressionism. I should not be very happy with this
as far as our domestic affair is concerned. Expressionism in art
has Germanic connotations, and the literature we are considering
is Anglo-American profoundly influenced by France. And Expres-
sionism is a name for a kind of critical doctrine, a doctrine of
personality and self-expression, that is precisely the one not held
by our twentieth century school. I should like to have a name; it
is a nuisance not to have one for something one is always discuss-
ing; but I should prefer to look nearer home and hope to fare
better.

If we look into the archives of the period of revolutionary
preparation, the name that is going about is Imagism. A "school
of images" is referred to. Ezra Pound announces that as for the
future the "Imagistes" have that in their keeping. This was in a

IMACISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 195

note to the complete poetical works of T. E. Hulme (five
poems) , published at the end of Ripostes in 1912. Several forms
of an Imagist manifesto exist; and Ezra Pound's "A few don'ts by
an Imagist" appeared in Poetry in 1913. And there are several
Imagist anthologies, the first under the auspices of Ezra Pound,
others under those of Amy Lowell. In the narrow sense, the name
refers to a movement whose history was brief, broken and queru-
lous, whose poetic results were minuscule. The refinement of our
numbers was to be accomplished by the introduction of the
haiku, the Japanese poem of seventeen syllables. The tongue that
Milton spake is not easily compressed into seventeen-syllable
units; and even in its longer flights Imagism remains a small
affair. But as a centre and an influence it is not small. It is the
hard irreducible core of a whole cluster of poetic ideas that
extend far beyond Imagism as a movement. Imagist ideas are at
the centre of the characteristic poetic procedures of our time, and
there is a case for giving the word a wider extension.

Imagism sounds like a by-blow from Symbolism. Image and
symbol — we have been pestered by both words long enough;
often we do not distinguish between them. If we were talking
about continental Europe instead of the Anglo-American literary
world there woidd be no need to make much play with Imagism.
Symbolism is already there, well established and more or less
understood. There have been several attempts to see the new
poetry in English simply as a part of this earlier European
movement. Edmund \\'ilson sees it in this way, as a large exten-
sion of Symbolism, in Axel's Castle. But this justly famous book
was written in the middle of the development that it describes,
and has been overtaken by the event. Its introductory chapter on
Symbolism seems thin today, though it was nourishing at the
time. Sir Afaurice Bowra, largelv concerned with Europe, has
written of modern literature as the heritage of Symbolism. More
recently, Frank Kermode, in a brief, brilliant, unhistorical essay,
Romantic Ima^r, has conflated Symbolism and Imagism, and
even seen both of them as a continuation of the Romantic road.
However, there is room for a distinction here, and not only room,
but a real need for it.

Though Symbolism is in a sense a late development of Roman-

196 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

tic thought it takes a decisively new turn. The great Romantic
writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats) all see literature as
deeply rooted in experience. The confessional poem, the truth
that has been "proved upon our pulses," the attitude of those "to
whom the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them
rest" — these are its characteristic expressions. Symbolism moves
in the direction of an autonomous art, severed from life and
experience by an impassable gulf. The Symbolists share with the
Romantics the reliance on the epiphany, the moment of revela-
tion; but they differ sharply about its status in nature and its
relation to art. Wordsworth's spiritual life is founded on such
moments of illumination, and it is the business of his poetry both
to describe them and to relate them to the whole experience of a
long ordered lifetime. For the Symbolist poet there is no question
of describing an experience; the moment of illumination only
occurs in its embodiment in some particular artistic form. There
is no question of relating it to the experience of a lifetime, for it
is unique, it exists in the poem alone. Rimbaud's alchimie du
verhe is not a mere phrase, for the poet not only transmits, he
creates the revelations that make up his world.

Symbolism therefore has strong transcendental overtones. The
poet is a magus, calling reality into existence. Or he is the sole
transmitter of a mysterious system of correspondences that actu-
ally pervades the universe, but only becomes apparent in art. Or
he is capable of evoking from the Anima Mundi symbols of the
profoundest import, but strictly unexpoundable, for their con-
tent is inseparable from the form of their first expression. At
times we seem to be in something like the medieval symbolic
universe. But that symbolism has a key, a key given once and for
all in revelation. Since the means of grace and some means of
instruction are available to all, it was in a sense a joy in widest
commonalty spread; while the Symbolist universe reveals itself
only in glimpses, only in art, and only to initiates.

Now while modern literature has been afflicted with a persist-
ent hangover from the rich Symbolist symposium, the magical
and transcendental pretensions of Symbolism have almost en-
tirely disappeared. It is only in the work of the early Yeats that
we can find the Symbolist doctrine in full bloom. Even here it is

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 197

considerably contaminated with a non-literary occultism —
thcosophy, spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky and the order of the
Golden Dawn. It is doubtful whether we can properly speak of a
Symbolist movement in English poetry, in a historical sense. Of
course, if we like to take Symbolism as a universal, recurrent
phenomenon we can rope in such diverse figures as Blake and
Herman Melville, and no doubt a dozen others, and make some
use of the concept. I am speaking of Symbolism as a more or less
dateable historical development, as the term is used in French
literature. This development several times looks as though it is
going to occur in English, but it never comes to much, though
relations with the French movement were frequent and beguil-
ing. There was a foreshadowing of French Symbolism in the
Pre-Raphaelitcs; there were many importations of Symbolist doc-
trine in the nineties; but it is not until the years before the first
world war that French doctrines and practice showed signs of
giving rise to a new poetry in England.

The history is complicated, and it has still only partly been
written. There are probably many reasons that Symbolism took
such feeble roots in England. ^Ve had a little of it of our own
already; English poetry lacks a Baudelaire to stand as eminence
grise behind the movement; above all. Symbolist influence on
sensibility was not paralleled by a close study of Symbolist forms.
The fin-de-siecle, fertile in sentiments and attitudes that are
important for modern literature, was ciuiously powerless to find
forms to match them; and it was not until the years around 1910
that a radically new poetry, and that implies a new poetic form,
really logins to appear in English. In those years, when the group
that were later to call themselves Imagists were laying their plans,
the transcendental pretensions of Symbolism were no longer easy
to entertain. The career of Mallarmc^ had ended in silence and
something like despair. Un coup de dcs jamais n'abnlira le ha-
sard. Rimbaud's defection to slave-trading in Africa was itself a
symbol of the inefficacy of magical Symbolism: and the innocuous
chastities of Japanese poetry in dilute translation were focussing
attention on the surface properties rather than on the mystic
attributes of the symbol.

Certain aspects of Symbolist doctrine persist, but the nature of

198 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

the attention is changed. Revelation becomes technique, incanta-
tion becomes a code of prohibitions. What emerges is a new
phenomenon, to which we rightly give a new name — Imagism.
Not to deal in definition at this stage, and in the hope that things
will become clearer as we go on, we can describe it roughly as
Symbolism without the magic. The symbol, naked and unex-
plained, trailing no clouds of glory, becomes the image.

Let us clip a few flowers from the imagist's garden of maxims:

An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time.

Go in fear of abstractions.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that
if a man uses "symbols" he must so use them that their symbolic
function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the
passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such,
to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.^

Unexceptionable sentiments, according to the canons of much
modern poetics; but compare them with some pure symbolist
pronouncements:

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible
essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame.^

Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de I'oubli ou ma voix rel6gue aucun contour,
en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se
l^ve, id^e meme et suave, I'absente de tous bouquets.^

These alone will serve to illustrate the way the sumbol has
become opaque in transforming itself into the image. No trans-
parent envelopes, or mysterious absences, or invisible essences.
Direct treatment of the thing, we are told, is the great object. T.
E. Hulme's early criticism hammers away at accurate description,
hardness, clarity. And we know what came of it:

4 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, pp. 5, 9.

5 W. B. Yeats, Essays (London, 1924) , p. 142.

6 St^phane Mallarme, OLuvres Completes (Pleiade, Paris, 1945) , p. 368.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • HoUgll 199

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bought

Those dozens of little poems in Pound's Ripostes and later;
clear, limited, without resonance, without transparency. "The
natural object is always the adequate symbol" — but of what? Of
nothing but itself. A world composed of atomic notations, each
image separate from all the others. They neither lead into each
other nor to apprehension on any other level. There is in all
Pound's practice and theory at this time a positivism, a defiant
insistence on the surface of things, and an insistence that the
surface of things is all.

Pound writes of Laurent Tailhade:

I think this sort of clear presentation is of the noblest tradition of our
craft. It is surely the scourge of fools. It is what may be called the "prose
tradition" of poetry, and by this I mean that it is a practice of speech
common to good prose and good verse alike. ... It means constatation
of fact. It presents. It does not comment. . . . It is not a criticism of life.
I mean it does not deal in opinion. It washes its hands of theories. It
does not attempt to justify anybody's ways to anybody or anything else.^

But even Pound could not consistently maintain that the clear
presentation of the object was the sole aim of poetry. Though he
often talks in T. E. Hulme's terms, as though presentational
accuracy was an end in itself, in other places the natural object is
seen as the equivalent of an emotion. Poetry is the art of making
equations for emotions. But it is an equation of which one side
only is to be presented. Imagist convention forbids that most
ancient recipe for a poem — the poem in which first a natural
object is presented, and then some reflection on human experi-
ence that arises from it, or is in some way parallel to it. As a
student of Provencal Pound must have been familiar with the
rcvcrdie and its long history — the spring song, wiiose first stan/a
presents "the soote scsoini that bud and bloom forth brings."
whose later ones present the happy love that resembles it, or the

7 Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Direc-
tions.

s"The Approach to Paris." TJie New Age, Oct. 2. 1913.

200 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

unhappy love that contrasts with it. By his subsequent Hghts it is
only possible for the poet to say "It is Spring" — and, unspoken,
on no account to be uttered, only to be understood — "if you care
to make any deductions from this to my state of mind, you may."
But since the natural object is always the adequate symbol the
poem will not make itself responsible for any of these deductions.

I leaned against a sturdy oak,
I thought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bent and syne it broke,
Sae did my true love lichtly me.

This is too explicit for true Imagist principles. The proper
procedure is to be seen in Pound's "Fan-Piece, for her Imperial
Lord":

O fan of white silk,

clear as the frost on the grass-blade.
You also are laid aside.^

So far, merely a change of rhetorical convention; a laconic
novelty of procedure that has its own charm. We know well
enough what the Imagists are tired of. They are tired of Arnold's
"Dover Beach"; the extended picture of the moonlight, the beach
and the tide; and then the inevitable, the too-long expected "The
sea of faith was once too at the full . . ."; the melancholy
nineteenth-century automatism by which no natural object can
appear without trailing its inglorious little cloud of moralising
behind it. They were right to be tired. One aspect of the history
of poetry is an intermittent warfare against automatisms, cliches
of feeling and expression. Only an intermittent warfare, for there
are long periods when poetry can rest, contented, healthy and
active, within a set of received conventions. But these periods
come to an end. This was a time when the battlefront had again
become particularly active.

From this point of view Imagism was good tactics, and the
skirmish was conducted with vigour and address. But tactics are
not principles, and there is always danger when they are erected

9 Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Direc-
tions.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hougfl 201

into principles. Pound was particularly liable to make this trans-
formation. His insistence on procedure and technique is the
beginning of this. "A few don'ts"; as though the writing of poetry
is the adroit employment of a series of gimmicks; the continual
invocation of "the expert"; the deference (in writing that shows
little deference) to the progress of the natural sciences:

\Vhat the expert is tired of to-day the pul^lic will be tired of
to-morrow.

It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it docs
rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until
he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been
discovered already. He goes from that point onward.

The best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would be a
twelve-volume anthology in which each poem was chosen . . . because it
contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal
expression. ^°

When Imagist doctrine was reinforced by Pound's study (if it
can be called study) of Chinese, and his understanding (which
was a misunderstanding) of the natme of Chinese ideogram, the
gimmicks were well on the way to becoming a principle. When
Pound took over Fenollosa's manuscripts he also took over the
idea that the originally pictographic nature of the Chinese writ-
ten character was still a subsistcnt force, that the reader actually
saw the image in the complex ideogram. All scholars now agree
that this is mistaken; even if they did not, it is on the face of it
impossible; as impossible as to suppose that the reader of English
resuscitates every dead metaphor as he goes along, thinks of
weighing when he ponders, or of the stars when he considers.
Even though it was untrue, this way of thinking might have
given rise, when applied to an Indo-European language, to some
sort of doctrine of radical metaphor — that poetry proceeds by
distilling the quintessence of language. This, we have been told,
is one of the keys to Mallarm^. But Pound shows no interest in
this sort of speculation. His supposed nugget of wisdom from the
East is used to provide a cultural foundation for the doctrine of

^ Literm-y F.saays of Ezra Pound, pp. '). 6, 17.

202 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

the image. Chinese uses picture-writing and so ought we. A strain
of crotchety hostiHty to the traditions of Western thinking begins
to appear. An obscure ideological war is invented in which
Confucius knocks out Aristotle and abstraction and discursive
thought are left in ruins. Poetry proceeds by the juxtaposition of
ideograms, and new ideogram is old image writ large. The unit of
poetry is the pictograph, the record of a significant glimpse.

From then on the doctrine burgeons, flourishes, spreads its
roots and sends up suckers in every direction. (Many of us have
been suckers for it at one time or another.) It connects itself eas-
ily with other speculations and manoeuvres which start from a dif-
ferent point but begin to converge with Imagism. Joyce's "epiph-
any," the moment in which the essential nature of an object
reveals itself, is presented with a good deal of Thomistic top-
dressing; but it is really a survival from magical Symbolism, and
our sense of this is confirmed by the fin-de-siecle prose in which
the earlier Joycean epiphanies are often enshrined. The moment
of revelation need not be a revelation of beauty or transcendence.
The customs-house clock, Stephen tells Cranly, might suddenly
be epiphanised — manifest itself in its essence." Or more fre-
quently, a quotidian object suddenly reveals not only its own
nature, but that of the forces that went to make it, or of the
whole circumambient situation: "one of those brown brick
houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis." This
can become something like a form of Imagist doctrine; more
sophisticated, without the pinched prohibitoi7 air that hangs
round Imagism. It produces similar technical results — the instan-
taneous glimpse of a phenomenal object as the basic symbolic
counter. Portrait of the Artist is built out of a succession of such
instants. Compared with the startling technical innovations of
Joyce's later work its method is unsurprising. It is nevertheless
one of the earliest examples of a narrative, a development, pre-
sented by a series of unlinked scenes or shots.

One of the most celebrated offshoots of the Imagist idea is Mr,
Eliot's Objective Correlative. We are all heartily sick of the
phrase, even Mr. Eliot, so I will only recall briefly its original

11 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York, 1955) , p. 210.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 20S

formulation. "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events wliich shall be the formula
of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emo-
tion is immediately evoked."^' Objections have been made to the
"expressionist" character of this passage — the suggestion that the
business of the poet is to find external manifestations for pre-
viously determinate emotions. I wish to point to something
rather different — the suggestion that the whole natural world
offers to the poet a collection of bric-^-brac from which he takes
selections to represent emotional states. "Direct presentation of
the thing" — the image so produced exists to be one side of an
equation tlie other side of which is an emotion. Plainly an
eccentric view of the poet's procedure. We can hardly suppose
that either the author of the Iliad or the author of

Christ, that my love was in my arms
And I in my bed again

were collecting objets trouves in this way. Gerard Manley Hop-
kins wrote "The Wreck of the Deutschland" because he was
moved by the account of a shipwreck in which five nuns were
drowned; he did not go round looking for a suitable disaster to
match an emotion that he already had. This is possibly a position
that Mr. Eliot, who wrote of it a long time ago, would not wish to
maintain in its full rigour. But we must in some sense hold him
to it, for it has consequences in other parts of his thinking about
poetry. There is the idea that coherence and validity of thought
have nothing to do with poetic worth; Dante made great poetry
out of a strong and beautiful philosophy, Shakespeare out of a
muddled one, but this does not affect their merit as poets. There
is the related idea that poets do not "think," they take over the
thought of their time. This would make the poet's activity some-
thing like painting flowers on china plates that he had bought
ready-made from the factory; and I am sure that this is not what
Mr. Eliot means; but it is what he appears to be saying. There is

""Hamlet and His Problems," The Sacred Wood (London, 1920), p. 100.

204 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

the idea that meaning is a kind of sop thrown to the intellect,
like the bit of meat the burglar keeps to give to the dog, while the
"poetry" does its work.^^ These are all pervasive ideas in modern,
post-symbolist poetic strategy, and they are all related to the root
idea that the substance of poetry is the image and its resonances.
The doctrine has its corollary when we come to consider the
major structure of poetry; one that is startlingly at variance with
the classical view. If poetry is a matching up of images with
emotions its underlying framework consists of emotions. Its order
is therefore an order of emotions. In classical poetic theory (by
classical I mean here one that prevailed generally from the
Greeks till some time in the nineteenth century) the order of
poetry was an order of events or thoughts. Events are capable of
causal connection, thoughts of logical connection; the one is the
structure of narrative or dramatic poetry, the other of philo-
sophic or reflective poetry. Only in the briefest lyric can we find
an order that is simply that of emotions; and classical poetic
theory was not deduced from brief lyrics. One does not insist on
an Aristotelian rigour of construction; but even in the looser
forms the sense of a syntax of events or the syntax of thoughts is
preserved; and criticism insisted on it. Emotions are not capable
of such a syntax. A pattern can be made of them, by simple
juxtaposition, but it will hardly be an integrated pattern, unless
there runs through it the thread of narrative or logic. Imagist
poetry has therefore been obliged to invoke another kind of logic,
a logic of emotions that works in its own way, and is supposed to
be especially suitable for poetry. The most compendious expres-
sion of this notion is to be found in Mr. Eliot's introduction to
St. John Perse's Anabase:

. . . any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppres-
sion of 'links in the chain,' of explanatory and connecting matter, and
not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of
such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides
and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civihsation.
The reader has to allow the images to faU into his memory successively

13 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933)
p. 151.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hougfl 205

without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that,
at the end, a total etiect is produced.

Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic
about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of
concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difTicult to
distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and
even those who are capable of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon
first impressions. I was not convinced of Mr. Parse's imaginative order
until I had read the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an
arrangement of imagery requires just as much 'fundamental brainwork'
as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader
of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an
important decision on a complicated case.^"*

This document is worth examining in some detail. The occa-
sion is particular, but the application is general. What is outlined
is the method of a school. Three layers are to be discerned in this
ingenious piece of discourse. The first is simply descriptive. We
are told of a "sequence of images," of images that fall into the
memory successively with no question of reasonableness, of result-
ant obscurity. This is a general description of Imagist technique;
it is the procedure of Anabase; it is also the procedure of The
Waste Land and the Cantos. The second layer, interwoven with
the first, biu we are attempting to sejiarate it, is one of justifica-
tion. Two justifications of this method are in fact offered. They
are not compatible with each other. The first is that any appear-
ance of obscurity is merely due to the suppression of connecting
matter: the logic of the poem is like the logic of any other kind of
discourse, but it is presented in a concentrated and elliptical
form. The second justification, however, is that the poem is
constructed according to a "logic of the imagination" which is
different from ordinary logic. It recjuires as much effort as the
construction of an argument, but it is evidently of a different
kind. And besides these layers, of description and justification,

" From Anabase by St. John Pcrsc, translated h\ T. S. Eliot, copyriRht lO.'JS.
1049, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.. and reprinted with their
permission. Throughout, the quotations from T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems
^copvritjht 19,%, hv Harcourt, Br.nce and Company. Inc.) are used hy
permission of the publishers.

206 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

there is a third layer of knock-me-down argumentum ad homi-
nem, designed to cause alarm and despondency in the breasts of
persons who have not yet accepted the first two. Such persons do
not appreciate poetry, cannot distinguish between order and
chaos, and, in their benighted triviality, have probably never
thought of assimilating the action of a reader of poetry to that of
a barrister getting up a brief.

There is much in this sort of argument that arouses suspicion.
The device of dismissing one's opponents as unqualified instead
of convincing them that they are wrong is one that works only
with the very unsophisticated or the very easily scared. It has
been greatly overworked by the founding fathers of modern
poetics. Only poets can judge poetry; this is a matter for the
expert; certificates of culture countersigned by Confucius, Lance-
lot Andrews and R^my de Gourmont to be produced on admis-
sion— but these minatory gestures have dwindled into a curious
historic ritual; and they have been discussed elsewhere. A more
serious question is whether the Imagist procedure here described
is an ordinary mode of discourse telescoped and abbreviated, or
whether some special "logic of the imagination" is involved.

Let us look at the organisation of The Waste Land. In detail,
and in some places, the first explanation works well enough. The
twenty opening lines of the poem can be seen as an elliptical
narrative, with fragments of reflection and direct speech. ("April
is the cruellest month. . . . [we] went on in sunlight, into the
Hofgarten, . . . And when we were children, staying at the
arch-duke's.") In principle it could be expanded, the links could
be supplied; what we have is the natural result of the attempt at
pruning and concentrating nineteenth-century poetic method.
The sense of an existing but not definitely stated plot is still
there. It will require a great deal more latitude to apply this
argument to the major structure of the poem. We know now that
it was of considerably greater length, and attained its present
proportions under the direction of Ezra Pound. We have always
known that "Death by Water," the Phlebas the Phoenician sec-
tion, was not originally part of The Waste Land, since it is a
translation from the French of the last section of an earlier poem
"Dans le Restaurant." Its insertion was again due to Pound. We

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • HOUgll 207

know loo that "Gerontion" was at one time to be included but
was in the end left out to become a separate poem.^'' If this is the
logic of the imagination it is evidently patient of a good deal of
outside influence. There is a curious fortuitousness about it. And
mere ellipsis, the omission of connecting links, will not serve as
an explanation of the changes of speaker, shifts in time, scene
and mode of address, the liberation of the image from all conti-
nuity that give the poem its peculiarly coruscating surface. In the
poem as a whole the sense of an unspoken underlying plot has
completely disappeared.

I cannot think that the problems raised by the structure of The
Waste Land have been faced. They have been a party matter, a
matter for polemic or defence; they have been a shibboleth; to
accept this sort of technique was at one time a sort of touchstone
for participation in modern poetry. Above all, the methodologi-
cal anfractuosities of the piece have fulfilled one of the main
economic functions of poetry in this century — they have given
employment to a host of scholiasts. But they have hardly been a
matter for disinterested enquiry. While the poem was still capa-
ble of causing bewilderment it established itself. The brilliance
of the imagery, the auditory and incantatory grandeur of its best
passages, stole into the consciousness and became a part of our
poetical pro|)erty; it became ungrateful, almost indecent to ask of
what sort of continuum these fragments were a part. And we
became satisfied with a level of coherence that we should never
have found sufficient in any earlier poem. The unity of emotional
effect withdrew attention from the logical discontinuity, the ex-
traordinary rhetorical diversity. A poem about frustration, arid-
ity, fear and the perversions of love — these signs were to be read
by anyone. They were read, and in combination with the modern
urban imagery they instigated the critics who said that the poem
expressed "the disillusionment of a generation." For this, some
years later, they were sternly reproved by the author; but they
were no doubt expressing, in their way, the only sense they had of

"See Letters of Ezra Pound (New York. 1950), pp. 169-172. It is also
noteworthy that in John Rodker's circular for Bel Esprit, a proposed literary
fund. The Waste Land is referred to as "a series of poems." (Letters of Ezra
Pound, p. 175) .

208 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

a unity of purpose in the poem. Meanwhile, prompted by the
notes, many persons who had stopped reading The Golden
Bough looked at it again, and those who had never heard of Miss
Jessie Weston read From Ritual to Romance. None of them were
bold enough to say in public that these studies did little to
advance their understanding. Certainly they directed attention to
recurring symbolism of death and rebirth, drought and rain. But
this was the kind of pattern that in earlier poetry had been only
secondary to structure of another kind; it could not be seen as
constituting a structure in itself. So we turned to more peripheral
matters. We looked up the quotations from Dante and Baude-
laire, and our apprehension of isolated lines increased in depth.
Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, whose water-dripping song is justly
celebrated, doubtless afforded satisfaction to many. And the vol-
ume of exegesis increased, the explanations that did not explain,
the links that connected nothing to nothing. And by the time
that the movement of modern poetry had gone far enough for it
to be a possible object of contemplation and enquiry, one shrank
from asking the real questions, lest what was after all one of the
great poetic experiences of our time should be still further buried
beneath yet another load of waste paper.

But the questions remain — above all the question of what
really makes the poem a totality, if it is one at all. If we can
imagine some ideal critic, acquainted with the poetical tradition
of Europe, yet innocent of the spirit of our age, and if we can
imagine ourselves persuading him to leave the question of total
structure in abeyance, "to allow the images to fall into his mem-
ory successively without questioning the reasonableness of
each" — he would still be struck by the extraordinary rhetorical
incongruities. He would find within its four hundred lines pas-
sages that are narrative, others that are dramatic, descriptive,
lyric, hallucinatory and allusive. The theory of genres was never
watertight or exhaustive, but never before was there a poem of
this length, or perhaps of any other length, in which the modes
were so mixed. Nor is the rhetorical level any more constant than
the rhetorical mode. A modern and highly individual elegiac
intensity, pastiche Renaissance grandeur, sharp antithetical social
comment in the Augustan manner, the low mimetic of public

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 209

house conversation — all these and probably several other styles
are found side by side. The relation of these is sometimes ob-
vious; it is one of calculated contrast. But it is a question how
hard such contrasts of texture can be worked in a relatively short
poem without disastrous damage to the unity of surface. It is not
so much in the obvious collisions of the high and the low styles
that this is felt. That kind of calculated shock action is a limited
effect, and the intention of producing the shock itself provides a
medium between the two elements. It is the use of language in
different and imrelated fashions in different parts of the poem
tliat is disruptive. There is the lovely, romantically evocative
manner of the hyacinth girl passage:

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

These lines live imhappily in the same poem with:

Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreprovcd, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

The uneasiness does not arise from incompatibility of tone and
feeling, but because the two passages are using language in ut-
terly different ways; the first to evoke, by overtones and connota-
tions, tlie trembling ghost of an intense emotion that is never
located or defined; the second to define a situation by precise
denotation and intelligent analysis. It is as though a painter were
to employ a pointilliste technique in one part of a picture, and
the glazes of the high renaissance in another.

When we come to the content of the separate passages the
situation is disturbing in another way. It has become fashionable
to refer to these contents as "themes," suggesting a vaguely musi-
cal analog)'; and suggesting, too, I suppose, that the "themes" of a

210 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

poem are related to each other only as the themes of a musical
composition are. But themes in a poem are made of words, and
words have meanings; our attention is never arrested at the
verbal surface; it proceeds to what the words denote. They de-
note objects, persons and ideas; and it is very difficult altogether
to dispel the notion that the objects, persons and ideas in a single
poem should be in some intelligible relation to one another. A
very little inspection of the commentaries, or questioning of
readers of the poem, will show that this is not the case with The
Waste Land; there is no certainty either about what is denoted,
or how it is related to other denotations. It is sometimes sug-
gested, for example, that the hyacinth girl is or might be the same
as the lady who stayed with her cousin the archduke a few lines
earlier. To me it has always been obvious that these fragmentary
glimpses showed us, and were designed to show us, two different
kinds of women and two different kinds of hviman relationship. I
suppose that those who think otherwise have taken at least as
much trouble and are no greater fools than I. And I see no means
by which the matter could be decided.

We have already remarked that Phlebas the Phoenician had a
prior existence in another context and was included by chance or
outside suggestion. True, a place is rather arbitrarily prepared
for him; Madame Sosostris the clairvoyant, who is supposed to be
using a Tarot pack, produces the card of the drowned Phoenician
sailor — which is not a member of the Tarot pack — in order to
suggest in advance that Phlebas has some part in the structure of
the poem. But what his part is remains quite uncertain. Here the
commentators for the most part insist on resolutely marking
time, for fear of committing themselves to a false step; and we are
even bidden to observe that the "currents" which pick the
drowned Phlebas's bones have a forerunner in the "currants" in
the pocket of Mr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant. Surely the last
refuge of baffled imbecility.

It has been said that the poem adopts a "stream of conscious-
ness" technique;^'' and this sounds reassuring without committing
us to anything very much. But it is precisely what the poem does

isGrover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956) , p. 58.

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hough 211

not do. The advantage of tlie "stream of consciousness" tech-
nique is that it allows a flood of images, more or less emancipated
from narrative or logical continuity, while still preserving a
psychological continuity — the continuity of inhering in a single
consciousness. The Waste Land conspicuously foregoes this kind
of unifying principle. One desperate expedient has been to fasten
on Mr. Eliot's note to line 218: "Tiresias, although a mere
spectator and not indeed a 'character,' is yet the most important
personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. . . . \Vhat Tiresias
sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." In the light of this it
can be suggested that the whole poem is Tiresias's "stream of
consciousness."^^ This is probably to give the note more weight
than it can bear, and in any case, it does little to the purpose.
"Who was Tiresias? A man who had also been a woman, who lived
forever and could foretell the future. That is to say, not a single
human consciousness, but a mythological catch-all, and as a uni-
fying factor of no effect whatever.

I should like to commit myself to the view that for a poem to
exist as a unity more than merely bibliographical, we need the
sense of one voice speaking, as in lyric or elegiac verse; or of
several voices intelligibly related to each other, as in narrative
with dialogue or drama; that what these voices say needs a
principle of connection no different from that which would be
acceptable in any other kind of discourse; that the collocation of
images is not a method at all, but the negation of method. In
fact, to expose oneself completely, I want to say that a poem,
internally considered, ought to make the same kind of sense as
any other discourse.

This should amount to a frontal attack on the main positions
of modern poetics. I cannot feel that I have the equipment for
this enterprise, nor if I had that it would be the right way to
proceed. If the conviction I have baldly stated is just, its justice
will be seen, in due time, not by virtue of a puny attack from a
simple criticaster, but by what Johnson calls the common sense of
readers uncorrupted by literary prejudice. So I only wish to press

17 /bid., p. 58. See also George Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot
(New York. 1957) . p. 123.

212 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

my point in two directions of which I feel fairly certain, neither
of them quite central.

For the first I return to the sentence of Johnson I have just
quoted. "By the common sense of readers uncorrupted with
literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the
dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to
poetical honours." These are words that no one who cares about
poetry in our century can read without a twinge. The appeal to a
body of readers who are not specialists or eccentrics, who are
merely representative of the common sentiment and intelligence
of human kind, is one we feel ourselves so little able to make, one
that we know so well, if we are honest, ought to be made — that
we can think of it only with a feeling of distress. Where is
contemporary poetry read, and where is it written? In the univer-
sities. Who reads it? Students; professional students of literature
mostly, and professors, who expect to write papers on it, or to
lecture on it — to "explicate" it, in the current technical cant.
What has become (not to go back to some pre-lapsarian Eden) of
the kind of public that even so recent a poet as Tennyson could
enjoy? It has been warned off; it has been treated to sneers,
threats and enigmas. It has been told so often that it has no status
and no business in the sacred wood, and it has found the business
actually being transacted there so remote from its ordinary appre-
hension, that it has turned away, in indifference, or disgust, or
despair. A complex of social reasons is often produced to account
for this; no doubt some of them are valid. A covert notion of
social determinism is invoked to produce a sensation of comfort-
ing hopelessness about almost any undesirable situation today.
But that is not my business. I am only concerned with what is
intrinsic to poetry; and much of the reason for the narrow appeal
of modern poetry is in the poetry itself. The wilful Alexandrian-
ism, the allusiveness and multiplicity of reference, above all, the
deliberate cultivation of modes of organisation that are utterly at
variance with those of ordinary discourse — these are the main
reasons for the disappearance of Johnson's common reader. It is
hard to say this, for to say it lines one up with the hostile, the
malicious and the Philistine, with all those who hate and suspect
the exploring sensibility and have never made the attempt to

IMAGISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES • Hoilgh 213

penetrate into the imaginative life of their time. But it is some-
times necessary to risk being put in bad company for the sake of
saying what seems to be true. One can only hope that one has
better reasons for saying it.

For my second point I hope to produce a better reason. The
poem that abandons the syntax of narrative or argument and
relies on the interplay of "themes" or the juxtaposition of images
according to the mysterious laws of poetic logic is not, so far as it
is doing anything positive at all, doing anything that poetry has
not done before. Clustered and repeated images, contrasts or
echoes among them, a half-heard music of this kind has always
been part of poetic effect. We have always partly known it, and
modern criticism has done much to make it explicit. But in all
poetry before our time this music has been background music.
"What we have heard with the alert and directed attention has
been something different. It has been a story, or an argument, or
a meditation, or the direct expression of feeling. Modern criti-
cism has aroused our sense of this second sub-rational layer in our
appreciation of poetry. Perhaps the most signal instance of this is
the Shakespeare criticism of Wilson Knight, which sees the plays
not as patterns made by character in action, but as "expanded
metaphors." patterns of "themes" and "images." Modern poetry
in the Im agist mode has performed the extraordinary manoeuvre
of shifting its whole weight to this second level. It has shorn itself
of parnphrasable sense, of all narrative or discursive line, and
relies on the play of contrasted images alone. In doing so it has
achieved a startling concentration and brilliance of the individ-
ual image, and a whole new rhetoric of its own, with its own
special kind of fascination. I still wish to maintain that it is an
inadequate rhetoric, inadequate for anything but very short
poems and very special effects — states of madness and dream, for
example. I take it that the case of Pound's Cantos goes without
saying; they are the wreckage of poetry; brilliant passages, some-
times long, sometimes the merest splinters, floating in a turbid
sea of stammering and incoherent mumble. But even in The
Waste Land and the Fonr Quartets, where the level of the indi-
vidual passages is far more consistent, and where it is just possible
to give their arrangement some sort of publicly valid justifica-

214 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

tion, the organising principle is still quite inadequate for poems
of this scope. These poems survive, and will survive, not assisted
by their structure, but in spite of it.

This is true of much of the work of Pound, Eliot and Wallace
Stevens — to name three of the founding fathers of modern po-
etry. Their poetry suffers, even on the level on which it functions
so persuasively and brilliantly, from the lack of any other level,
the lack of public, explicit, paraphrasable discourse. We know, of
course, about the "heresy of paraphrase" as it has been called —
that we ought never to suppose that a paraphrase can tell us what
a poem is "about." Perhaps we ought never to paraphrase a
poem; but as with many other things that we ought never to do,
we ought also to be able to feel that we could do it. The virtue
that we exercise in not making a conceptual prose translation of
a modern poem is generally a fugitive and cloistered virtue; for it
would not be possible to give any such translation if we tried. To
attempt to explain to an intelligent person who knows nothing
about twentieth-century poetry how The Waste Land works is to
be overcome with embarrassment at having to justify principles
so affected, so perverse, so deliberately removed from the ordi-
nary modes of rational communication. If poetry were to go on in
this way it would develop before long into an esoteric entertain-
ment with as much relevance to the experience of the common
reader as, say, heraldry or real tennis. The imagist revolution was
a sort of spring-cleaning; a much-needed spring-cleaning that got
rid of a great deal of the fusty, obstructive and dust-gathering
matter that had cluttered up the weaker poetry of the nineteenth
century. But the house has not been comfortable to live in ever
since. And the clotted rubbish of academic imagist criticism is
already beginning to fill it up again. There is no reason to be
optimistic about this situation. Poetry can degenerate into a
meaningless esoteric exercise, and go on that way for centuries. It
has happened. But perhaps it will not happen to us. And we have
the example of the greatest poet of the early twentieth century to
show that it need not. It is something of a paradox that Yeats,
whose beliefs are often supposed to be more fantastic and irra-
tional than those of any other great mind of our time, should
never have lost his faith in rational order and the disposing
intelligence as the guiding principle of a poem.

The Cult of Experience in
American Writing

PHILIP RAHV

Every attentive reader of Henry James remembers that highly
dramatic scene in The Ambassadors — a scene singled out by its
author as giving away the "whole case" of his novel — in which
Lambert Strether, the elderly New England gentleman who had
come to Paris on a mission of business and duty, proclaims his
conversion to the doctrine of experience. Caught in the spell of
Paris, the discovery of whose grace and form is marked for him by
a kind of meaning and intensity that can be likened only to the
raptures of a mystic vision, Strether feels moved to renounce
publicly the morality of abstention he had brought with him
from Woollett, Mass. And that mellow Sunday afternoon, as he
mingles with the charming guests assembled in the garden of the
sculptor Gloriani, the spell of the world capital of civilization is
so strong upon the sensitive old man that he trembles with
hapj)incss and zeal. It is then that he communicates to little
Bilham his newly acquired piety toward life and the fruits
thereof. The worst mistake one can make, he admonishes his
youthful interlocutor, is not to live all one can. — "Do what you
like so long as you don't make my mistake . . . Live! ... It
doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you
have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? . . .
This place and these impressions . . . have had their abundant
message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it
now . . . and more than you'd believe or I can express . . . The

From Pliilip Rahv, Image and Idea {New York: New Directions, 1949) .

215

216 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

right time is now yours. The right time is any time that one is
still so lucky as to have . . . Live, Live!"

To an imaginative European, unfamiliar with the prohibitive
American past and the long-standing national habit of playing
hide and seek with experience, Strether's pronouncements in
favor of sheer life may well seem so commonplace as scarcely to
be worth the loving concentration of a major novelist. While the
idea that one should "live" one's life came to James as a revela-
tion, to the contemporary European writers this idea had long
been a thoroughly assimilated and natural assumption. Experi-
ence served them as the concrete medium for the testing and
creation of values, whereas in James's work it stands for some-
thing distilled or selected from the total process of living; it
stands for romance, reality, civilization — a self-propelling autono-
mous "presence" inexhaustibly alluring in its own right. That is
the "presence" which in the imagination of Hyacinth Robinson,
the hero of The Princess Casamassima, takes on a form at once
"vast, vague, and dazzling — an irradiation of light from objects
undefined, mixed with the atmosphere of Paris and Venice."

The significance of this positive approach to experience and
identification of it with life's "treasures, felicities, splendors and
successes" is that it represents a momentous break with the then
dominant American morality of abstention. The roots of this
morality are to be traced on the one hand to the religion of the
Puritans and, on the other, to the inescapable need of a frontier
society to master its world in sober practice before appropriating
it as an object of enjoyment. Such is the historical content of that
native "innocence" which in James's fiction is continually being
ensnared in the web of European "experience." And James's
tendency is to resolve this drama of entanglement by finally
accepting what Europe offers on condition that it cleanse itself of
its taint of evil through an alliance with New World virtue.

James's attitude toward experience is sometimes overlooked by
readers excessively impressed (or depressed) by his oblique meth-
ods and effects of remoteness and ambiguity. Actually, from the
standpoint of the history of the national letters, the lesson he
taught in The Ambassadors, as in many of his other works, must
be understood as no less than a revolutionary appeal. It is a

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • Rafw 217

veritable declaration of the rights of man — not, to be sure, of the
rights of the public, of the social man, but of the rights of the
private man, of the rights of personality, whose openness to
experience provides the sole effective guaranty of its develop-
ment. Already in one of his earliest stories we find the observa-
tion that "in this country the people have rights but the person
has none." And in so far as any artist can be said to have had a
mission, his manifestly was to brace the American individual in
his moral struggle to gain for his personal and subjective life that
measure of freedom which, as a citizen of a prosperous and
democratic community, he had long been enjoying in the sphere
of material and political relations.

Strether's appeal, in curiously elaborated, varied, as well as
ambivalent forms, pervades all of James's work; and for purposes
of critical symbolization it might well be regarded as the composi-
tional key to the whole modern movement in American writing.
No literature, it might be said, takes on the qualities of a truly
national body of expression unless it is possessed by a basic theme
and unifying principle of its own. Thus the German creative
mind has in the main been actuated by philosophical interests,
the French by the highest ambitions of the intelligence unre-
strained by system or dogma, the Russian by the passionately
candid questioning and shaping of values. And since Whitman
and James the American creative mind, seizing at last upon what
had long been denied to it, has found the terms and objects of its
activity in the urge toward and immersion in experience. It is
this search for experience, conducted on diverse and often con-
flicting levels of consciousness, which has been the dominant,
quintessential theme of the characteristic American literary pro-
ductions— from Leaves of Grass to Winesburg, Ohio and beyond;
and the more typically American the writer — a figure like
Thomas \\'olfe is a patent example — the more deeply does it
engulf him.

It is through this preoccupation, it seems to me, that one can
account, perhaps more adequately than through any other factor,
for some of the peculiarities of American writing since the close
of its classic period. A basis is thus provided for explaining the
unique indifference of this literature to certain cultural aims

218 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

implicit in the aesthetic rendering of experience — to ideas gener-
ally, to theories of value, to the wit of the speculative and
problematical, and to that new-fashioned sense of irony which at
once expresses and modulates the conflicts in modern belief. In
his own way even a writer as intensely aware as James shares this
indifference. He is the analyst of fine consciences, and fine minds
too, but scarcely of minds capable of grasping and acting upon
those ineluctable problems that enter so prominently and with
such significant results into the literary art developed in Europe
during the past hundred years. And the question is not whether
James belonged among the "great thinkers" — very few novelists
do — but whether he is "obsessed" by those universal problems,
whether, in other words, his work is vitally associated with that
prolonged crisis of the human spirit to which the concept of
modernity is ultimately reducible. What James asks for, prima-
rily, is the expansion of life beyond its primitive needs and
elementary standards of moral and material utility; and of cul-
ture he conceives as the reward of this expansion and as its
unfailing means of discrimination. Hence he searches for the
whereabouts of "Life" and for the exact conditions of its enrich-
ment. This is what makes for a fundamental difference between
the inner movement of the American and that of the European
novel, the novel of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Proust,
Joyce, Mann, Lawrence, and Kafka, whose problem is invariably
posed in terms of life's intrinsic worth and destiny.

The intellectual is the only character missing in the American
novel. He may appear in it in his professional capacity — as artist,
teacher, or scientist — but very rarely as a person who thinks with
his entire being, that is to say, as a person who transforms ideas
into actual dramatic motives instead of merely using them as
ideological conventions or as theories so externally applied that
they can be dispensed with at will. Everything is contained in the
American novel except ideas. But what are ideas? At best judg-
ments of reality and at worst substitutes for it. The American
novelist's conversion to reality, however, has been so belated that
he cannot but be baffled by judgments and vexed by substitutes.
Thus his work exhibits a singular pattern consisting, on the one

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RaJlV 219

hand, of a disinclination to thought and, on the other, of an
intense predilection for the real: and the real appears in it as a
vast phenomenology swept by waves of sensation and feeling. In
this welter there is little room for the intellect, which in the
unconscious belief of many imaginative Americans is naturally
impervious, if not wholly inimical, to reality.

Consider the literary qualities of Ernest Hemingway, for exam-
ple. There is nothing Hemingway dislikes more than experience
of a make-believe, vague, or frigid nature, but in order to safe-
guard himself against the counterfeit he consistently avoids draw-
ing upon the more abstract resources of the mind, he snubs the
thinking man and mostly confines himself to the depiction of life
on its physical levels. Of course, his rare mastery of the sensuous
element largely compensates for whatever losses he may sustain in
other spheres. Yet the fact remains that a good part of his writing
leaves us witli a sense of situations unresolved and with a picture
of human beings tested by values much too simplified to do them
justice. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren have recently
remarked on the interrelation betw^een qualities of Hemingway's
style and his bedazzlement by sheer experience. The following ob-
servation in particular tends to bear out the point of view ex-
pressed in this essay: "The short simple rhythms, the succession of
coordinate clauses, the general lack of subordination — all suggest
a dislocated and ununified world. The figures which live in this
world live a sort of hand-to-mouth existence perceptually, and
conceptually, they hardly live at all. Subordination implies some
exercise of discrimination — the sifting of reality through the
intellect. But Hemingway has a romantic anti-intellectualism
which is to be associated with the premium which he places upon
experience as such."^

But Hemingtvay is only a specific instance. Other writers, less
gifted and not so self-sufficiently and incisively one-sided, have
come to grief through this same creative psychology'. Under its
conditioning some of them have produced work so limited to the

^ Cf. "The Killers," by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Pcnn Warren, in
American Prefaces, Spring 1942.

220 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

recording of the unmistakably and recurrently real that it can
truly be said of them that their art ends exactly where it should
properly begin.

"How can one make the best of one's life?" Andr^ Malraux
asks in one of his novels. "By converting as wide a range of
experience as possible into conscious thought." It is precisely this
reply which is alien to the typical American artist, who all too
often is so absorbed in experience that he is satisfied to let it
"write its own ticket" — to carry him, that is, to its own chance or
casual destination.

In the first part of Faust Goethe removes his hero, a Gothic
dreamer, from the cell of scholastic devotion in order to embroil
him in the passions and high-flavored joys of "real life." But in
the second part of the play this hero attains a broader stage of
consciousness, reconciling the perilous freedom of his newly-re-
leased personality with the enduring interests of the race, with
high art, politics, and the constructive labor of curbing the
chaotic forces in man and nature alike. This progress of Faust is
foreshadowed in an early scene, when Mephisto promises to
reveal to him "the little and then the great world." — Wir sehen
die kleine, dann die grosse Welt. — The little world is the world
of the individual bemused by his personal experience, and his
sufferings, guilt-feelings, and isolation are to be understood as the
penalty he pays for throwing off the traditional bonds that once
linked him to God and his fellow-men. Beyond the little world,
however, lies the broader world of man the inhabitant of his own
history, who in truth is always losing his soul in order to gain it.
Now the American drama of experience constitutes a kind of
hall-Faust, a play with the first part intact and the second part
missing. And the Mephisto of this shortened version is the famil-
iar demon of the Puritan morality-play, not at all the Goethian
philosopher-sceptic driven by the nihilistic spirit of the modern
epoch. Nor is the plot of this hali-Faust consistent within itself.
For its protagonist, playing Gretchen as often as he plays Faust, is
evidently unclear in his own mind as to the role he is cast
in — that of the seducer or the seduced?

It may be that this confusion of roles is the inner source of the
famous Jamesian ambiguity and ever-recurring theme of be-

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • Rahv 221

trayal. James's heroines — his Isabel Archers and Milly Theales
and Maggie Ververs — are they not somehow always being victim-
ized by the "great world" even as they succeed in mastering it?
Gretchen-like in their innocence, they none the less enact the
Faustian role in their uninterrupted pursuit of experience and in
the use of the truly Mephistophelean gold of their millionaire-
fathers to buy up the brains and beauty and nobility of the civili-
zation that enchants them. And the later heroes of American
fiction — Hemingway's young man, for instance, who invariably
ajjpears in each of his novels, a young man posing his virility
against the background of continents and nations so old that, like
Tiresias, they have seen all and suffered all — in his own way he,
too. responds to experience in the schizoid fashion of the Gretch-
cn-Faust character. For what is his \irility if not at once the
measure of his innocence and the measure of his aggression? And
what shall we make of Steinbeck's fable of Lennie, that mindless
giant who literally kills and gets killed from sheer desire for those
soft and lovely things of which fate has singularly deprived him?
He combines an unspeakable innocence with an unspeakable
aggression. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to say that in this
grotesque creature Steinbeck has unconsciously created a sym-
bolic parody of a figure such as Thomas Wolfe, who likewise
crushed in his huge caresses the delicate objects of the art of life.

The disunity of American literature, its polar division into
above and below or paleface and redskin writing, I have noted
elsewhere. Whitman and James, who form a kind of fatal anti-
podes, have served as the standard examples of this dissociation.
There is one sense, however, in which the contrast between these
two archetypal Americans may be said to have been overdrawn.
There is, after all, a common ground on which they finally,
though perhaps briefly, meet — an essential Americanism subsum-
ing them both that is best defined by their mutual affirmation of
experience. True, what one affirmed the other was apt to negate;
still it is not in their attitudes toward experience as such that the
difference between them becomes crucial but rather in their

222 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

contradictory conceptions of what constitutes experience. One
sought its ideal manifestations in America, the other in Europe.
Whitman, plunging with characteristic impetuosity into the tur-
bulent, formless life of the frontier and the big cities, accepted
experience in its total ungraded state, whereas James, insisting on
a precise scrutiny of its origins and conditions, was endlessly
discriminatory, thus carrying forward his ascetic inheritance into
the very act of reaching out for the charms and felicities of the
great European world. But the important thing to keep in mind
here is that this plebeian and patrician are historically associated,
each in his own incomparable way, in the radical enterprise of
subverting the puritan code of stark utility in the conduct of life
and in releasing the long compressed springs of experience in the
national letters. In this sense. Whitman and James are the true
initiators of the American line of modernity.

If a positive approach to experience is the touchstone of the
modern, a negative approach is the touchstone of the classic in
American writing. The literature of early America is a sacred
rather than a profane literature. Immaculately spiritual at the
top and local and anecdotal at the bottom, it is essentially, as the
genteel literary historian Barrett Wendell accurately noted, a
"record of the national inexperience" marked by "instinctive
disregard of actual fact." For this reason it largely left untouched
the two chief experiential media — the novel and the drama.
Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville were "ro-
mancers" rather than novelists. They were incapable of appre-
hending the vitally new principle of realism by virtue of which
the art of fiction in Europe was in their time rapidly evolving
toward an hitherto inconceivable condition of objectivity and
familiarity with existence. Not until James did a fiction-writer
appear in America who was able to sympathise with and hence to
take advantage of the methods of Thackeray, Balzac, and Turge-
nev. Since the principle of realism presupposes a thoroughly
secularized relationship between the ego and experience, Haw-
thorne and Melville could not possibly have apprehended it.
Though not religious men themselves, they were nevertheless
held in bondage by ancestral conscience and dogma, they were
still living in the afterglow of a religious faith that drove the ego.

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RaflV 228

on its external side, to aggrandize itself by accumulating practical
sanctions Avhile scourging and inhibiting its intimate side. In
Hawthorne the absent or suppressed experience reappears in the
shape of spectral beings whose function is to warn, repel, and
fascinate. And the unutterable confusion that reigns in some of
Melville's narratives (Pierre, Mardi) , and which no amount of
critical labor has succeeded in clearing up, is primarily due to his
inability either to come to terms with experience or else wholly
and finally to reject it.

Despite the featureless innocence and moral-enthusiastic air of
the old American books, there is in some of them a peculiar
virulence, a feeling of discord that does not easily fit in with the
general tone of the classic age. In such worthies as Irving, Cooper,
Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell there is scarcely any-
thing more than meets the eye, but in Poe, Hawthorne, and
Melville there is an incandescent svmbolism, a meaning within
meaning, the vitality of which is perhaps only now being rightly
appreciated. D. H. Lawrence was close to the truth when he
spoke of what serpents they were, of the "inner diabolism of their
underconsciousness." Hawthorne, "that blue-eyed darling," as
well as Poe and Melville, insisted on a subversive vision of
human nature at the same time as cultivated Americans were
ever)whcre relishing the orations of Emerson \\ho, as James put
it, was helping them "to take a picturesque view of one's internal
possibilities and to find in the landscape of tlie soul all sorts of
fine sunrise and moonlight effects." Each of these three creative
men displays a healthy resistance to the sentimentality and vague
idealism of his contemporaries; and along with this resistance
they display morbid qualities that, aside from any specific bio-
graphical factors, might perhaps be accounted for by the contra-
diction between the poverty of the experience provided by the
society they lived in and the high development of their moral,
intellectual, and affective natures — though in Poe's case there is
no need to put any stress on his moral character. And the curious
thing is that whatever faults their work shows are reversed in
later American literature, tiie weaknesses of which are not to be
traced to poverty of experience but to an inability to encompass
it on a significant level.

224 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

The dilemma that confronted these early writers chiefly mani-
fests itself in their frequent failure to integrate the inner and
outer elements of their world so that they might stand witness for
each other by way of the organic linkage of object and symbol,
act and meaning. For that is the linkage of art without which its
structure cannot stand. Lawrence thought that Moby Dick is
profound beyond human feeling — which in a sense says as much
against the book as for it. Its further defects are dispersion, a
divided mind: its real and transcendental elements do not fully
interpenetrate, the creative tension between them is more fortui-
tous than organic. In The Scarlet Letter, as in a few of his shorter
fictions, and to a lesser degree in The Blithedale Romance,
Hawthorne was able to achieve an imaginative order that other-
wise eluded him. A good deal of his writing, despite his gift for
precise observation, consists of phantasy unsupported by the con-
viction of reality.

Many changes had to take place in America before its spiritual
and material levels could fuse in a work of art in a more or less
satisfactory manner. Whitman was already in the position to
vivify his democratic ethos by an appeal to the physical features
of the country, such as the grandeur and variety of its geography,
and to the infinite detail of common lives and occupations. And
James too, though sometimes forced to resort to makeshift situa-
tions, was on the whole successful in setting up a lively and
significant exchange between the moral and empiric elements of
his subject-matter. Though he was, in a sense, implicitly bound
all his life by the morality of Hawthorne, James none the less
perceived what the guilt-tossed psyche of the author of The
Marble Faun prevented him from seeing — that it is not the man
trusting himself to experience but the one fleeing from it who
sufliers the "beast in the jungle" to rend him.

The Transcendentalist movement is peculiar in that it ex-
presses the native tradition of inexperience in its particulars and
the revolutionary urge to experience in its generalities. (Perhaps
that is what Van Wyck Brooks meant when, long before prostrat-
ing himself at his shrine, he wrote that Emerson was habitually
abstract where he should be concrete, and vice versa) . On a
purely theoretical plane, in ways curiously inverted and idealis-

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RoflV 225

tic, the cult of experience is patently prefigured in Emerson's
doctrine of the uniqueness and infinitude, as well as in Thoreau's
equally steep estimate, of the private man. American culture was
then unprepared for anything more drastic than an affirmation of
experience in theory alone, and even the theory was modulated
in a semi-clerical fashion so as not to set it in too open an
opposition to the dogmatic faith that, despite the decay of its
theology, still prevailed in the ethical sphere. "The love which is
preached nowadays," wrote Thoreau, "is an ocean of new milk
for a man to swim in. I hear no surf nor surge, but the winds coo
over it." No wonder, then, that Transcendentalism declared itself
most clearly and dramatically in the form of the essay — a form in
which one can preach without practicing.

Ill

Personal liberation from social taboos and conventions was the
war-cry of the group of writers that came to the fore in the second
decade of the century. They employed a variety of means to
formulate and press home this program. Dreiser's tough-minded
though somewhat arid naturalism, Anderson's softer and spottier
method articulating the protest of shut-in people, Lewis's satires
of Main Street, Cabell's florid celebrations of pleasure, Edna
Millay's emotional expansiveness, Mencken's worldly wisdom
and assaults on the provincial pieties, the early Van Wyck
Brooks's high-minded though bitter evocations of the inhibited
past, his ideal of creative self-fulfillment — all these were weapons
brought to bear by the party of rebellion in the struggle to gain
free access to experience. And the secret of energy in that struggle
seems to have been the longing for what was then called "sexual
freedom"; for at the time Americans seeking emancipation were
engaged in a truly elemental discovery of sex whose literary
expression on some levels, as Randolph Bourne remarked, easily
turned into "caricatures of desire." The novel, the poem, the
play — all contributed to tlie development of a complete symptom-
atology of sexual frustration and release. In his Memoirs, writ-
ten toward the end of his life. Sherwood Anderson recalled the
writers of that period as "a little band of soldiers who were going

226 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

to free life . . . from certain bonds." Not that they wanted to
overplay sex, but they did want "to bring it back into real
relation to the life we lived and saw others living. We wanted the
flesh back in our literature, wanted directly in our literature the
fact of men and women in bed together, babies being born. We
wanted the terrible importance of the flesh in human relations
also revealed again." In retrospect much of this writing seems but
a naive inversion of the dear old American innocence, a turning
inside out of inbred fear and reticence, but the qualities one likes
in it are its positiveness of statement, its zeal and pathos of the
limited view.

The concept of experience was then still an undifferentiated
whole. But as the desire for personal liberation, even if only from
the less compulsive social pressures, was partly gratified and the
tone of the literary revival changed from eagerness to disdain, the
sense of totality gradually wore itself out. Since the nineteen-
twenties a process of atomization of experience has forced each of
its spokesmen into a separate groove from which he can step out
only at the risk of utterly disorienting himself. Thus, to cite some
random examples, poetic technique became the special experi-
ence of Ezra Pound, language that of Gertrude Stein, the con-
crete object was appropriated by W. C. Williams, super-American
phenomena by Sandburg and related nationalists, Kenneth
Burke experienced ideas (which is by no means the same as
thinking them) , Archibald MacLeish experienced public atti-
tudes, F. Scott Fitzgerald the glamor and sadness of the very rich,
Hemingway death and virile sports, and so on and so forth.
Finally Thomas Wolfe plunged into a chaotic recapitulation of
the cult of experience as a whole, traversing it in all directions
and ending nowhere.

Though the crisis of the nineteen-thirties arrested somewhat
the progress of the experiential mode, it nevertheless managed to
put its stamp on the entire social-revolutionary literature of the
decade. A comparison of European and American left-wing writ-
ing of the same period will at once show that whereas Europeans
like Malraux and Silone enter deeply into the meaning of politi-
cal ideas and beliefs, Americans touch only superficially on such
matters, as actually their interest is fixed almost exclusively on

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RaflV 227

the class war as an experience which, to them at least, is new and
exciting. They succeed in representing incidents of oppression
and revolt, as well as sentimental conversions, but conversions of
the heart and mind they merely sketch in on the surface or imply
in a gratuitous fashion. (What does a radical novel like The
Grapes of Wrath contain, from an ideological point of view, that
agitational journalism cannot commimicate with equal heat and
facility? Surely its vogue cannot be explained by its radicalism.
Its real attraction for the millions who read it lies elsewhere —
perhaps in its vivid recreation of "a slice of life" so horridly
unfamiliar that it can be made to yield an exotic interest.) The
sympathy of these ostensibly political writers with the revolution-
ary cause is often genuine, yet their understanding of its inner
movement, intricate problems, and doctrinal and strategic mo-
tives is so deficient as to call into question their competence to
deal with political material. In the complete works of the so-
called "proletarian school" you will not find a single viable
portrait of a Marxist intellectual or of any character in the
revolutionary drama who, conscious of his historical role, is not a
mere automaton of spontaneous class force or impulse.

What really happened in the nineteen-thirties is that due to
certain events the public aspects of experience appeared more
meaningful than its private aspects, and literature responded
accordingly. But the subject of political art is history, which
stands in the same relation to experience as fiction to biography;
and just as surely as failure to generalize the biographical ele-
ment thwarts the aspirant to fiction, so the ambition of the
literary Left to create a political art was thwarted by its failure to
lift experience to the level of history. (For the benefit of those
people who habitually pause to insist on what they call "strictly
literary values," I might add that by "history" in this connection
I do not mean "history books" or anything resembling what is
known as the "historical novel" or drama. A political art would
succeed in lifting experience to the level of history if its percep-
tion of life — any life — were organized aroimd a perspective relat-
ing the artist's sense of the society of the dead to his sense of the
society of the living and the as yet unborn.)

Experience, in the sense of "felt life" rather than as life's total

228 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

practice, is the main but by no means the total substance of
literature. The part experience plays in the aesthetic sphere
might well be compared to the part that the materialist concep-
tion of history assigns to economy. Experience, in the sense of this
analogy, is the substructure of literature above which there rises a
superstructure of values, ideas, and judgments — in a word, of the
multiple forms of consciousness. But this base and summit are
not stationary: they continually act and react upon each other.

It is precisely this superstructural level which is seldom reached
by the typical American writer of the modern era. Most of the
well-known reputations will bear out my point. \^Tiether you
approach a poet like Ezra Pound or novelists like Steinbeck and
Faulkner, what is at once noticeable is the uneven, and at times
quite distorted, development of the various elements that consti-
tute literary talent. What is so exasperating about Pound's po-
etry, for example, is its peculiar combination of a finished tech-
nique (his special share in the distribution of experience) with
amateurish and irresponsible ideas. It could be maintained that
for sheer creative power Faulkner is hardly excelled by any living
novelist, yet he cannot be compared to Proust or Joyce. The
diversity and wonderful intensity of the experience represented
in his narratives cannot entirely make up for their lack of order,
of a self-illuminating structure, and obscurity of value and mean-
ing. One might naturally counter this criticism by stating that
though Faulkner rarely or never sets forth values directly, they
none the less exist in his work by implication. Yes, but implica-
tions incoherently expressed are no better than mystifications,
and nowadays it is values that we can least afford to take on faith.
Moreover, in a more striking manner perhaps than any of his
contemporaries, Faulkner illustrates the tendency of the experi-
ential mode, if pursued to its utmost extreme, to turn into its
opposite through unconscious self-parody. In Faulkner the excess,
the systematic inflation of the horrible is such a parody of experi-
ence. In Thomas Wolfe the same effect is produced by his swollen
rhetoric and compulsion to repeat himself — and repetition is an
obvious form of parody. This repetition-compulsion has plagued
a good many American writers. Its first and most conspicuous

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RoflV 229

victim, of course, was Whitman, who occasionally slipped into
unintentional parodies of himself.

Vet there is a positive side to the primacy of experience in late
American literature. For this primacy has conferred certain ben-
efits upon it, of which none is more bracing than its relative
immunity from abstraction and otherworldliness. The stream of
life, unimpeded by the rocks and sands of ideology, flows through
it freely. If inept in coping with the general, it particularizes not
at all badly; and the assumptions of sanctity that so many Euro-
pean artists seem to require as a kind of guaranty of their
professional standing are not readily conceded in the lighter and
clearer American atmosphere. "\V^hatever may have been the case
in years gone by," Whitman wrote in 1888, "the true use for the
imaginative faculty of modern times is to give idtimate vivifica-
tion to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them
with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to
every real thing, and to real things only." As this statement was
intended as a prophecy, it is worth noting that while the radiant
endowments that Whitman speaks of — the "glows and glories and
final illustriousness" — have not been granted, the desired and
predicted vivification of facts, science, and common lives has in a
measure been realized, though in the process Whitman's demo-
cratic faith has as often been belied as confirmed.

It is not the mere recoil from the inhibitions of puritan and
neo-puritan times that instigated the American search for experi-
ence. Behind it is the extreme individualism of a country without
a long past to brood on, whose bourgeois spirit had not worn
itself out and been debased in a severe struggle against an old
cidture so tenacious as to retain the power on occasion to fasci-
nate and render impotent even its predestined enemies. More-
over, in contrast to the derangements that have continually
shaken Europe, life in the United States has been relatively
fortunate and prosperous. It is possible to speak of American
history as "successful" history. \\'ithin the limits of the capitalist

230 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

order — and until the present period the objective basis for a
different social order simply did not exist here — the American
people have been able to find definitive solutions for the great
historical problems that faced them. Thus both the Revolution-
ary and the Civil War were complete actions that once and for all
abolished the antagonisms which had initially caused the break-
down of national equilibrium. In Europe similar actions have
usually led to festering compromises that in the end reproduced
the same conflicts in other forms.

It is plain that until very recently there has really been no
urgent need in America for high intellectual productivity. In-
deed, the American intelligentsia developed very slowly as a
semi-independent grouping; and what is equally important, for
more than a century now and especially since 1865, it has been
kept at a distance from the machinery of social and political
power. What this means is that insofar as it has been deprived of
certain opportunities, it has also been sheltered and pampered.
There was no occasion or necessity for the intervention of the
intellectuals — it was not mentality that society needed most in
order to keep its affairs in order. On the whole the intellectuals
were left free to cultivate private interests, and, once the moral
and aesthetic ban on certain types of exertion had been removed,
uninterruptedly to solicit individual experience. It is this lack of
a sense of extremity and many-sided involvement which explains
the peculiar shallowness of a good deal of American literary
expression. If some conditions of insecurity have been known to
retard and disarm the mind, so have some conditions of security.
The question is not whether Americans have suffered less than
Europeans, but of the quality of whatever suffering and happi-
ness have fallen to their lot.

The consequence of all this has been that American literature
has tended to make too much of private life, to impose on it, to
scour it for meanings that it cannot always legitimately yield.
Henry James was the first to make a cause, if not a fetish, of
personal relations; and the justice of his case, despite his vaunted
divergence from the pioneer type, is that of a pioneer too, for
while Americans generally were still engaged in "gathering in the
preparations and necessities" he resolved to seek out "the ameni-

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE • RaflV 231

ties and consummations." Furthermore, by exploiting in a fash-
ion ahogether his own the contingencies of private hfe that fell
within his scope, he was able to dramatize the relation of the new
world to the old, thus driving the wedge of historical conscious-
ness into the very heart of the theme of experience. Later not a
few attempts were made to combine experience with conscious-
ness, to achieve the balance of thought and being characteristic of
the great traditions of European art. But except for certain
narratives of James and Melville, I know of very little American
fiction which can imqualifiedly be said to have attained this end.

Since the decline of the regime of gentility many admirable
works have been produced, but in the main it is the quantity of
felt life comprised in them that satisfies, not their quality of
belief or interpretative range. In poetry there is evidence of more
distinct gains, perhaps because the medium has reached that late
stage in its evolution when its chance of survival depends on its
capacity to absorb ideas. The modern poetic styles — metaphysical
and symbolist — depend on a conjunction of feeling and idea.
But, generally speaking, bare experience is still the leitmotiv of
the American writer, though the literary depression of recent
years tends to show that this theme is virtually exhausted. At
bottom it was the theme of the individual transplanted from an
old culture taking inventory of himself and of his new surround-
ings. This inventory, this initial recognition and experiencing of
oneself and one's surroundings, is all but complete now, and
those who persist in going on with it are doing so out of mere
routine and inertia.

The creative ]X)wer of the cult of experience is almost spent,
but what lies beyond it is still imclear. One thing, however, is
certain: whereas in the past, throughout the nineteenth and well
into the twentieth century, the nature of American literary life
was largely determined by national forces, now it is international
forces that have begun to exert a dominant influence. And in the
long run it is in the terms of this historic change that the future
course of American writing will define itself.

The Modern as Vision of a
Whole Situation

STEPHEN SPENDER

The confrontation of the past with the present seems to me the
fundamental aim of modernism. The reason why it became so
important was that, in the early stages of the movement, the
moderns wished to express the whole experience of modern life.

The feeling that the modern world, even if its values are
fragmented, nevertheless shares a fate that in being modem is
whole, is important. It results doubtless from contrasting the past
as variety of traditions and the present as the single irremediable
event which is progiess. The present is looked upon as a fatal
knowledge that has overtaken the whole of civilization and has
broken the line of tradition with the past. This situation can
therefore only be apprehended as a whole, as tragedy or over-
whelming disaster, unless indeed it can be viewed optimistically.

If the concept of wholeness is abandoned then at once work
becomes fragmentary, the parts cut off from the whole. This is
the characteristic of futurism that it separates the future finally
from the past. It is also the characteristic of the reaction against
modernism, which accepts the idea that there can only be
"minor" fragmented art. Thus today when certain poets and
critics say that they can only aim at elegance and correctness of
form, they reveal that they have accepted the idea of writing
within a fragmentary part of the fragmented situation, instead of
trying to comprehend the situation itself in a single vision that

From Partisan Review, 29 (Summer 1962) .
232

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 233

restores wholeness to the fragmentation, even by realizing it as
disaster.

Of course, a reaction against the modern movement was inevi-
table, and there is no argument that it should have continued
until the present time. It demands respect however when it
lingers on in the work of that heroic survivor, Samuel Beckett.
Beckett is characteristically modern in that he makes his audi-
ence aware that the mysterious eloquent apathy of his characters
is the result of a whole external disaster in surrounding history.

"When we read the following by Miss Pamela Hansford John-
son on Literature in The Baldwin Age we ask ourselves whether
it is not Miss Johnson who is "in retreat":

The full retreat began in the years between 1922 and 1925, the years
that saw Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. It was the retreat into pcrimental
experiment in verbal and oral techniques: and it pretty well dominated
the English novel for the next thirty years . . .

■\Vhat shrivelled away in their work was any contact between man and
society. "Bloomsday" is Bloom's alone and no-one else's: Mrs. Dalloway,
if she is anything at all, is merely herself, walking in her own dream of a
private world. Everything dropped away from the novel but Manner:
all that counted was how the thing was done, and never the thing itself.
We must blame no writer for the influence he exerts on his successors:
to have been an influence at all is a seal of achievement. Yet the
followers of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce began to lead the novel
into sterility. And nobody saw anything wrong in that inexorable and
dangerous process. Why not? Because life was growing too hard for
writers to face, and quiet lay in impotency alone.

It is difficult to disentangle this. It reads like lines deliberately
crossed in order to confuse and mislead. For example, in the
muddling up of Joyce and Mrs. Woolf as though they were one
flesh like Hamlet's uncle and his mother, or Sir Charles and Lady
Snow; and writing that no one "saw anything wrong" in these
writers — as though F. R. Leavis and Wyndham Lewis had not
spent years conducting the most vigorous polemics against Vir-
ginia W^oolf (as also against James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence) .

The passage confuses two important issues. For while on the
one hand it is untrue to imply that there was no contact between
from, or decide him on, taking it. This is usually an example of the

234 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

man and society in James Joyce, it is true that the method of the
interior monologue, which in Ulysses was a technique for present-
ing not just his main characters but also a whole society as a state
of consciousness, became in Virginia Woolf's work largely an
instrument for projecting her own sensibility; and in that of
other writers, for subjective outpourings.

The important point which becomes suppressed in Miss Hans-
ford Johnson's essay, is that although Joyce employed a tech-
nique of subjective monologue in his work, the intent of his
writing was to achieve an almost total objectivity. Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake may not be complete successes. It is difficult to
imagine how they could be, considering that the aim of Joyce in
Ulysses v/as to invent an imaginative form which would express
the whole experience of modern life, and in Finnegans Wake, the
whole of history. Perhaps they were gigantic achievements which
include elements of gigantic failure. But to dismiss them as mere
"experiments" whose discoveries have been usefully absorbed
into the novels of C. P. Snow is to overlook what remains truly
important and challenging about them: that they attempt to
envisage modern life as a whole complexity enclosed within a
consciousness conditioned by circumstances that are entirely of
today. They state a challenge which perhaps they did not meet
and which perhaps cannot be met, although they indicate the
scale of it. And what has come after the works which Miss
Hansford Johnson so easily dismisses is fragments of a frag-
mented view of civilization, and is on an altogether lesser scale.

The movements of modern literature and art are programs of
techniques for expressing this whole view of the past-future con-
frontation. There are different types of programs which might be
analyzed as establishing the following categories:

1. Realization through new art of the modern experience.

2. The invention through art of a pattern of hope, influencing
society.

3. The idea of an art which will fuse past with present into the
modern symbolism of a shared inner life.

4. Art as pattern for a technique of living through self-induced
sensation.

5. The Revolutionary concept of Tradition.

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 235

1. Realization is the primary gesture of modernism, the deter-
mination to invent a new style in order to express the deeply felt
change in the modern world. Industrial towns, machines, revolu-
tions, scientific thinking, are felt to have altered the texture of
living. Everyday language and taste reflect these changes, even
though the image they mirror is ugly. It is only art that remains
archaic, forcing its ideas into forms and manners that are out-
moded. Therefore artists have to learn the idiom of changed
speech, vision and hearing, and mold the modern experience into
forms either revolutionized or modified.

The outstanding characteristic of realization is, then, the great
attention paid to inventing an idiom which responds to the tone
of voice of contemporaries, the changed vision of a world of
machines and speed, the rhythms of an altered contemporary
tempo, the new voice of a humanity at times when the old social
hierarchies are breaking down.

The street speaks the idiom and the idiom, in the mind of the
artist, invents the form. Joyce and Eliot in their early work are
realizers of the modern idiom in their poetry and their poetic
prose. In music, Alban Berg's Wozzeck is a classic example of the
realization of the 1920's in Germany as idiom. In his Blue Period,
Picasso had supremely this quality of realization, like the Eliot of
Preludes:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely sufTcring thing.

The human element is often reduced to pathos, clownishness,
in Wozzeck, Blue Period Picasso, the early Eliot. In Apollinaire
as in some of the German Expressionists, this clownishness ac-
quires a quality of touching and nobly absurd heroism.

2. By the pattern of hope, I mean — and this certainly will seem
an unfashionable view today — the idea that modern art might
transform the contemporary environment, and hence, by paci-
fying and ennobling its inhabitants, revolutionize the world
(there is, surely, a pun on this idea in the program of Eugene
Jolas in his magazine transition — "the revolution of the word") .

236 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

The word hope has to be understood seriously, as Malraux still
intended it when he entitled his Spanish civil war novel Espoir.
Early in the century, hope was based on the international inter-
arts community of the alliance between the ballet, architecture,
furniture design, painting, music and poetry, all of them partici-
pating in the movement to revolutionize taste, and at the same
time make it an operative acting and criticizing force in modern
life. The way in which art might revolutionize the environment
and hence, by implication, people living in it, is explored in
many of the manifestoes of poets and painters early in the cen-
tury. The famous Der Blaue Reiter (1914) , the anthology of the
group of painters which was founded in Munich in 1909, is
prefaced with remarks of which these are characteristic:

"Everything which comes into being, on earth can only have its
beginning." This sentence by Daeubler might stand written over all our
inventing and all our aims. A fulfillment will be attained, some time, in
a new world, in another existence (Dasein) . On earth we are only able
to state the theme. This first volume is the prelude to a new theme . . .
We wander with our passionate wishes through the art of this time and
through the present age.

This is touching, innocent, mysteriously exciting. The same
dream of transforming the world — but this time the world of
actuality in which we live — is expressed by Wyndham Lewis, a
decade later, in The Tyro:

Art, however, the greatest art, even, has it in its power to influence
everybody. Actually the shapes of the objects (houses, cars, dresses and
so forth) by which they are surrounded have a very profound subcon-
scious efEect on people. A man might be unacquainted with the very
existence of a certain movement in art, and yet his life would be
modified directly if the street he walked down took a certain shape, at
the dictates of an architect under the spell of that movement, whatever
it were. Its forms and colors would have a tonic or a debilitating effect
on him, an emotional value. Just as he is affected by the change of the
atmosphere, without taking the least interest in the cyclonic machinery
that controls it, so he would be directly affected by any change in his
physical milieu.

A man goes to choose a house. He is attracted by it or not, often, not
for sentimental or practical reasons, but for some reason that he does
not seek to explain, and that yet is of sufficient force to prevent him

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • SpCudcr 237

functioning of the aesthetic sense (however underdeveloped it may be
in him) of wliich we are talking. The painting, sculpture and general
design of today, such as can be included in the movement we support,
aims at nothing short of a physical reconstructing and recording of the
visible part of tlie world.

The theme of hope re-connects an art, which has been driven
inwards into the isolated being of the artist, with the external
world, by accomplishing a revolution in the community which is
taught to share the visions of modern artists. In being victimized,
oppressed, and in having dreams, the artist already meets the
insulted and the oppressed who pray for change, although their
aspirations may be far removed from his visions. But it is impor-
tant to him that his visions are nevertheless closer to tlie poor and
the powerless than to those who are rich and enjoy power. Hence
the current of revolutionary feeling which runs alike through
dadaist, expressionist and surrealist manifestoes. Each group
claims to be the true revolutionaries of life, and that the stream
which it represents would join with the stream of the social
revolution; if only the revolutionaries were not too j)liilistine to
realize that modern art represents the democracy of the uncon-
scious forces which should be equated with economic democracy!
Hence the surrealists were later to insist that they were Commu-
nists. Some of them — Aragon, Tristan Tzara — even, as surrealists,
joined the Communist Party, later to renounce surrealism as
bourgeois. The smile was on the face of the tiger.

3. Art which will transform reality into shared inner life, is the
converse of (2) which would transform inner vision into outer
social change. It is the idea that the images of the materialist
modern world can be "interpreted," made to become symbols of
inner life where they are reconciled with the older things symbol-
ized by words like "jug," "mountain," "star," "cross." This proc-
ess was the infinitely patient research of experience of Rilke. It
finds its completest realization in the Duino F.lcgics, where the
Angels are set up as almost machine-like figures over the human
landscape in which there is the fair, the world of values that are
money. The angels are perpetually occupied in transforming the
world of outward materialism back into inner tragic values.

The connection of poetry here with iconographic modern

238 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

painting is evident. One of the Duino Elegies is inspired by
Picasso's Les Saltimhanques, in which Rilke sees the method of
interpretation of the performers in the fairground who are at
once traditional and contemporary.

The fascinating letter (Sierre: 13.11.25) of Rilke to Witold
von Hulewicz deserves to rank with Shelley's famous essay as a
twentieth century Defence of Poetry. If Shelley saw poets as the
"unacknowledged legislators," Rilke saw them as the inventors of
a machinery of symbolism which transforms the actual into the
significant material of inner being, reconciling within ourselves
the past and the present. The whole letter requires the closest
attention, and the few passages here quoted are only used to
fortify this argument:

We, the men of the present and today, we are not for one moment in
the world of time, nor are we fixed in it; we overflow continually
towards the men of the Past, towards our origin and towards those who
apparently come after us. In that most vast, open world all beings
are — one cannot say "contemporaneous," for it is precisely the passage
of Time which determines that they all are. This transitoriness rushes
everywhere into a profound Being,

This reads perhaps like oriental philosophy, but it is the view
which provides in the most concrete sense the groundwork of
Rilke's poetry:

The Elegies show us engaged on this work, the work of the perpetual
transformation of beloved and tangible things into the invisible vibra-
tion and excitability of our nature, which introduces new "frequencies"
into the pulsing fields of the universe . . .

The view put forward here, which is also surely the "ground-
work" for the eclecticism of Yeats, is that values, become de-
tached from facts, can nevertheless remain liquescent and molten
in our consciousness. Whatever the objections to this view (and
the objections are all of the kind that point out that to expect
men to believe in values that are unsupported by dogmas and
institutions is expecting altogether too much) , a world of con-
stant change can only be confronted by values so intensely imag-
ined, so spiritualized, that they become independent of dogmas,
institutions, and actual traditional objects. All has to be reborn

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 239

each instant as memory to confront external change. And if the
poets are incapable of such incandescence, then the divorce be-
tween dogmatic beliefs they nurture in themselves for the sake of
their art, and the world of changing appearances will become
evident. Or those who are today's up-to-date critics tied to the
values of the Great Tradition will become tomorrow's antiquar-
ies. As Rilke puts the matter:

Even for our grandfathers a house, a fountain, a familiar tower, their
vcr)' clodies, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate;
almost every object a vessel in which they found something human or
added their morsel of humanity. Now, from America, empty different
things crowd over to us, counterfeit things, the veriest dummies. A
house, in the American sense, an American apple or one of the vines of
that country has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape
into whicli have entered the hope and mediation of our forefathers.
The lived and living things, the things that share our thoughts, these
are on the decline and can no more be replaced. We are perhaps the
last to have known such things. The responsibility rests with us not only
to keep remembrance of them (that would be but a trifle and unreli-
able) , but also their human or 'laric' value ('laric' in the sense of
household gods) . The earth has no alternative but to become invisi-
ble— IN us, who with a portion of our being have a share in the
Invisible, or at least the appearance of sharing; we who can multiply
our possessions of the Invisible during our earthly existence, in us alone
can there be accomplished this intimate and continual transmutation of
the Visible into the Invisiiile . . . just as our destiny becomes unceas-
ingly more present, and at the same time invisible, in us.

The machinery of the symbolism of the angels becomes apparent.
They are the agents which transform the memoried past into the
invisible which flows over and acts upon the present.

•1. The Alternate Life of Art. By this I mean something dif-
ferent from (2) the hope that art might become the agency for
inspiring a transformed society, and (3) the use of art to inter-
pret the external materialism into the language of inner life. The
Alternate Life is when it is intended that the processes of art are
brought close to the borderline ecstatic or sexual experiences. I
am thinking here of the exaltation of violence, sexual relations,
madness, drugs, through art which is regarded by the artist as a

240 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

transition towards the actual experience of these states. Lawrence
surely often regarded his writing not as an end but as a means of
inducing in the reader a state of feeling which would release in
him the "dark forces" or "phallic consciousness," or the approach
to the mystic-physical sexual union which were more important
to him than the writing on the page.

The tendency here is to regard writing as hallucinatory: that is
to say as a literary technique for inducing non-literary sensations.
The poet, supposedly, has a peculiar insight into life-sensations
which he upholds as more "real" than the externals which are
everyday reality. The surrealists used poetry as a technique for
inducing states of mind supposedly super-real. It might be said
that surrealist writing is itself the super-reality, but if this were
true, it would only be in the way that incantation may itself be
what is invoked: a strangeness of feeling without language that
lies beyond the threshold of the words. However much one
disapproves of non-literary aims in literature, nevertheless there
is importance for literature itself in the view of writing as pro-
vider of alternate life. For we live in a time when material values
are generally regarded as the most important ones, sometimes for
selfish reasons, but sometimes also (as in the case of those who
want to improve the material conditions of the poor) for altruis-
tic ones. Therefore the view that there are "other" values of
living becomes extremely important for art, even if it accepts the
subsidiary position of being only a means to attain ends which lie
outside art. The definition of surrealism, by Andre Breton, which
I quote from David Gascoyne's Surrealism, is relevant:

Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to
express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of
thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by
the real reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

Encycl. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of
the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to
do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for
them in the solution of the principal problem of life.

Just as futurism is the expression of an impulse to repudiate
the whole of the past which is common to several movements

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 241

called by diflerent names, so surrealism has features in common
with quite a few other movements. All the "alternate life of art"
movements attempt to discover through art, or to use art to
discover, spiritual, sensual, or esoteric forces, which restore the
balance of inner life against industrialized societies.

The tendency to seek such a compensation of life through art,
and of art through life, was already present with Byron, Keats
and Shelley. "Oh for a life of pure sensation!" apostrophized
Keats.

Sensuality tinged with despair and anticipation of death
tended to produce a mood in which he regarded the taste of a
peach or rose, with its further suggestion of a drug, as lines of
poetry, lines of poetry as a peach or rose. He was tasting, I
suggest, at these moments the taste of his own being as a poet,
and delighting in it. Today at a later stage of individual despair
there is a meeting ground in drugs, violence, sexual relations,
hallucination, madness, between poets and non-poets who live
the life of poetry regarded as experienced sensation. The "dark
forces" released through sexual passion or through "phallic con-
sciousness," the mystical-physical sexual union, surely suggest in
Lawrence a meeting in which the art-sensation is the equivalent
of the life-sensation. The reader is recommended to have sex in
the way which will identify for him the sensation described in the
words. Significantly, Lawrence disapproved all sex which is not
experienced exactly in the way that he describes, or prescribes it.
And the purpose of this is not, of course, pornographic. It is to
assert the proximate reality and force of experienced sensation
against the abstract supra-personal forces of machinery and social
organization.

Here, the confusion of art-experience with life-experience
seems dangerous. The example of movements such as that of the
Beats in America shows the degradation of life, through art and
of art through life, which follows from the substitution of what is
supposed to be the life of the artist for the effort required to
create art.

5. By the Revolutionary concept of Tradition, I mean the
introduction, into certain works, of selected traditions. Often
such use of tradition seems outrageous to those who regard them-

242 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

selves as traditionalists. A famous example of the transformation,
distortion and even perversion of a tradition into expression of
ideas that may seem its opposite, is Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai.
The traditionally catholic consciousness of Baudelaire realizes
itself in the pursuit of evil. Grace is discovered in damnation, and
the only part of the faith that does not seem to have undergone a
terrible transmutation, is the doctrine of Original Sin. The proc-
ess by which the little flowers of St. Francis become in the late
nineteenth century the flowers of evil, can also be reversed, and a
certain intensity of corruption or debauchery can be taken as a
sign of grace. Claudel was converted to Catholicism by reading
the poems of Rimbaud, poete maudit, par excellence.

The justification of this conversion of traditions into art which
seems almost their opposite is, of course, that for the person who
has been really born into the true life of the tradition the modern
world produces the distortion. If Ulysses were a wanderer on the
stage of the twentieth century, he would be Leopold Bloom. Such
a view may seem too sophisticated, too much part of a world, in
which the poet, or man of letters, has become so isolated from
everything except literature, that there is something dubious
about his claiming to have beliefs in the same sense as ordinary
human beings might have them. One may suspect that the beliefs
of poets who are also critics and who have made profoundly
intellectual analyses of the effects of the world around them on
their situations as poets may have been improvised to bolster up
their own vocation. This is especially so, I think, when the poet
appears to see nothing else in the sum of human progiess than its
undermining of the traditional positions of art.

But when one turns to writers like Gerard Manley Hopkins in
whom faith seems undoubtedly more important than literary
vocational self-interest, one sees the necessity of revolutionizing
traditions in order to express faith in terms of modern life, as
directly arising out of the need for expression. And in a poet like
Wilfred Owen, in whom the human individuality predominates
over the thought-out position of the strategic man of letters, one
notes an irony towards the traditional view of poetry as beauty,
which compares with that of Leopold Bloom being the incarna-
tion of Ulysses in his modern Dublin setting.

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 243

The idea of tradition as an explosive force, an unknown quan-
tity almost, an apocalyptic mystery, something sought out from
the past and chosen by the modern artist, perhaps in a spirit of
grotesque mimicry, something disturbing and shocking, belongs
to the early phase of modernism in poetry and fiction. In paint-
ing it still retains the enormous eclecticism of Malraux's Musee
Imaginaire, the whole of visual art contained within the walls of
the contemporary skull, and in one timeless moment. In an
important paper on The Spirit of Modern Art (published in The
British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. I, No. 3, June 1961) J. P.
Hodin, discussing the visual arts, offers a definition of the mod-
ern:

Modern Art is cognition, the findings of which, often highly special-
ized and elaborated on an analytical basis, are organized into a new
visual order. Linking up with a tradition of its own choice, of universal
significance and without limitations in time and thus breaking with the
chronological tradition generally acknowledged in art history, it strives
for a synthesis in die work of the individual artist and through the
mutual influence of its different trends upon one another; a many-
faceted process moving towards a new unitary concept, a new artistic
tonality, in other words, a style.

This definition would scarcely apply to poetry and criticism in
the English language since the 1930's. It throws light on the
breaking up of the once single modern movement into different
tendencies in each art. One sees this process in Eliot's develop-
ment. The Waste Land admits of a complete eclecticism in the
choice of tradition. But with Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets
the choice has been narrowed to the Christian and, more speci-
fically, to the English Church. Parallel with this, there is in
Eliot's criticism, a corresponding narrowing down of the concept
of tradition. When Eliot defended Ulysses and the earlier work of
Ezra Pound, his concept of tradition surely extended to the
pagan. He greatly admired Frazer's The Golden Bough and I
surmise that he thought that whatever could be used as a myth
was suitable as tradition.

In Yeats's A Vision, a book in which he considered that he had
compiled the storehouse of symbols, myths and imagery for his

244 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

poetry, there is also freedom of choice in tradition. And of course
Pound, in the Cantos, is as eclectic as a painter like Picasso in his
wide wandering over all history and all mythology.

Although the reputation of Yeats is unimpaired, and although
Pound's cantos are vigorously defended, nevertheless the tend-
ency of recent poetry and criticism is against the freedom of
choice of tradition which Yeats, and Pound, and Joyce, and Eliot,
in The Waste Land, shared with the painters and with Stravin-
sky. The modern painter, according to Mr. Hodin's account of
what makes him modern, might be seen as asking himself "What
tradition should I choose, that would best serve my purpose in
inventing my own new style?" But the attitude which has more
and more divided the poets from the painters is that poets have
been influenced by critics to ask themselves "what tradition am I
already m?" And the critics have also pressed upon them that the
correct answer to this question is the answer discoverable to
criticism. They have argued, against Mr. Hodin, that there is no
such thing as freedom to choose a tradition which at the same
time breaks with the "chronological tradition." There is — they
have suggested — a choice between true tradition and no tradi-
tion. True tradition is that past which survives in a contin-
uous— if very fragile — line into present life, so that if you appre-
hend it with critical intelligence, it can put you into contact with
some pattern of living in the past. Thus it might be said that
although we do not live in a Christian society, nevertheless, there
is a lifeline of Christian tradition which will lead us back imagi-
natively and intelligently to true Christian communities. But, in
this sense, there is no pagan tradition. There is just a pagan past.

The prevalent argument is more and more on the lines that so
far from there being a freedom of choice among traditions, there
are extremely few lifelines leading back into past traditions.
From this there naturally follows the idea that there is only one
true tradition anyway, and debate in America and England be-
comes more and more concentrated on discussing which is the
true line of the tradition. The tradition is in the Church, say
some. Others, embarrassed by the fact that it is difficult to agree
to this without having to accept the Church's creed, argue that
the tradition is in the "organic community," or New England, or

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • SpCtlcIer 245

the South; and since there is no ciucstion of being able to revive
these communal patterns, they conclude that the tradition exists
simply in the library of works written by the best writers who
were privileged to belong to a place and time when the tradition
flourished as actual living.

These lines of thought have disrui)ted, in literature, what was
essentially modern: the vision of the present confronted by the
past as a whole state of being. The vision of a whole modern
world — a whole fatality — related to a past which is also whole, if
only in not being modern, is, let me emphasize again, essentially
the characteristic of the modern. As Rilke writes in the letter
already cited: "We let it be emphasized again, in the sense of the
Elegies "WE are the transmuters of the earth; our whole existence
here, the flights and falls of our love, all strengthen us for this
task (besides which there is really no other) ."

The connection of the idea of wholeness (the past as a whole,
the task of the artist to interpret it into the wholeness of the
present fatality) with freedom of choice to select any part of the
past as tradition, should be apparent. The attitude of most recent
critics to the traditional in the work of D. H. Lawrence, demon-
strates the way in which a partial interpretation can be super-im-
posed on what, in the life and work of the writer himself, was the
search for wholeness. F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart and others
acclaim Lawrence as the great exemplar of the alternative tradi-
tion: the chapel-going, Bunyanesque, proletarian. In doing this
they make him the champion of what is hopefully looked forward
to as a new socialist puritan revolution, with roots in Cromwel-
lian England, against the upper class public school Oxford and
Cambridge and Bloomsbury culture.

It is of course quite possible to quote from Fantasia of the
Unconscious and several of his essays to make him fit such a role.
On the whole, Lawrence was probably more of a socialist than a
Fascist or the blood-and-soil race-conscious Nazi whom Bertrand
Russell saw in him. But even though the socialist and puritan
working-class sentiments he sometimes expressed may prove that
he was capable of playing the kind of part that is now being
written out of his own books for him, in fact he refused it, even
though he wrote some of its speeches. His actions and the greater

246 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

part of his writing show that he was largely concerned with
getting away from the very tradition which he is now being
written (or analyzed) into. And those who put him back in this
tradition have somehow to ignore the fact that he left Notting-
ham and England and wandered over the earth in search pre-
cisely of a tradition which he felt to be lacking as much among
his "own" people as among the Bloomsbury intellectuals. More-
over the traditions — whether of Italian peasants, Etruscans, Aztec
or pueblo Indians — of which he went in search were precisely
those which, from the point of view of the literary sociologists
who are concerned with establishing effective connections be-
tween past and present, were most illusory and useless.

The reason why Lawrence in fact refused the role now being
thrust on him of leader of an English alternative tradition puri-
tan revival is, surely, that he rejected the idea of being that kind
of partisan. Although he was as much against the English upper
class and the Oxbridge common rooms as any inmate of a Red
Brick University common room could wish, he was not for Not-
tingham and the mines either. He had virtuous weaknesses which
made partisan action impossible for him — a complete inability to
co-operate with sociological types, and professors: above all a
blind, hysterical hatred of industrial ugliness, and an utter un-
willingness to work for any cause which had to deal in its terms.
But the real objection is that he was, despite his contempt for all
the literary sets, in the most essential respect a modern: that is to
say, he saw contemporary civilization as a whole consciousness
which would eventually engulf all the future and which already
had only left in primitive civilizations those pockets of uncon-
temporary existence which he sought out. And in thinking that
hope for the future could only begin by a change of consciousness
occurring within the individual, and between individuals in their
mutual spiritual and physical awareness, he was committing his
trust to people who were points of consciousness of what had
happened to the whole of civilization and who realized that the
answer to this was also the total change of consciousness.

What I have described here as the revolutionary concept of
tradition was, then, of fundamental importance to the modern
movement, because it permitted creative minds to view the whole

VISION OF A WHOLE SITUATION • Spender 247

significant past of art at all times and places as an available
tradition out of which modern forms and style might derive. The
reversal to the idea of instituiionali/cd or continuous tradition
probably contributed more than any other cause to the collapse
in literature of the modern movement. The difference between
all that was what Hodin calls "a tradition of its own choice" and
connected, institutionalized tradition, is apparent, I think in the
gulf that separates The ]Vaste Land from Four Quartets. It may
well be that the change was, in literature, at all events, inevitable.
All the same the price that is paid for the present reaction is the
abandonment of the aim of representing a whole modern situa-
tion, which produced the greatest works of the modern move-
ment: withdrawn into the limited fortified area that is the out-
post of what remains of the continuous line of the tradition,
poets turn away from the vast areas of the modern world where
these connections no longer count, critics use the communicating
lines as a means of getting back into the works of the past, and
condemning all that is modern and unprecedented. Myth be-
comes split off from tradition, mere illustration for academic
poems by academic poets. Inevitably, poetry seems as an art to
have receded, and while painters digress into futurism, the most
hopeful tendency in literature is the realism of novelists and
playwTights oblivious of the aims that were modern, but at least
contemporaries in the manner of Arnold Bennett, and energetic
propagandists of an impassioned argument that they are in the
line of the true tradition. In place of the upper class
tradition — universally admitted to be in decline — they have in
England set up their little standard of insularity.

Although the present reaction may be inevitable, it seems
impo'^sible, on the premises now put forward by criticism and by
novelists and playwrights content to be contemporaries in a
limited social realist tradition, that work on the scale of the
greatest achievements earlier in the century could be written.
Re-consideration of the aims of the modern and an attempt to
relate them to the most vigorous developments today, are surely
necessary.

The Ideology of Modernism

GEORG LUKACS

It is in no way surprising that the most influential contempo-
rary school of writing should still be committed to the dogmas of
'modernist' anti-realism. It is here that we must begin our investi-
gation if we are to chart the possibilities of a bourgeois realism.
We must compare the two main trends in contemporary bour-
geois literature, and look at the answers they give to the major
ideological and artistic questions of our time.

We shall concentrate on the underlying ideological basis of
these trends (ideological in the above-defined, not in the strictly
philosophical, sense) . What must be avoided at all costs is the
approach generally adopted by bourgeois-modernist critics them-
selves: that exaggerated concern with formal criteria, with ques-
tions of style and literary technique. This approach may appear
to distinguish sharply between 'modern' and 'traditional' writing
(i.e. contemporary writers who adhere to the styles of the last
century) . In fact it fails to locate the decisive formal problems
and turns a blind eye to their inherent dialectic. We are pre-
sented with a false polarization which, by exaggerating the im-
portance of stylistic differences, conceals the opposing principles
actually underlying and determining contrasting styles.

To take an example: the monologue interieur. Compare, for
instance, Bloom's monologue in the lavatory or Molly's mono-
logue in bed, at the beginning and at the end of Ulysses, with
Goethe's early-morning monologue as conceived by Thomas
Mann in his Lotte in Weimar. Plainly, the same stylistic tech-
nique is being employed. And certain of Thomas Mann's remarks

From Georg Lukacs, Realism in Our Time {New York: Harper if Row, 1964) .
248

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukcCS 249

about Joyce and his methods would appear to confirm this.

Vet it is not easy to think of any two novels more basically
dissimilar than Ulysses and Lotte in Weimar. This is true even of
the superficially rather similar scenes I have indicated. I am not
referring to the — to my mind — striking difference in intellectual
quality. I refer to the fact that with Joyce the stream-of-conscious-
ness technique is no mere stylistic device; it is itself the formative
principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of
character. Technique here is something absolute; it is part and
parcel of the aesthetic ambition informing Ulysses. With Thomas
Mann, on the other hand, the moiiologne interieur is simply a
technical device, allowing the author to explore aspects of
Goethe's world which would not have been otherwise available.
Goethe's experience is not presented as confined to momentary
sense-impressions. The artist reaches down to the core of Goethe's
personality, to the complexity of his relations with his own past,
present, and even future experience. The stream of association is
only apparently free. The monologue is composed with the ut-
most artistic rigour: it is a carefully plotted sequence gradually
piercing to the core of Goethe's personality. Every person or
event, emerging momentarily from the stream and vanishing
again, is given a specific weight, a definite position, in the pattern
of the whole. However unconventional the presentation, the
compositional principle is that of the traditional epic; in the way
the pace is controlled, and the transitions and climaxes are organ-
ized, the ancient rules of epic narration are faithfully observed.

It would be absurd, in view of Joyce's artistic ambitions and
his manifest abilities, to qualify the exaggerated attention he
gives to the detailed recording of sense-data, and his comparative
neglect of ideas and emotions, as artistic failure. All this was in
conformity with Joyce's artistic intentions; and, by use of such
techniques, he may be said to have achieved them satisfactorily.
But between Joyce's intentions and those of Thomas Mann there
is a total opposition. The perpetually oscillating patterns of
sense- and memory-data, their powerfully charged — but aimless
and directionless — fields of force, give rise to an epic structure
which is static, reflecting a belief in tlic basically static character
of events.

250 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

These opposed views of the world — dynamic and developmen-
tal on the one hand, static and sensational on the other — are of
crucial importance in examining the two schools of literature I
have mentioned. I shall return to the opposition later. Here, I
want only to point out that an exclusive emphasis on formal
matters can lead to serious misunderstanding of the character of
an artist's work.

What determines the style of a given work of art? How does the
intention determine the form? (We are concerned here, of
course, with the intention realized in the work; it need not
coincide with the writer's conscious intention) . The distinctions
that concern us are not those between stylistic 'techniques' in the
formalistic sense. It is the view of the world, the ideology or
Weltanschauung underlying a writer's work, that counts. And it is
the writer's attempt to reproduce this view of the world which
constitutes his 'intention' and is the formative principle under-
lying the style of a given piece of writing. Looked at in this way,
style ceases to be a formalistic category. Rather, it is rooted in
content; it is the specific form of a specific content.

Content determines form. But there is no content of which
Man himself is not the focal point. However various the donnees
of literature (a particular experience, a didactic purpose) , the
basic question is, and will remain: what is Man?

Here is a point of division: if we put the question in abstract,
philosophical terms, leaving aside all formal considerations, we
arrive — for the realist school — at the traditional Aristotelian dic-
tum (which was also reached by other than purely aesthetic
considerations) : Man is zoon politikon, a social animal. The
Aristotelian dictum is applicable to all great realistic literature.
Achilles and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Jones, Antigone and
Anna Karenina: their individual existence — their Sein an sich, in
the Hegelian terminology; their 'ontological being', as a more
fashionable terminology has it — cannot be distinguished from
their social and historical environment. Their human signifi-
cance, their specific individuality cannot be separated from the
context in which they were created.

The ontological view governing the image of man in the work
of leading modernist writers is the exact opposite of this. Man,

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 251

for these writers, is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter
into relationships with other human beings. Thomas Wolfe once
wrote: 'My view of the world is based on the firm conviction that
solitariness is by no means a rare condition, something peculiar
to myself or to a few specially solitary human beings, but the
inescapable, central fact of human existence.' Man, thus imag-
ined, may establish contact with other individuals, but only in a
superficial, accidental manner; only, ontologically speaking, by
retrospective reflection. For 'the others', too, are basically solitary,
beyond significant human relationship.

This basic solitariness of man must not be confused with that
individual solitariness to be found in the literature of traditional
realism. In the latter case, we are dealing with a particular
situation in which a human being may be placed, due either to
liis character or to the circumstances of his life. Solitariness may
be objectively conditioned, as with Sophocles' Philoctetes, put
ashore on the bleak island of Lemnos. Or it may be subjective,
the product of inner necessity, as with Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyitsch or
Flaubert's Fr^d^ric Moreau in the Education Sentimentale. But
it is always merely a fragment, a phase, a climax or anticlimax, in
the life of the community as a whole. The fate of such individu-
als is characteristic of certain human types in specific social or
historical circumstances. Beside and beyond their solitariness, the
common life, the strife and togetherness of other human beings,
goes on as before. In a word, their solitariness is a specific social
fate, not a universal condition humaine.

The latter, of course, is characteristic of the theory and practice
of modernism. I would like, in the present study, to spare the
reader tedious excursions into philosophy. But I cannot refrain
from drawing the reader's attention to Heidegger's description of
lumian existence as a 'thrownness-into-being' (Geworfenheit ins
Dasein) . A more graphic evocation of the ontological solitariness
of the individual would be hard to imagine. Man is 'thrown-into-
bcing'. This implies, not merely that man is constitutionally
unable to establish relationships with things or persons outside
himself; but also that it is impossible to determine theoretically
the origin and goal of human existence.

Man, thus conceived, is an ahistorical being. (The fact that

252 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

Heidegger does admit a form of 'authentic' historicity in his
system is not really relevant. I have shown elsewhere that Heideg-
ger tends to belittle historicity as 'vulgar'; and his 'authentic'
historicity is not distinguishable from ahistoricity) . This nega-
tion of history takes two different forms in modernist literature.
First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own
experience. There is not for him — and apparently not for his
creator — any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon
him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is
without personal history. He is 'thrown-into-the- world': meaning-
lessly, unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with
the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it. The only
'development' in this literature is the gradual revelation of the
human condition. Man is now what he has always been and
always will be. The narrator, the examining subject, is in mo-
tion; the examined reality is static.

Of course, dogmas of this kind are only really viable in philo-
sophical abstraction, and then only with a measure of sophistry.
A gifted writer, however extreme his theoretical modernism, will
in practice have to compromise with the demands of historicity
and of social environment. Joyce uses Dublin, Kafka and Musil
the Hapsburg Monarchy, as the locus of their masterpieces. But
the locus they lovingly depict is little more than a backcloth; it is
not basic to the artistic intention.

This view of human existence has specific literary conse-
quences. Particularly in one category, of primary theoretical and
practical importance, to which we must now give our attention:
that of potentiality. Philosophy distinguishes between abstract
and concrete (in Hegel, 'real') potentiality. These two categories,
their interrelation and opposition, are rooted in life itself. Poten-
tiality— seen abstractly or subjectively — is richer than actual life.
Innumerable possibilities for man's development are imaginable,
only a small percentage of which will be realized. Modern subjec-
tivism, taking these imagined possibilities for actual complexity
of life, oscillates between melancholy and fascination. When the
world declines to realize these possibilities, this melancholy be-
comes tinged with contempt. Hofmannsthal's Sobeide expressed
the reaction of the generation first exposed to this experience:

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • I.ukaCS 253

The burden of those endlessly pored-over
And now forever perished possibilities . . .

How far were those possibilities even concrete or 'real'?
Plainly, they existed only in the imagination of the subject, as
dreams or day-dreams. Faulkner, in whose work this subjective
potentiality plays an important part, was evidently aware that
reality must thereby be subjectivized and made to appear arbi-
trary. Consider this comment of his: 'They were all talking
simultaneously, getting flushed and excited, quarrelling, making
the unreal into a possibility, then into a probability, then into an
irrefutable fact, as human beings do when they put their wishes
into words.' The possibilities in a man's mind, the particular
pattern, intensity and suggestiveness they assume, will of course
be characteristic of tliat individual. In practice, their number
will border on the infinite, even with the most unimaginative
individual. It is thus a hopeless undertaking to define the con-
tours of individuality, let alone to come to grips with a man's
actual fate, by means of potentiality. The abstract character of
potentiality is clear from the fact that it cannot determine devel-
opment— subjective mental states, however permanent or pro-
found, cannot here be decisive. Rather, the development of per-
sonality is determined by inherited gifts and qualities; by the
factors, external or internal, which further or inhibit their
growth.

But in life potentiality can, of course, become reality. Situa-
tions arise in which a man is confronted with a choice; and in the
act of choice a man's character may reveal itself in a light that
surprises even himself. In literature — and particularly in dra-
matic literature — the denouement often consists in the realiza-
tion of just such a potentiality, which circumstances have kept
from coming to the fore. These potentialities are, then, 'real' or
concrete potentialities. The fate of tlie character depends upon
the potentiality in question, even if it should condemn him to a
tragic end. In advance, while still a subjective potentiality in the
character's mind, there is no way of distinguishing it from the
innumerable abstract potentialities in his mind. It may even be
buried away so completely that, before the moment of decision, it
has never entered his mind even as an abstract potentiality. The

254 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

subject, after taking his decision, may be unconscious of his own
motives. Thus Richard Dudgeon, Shaw's Devil's Disciple, having
sacrificed himself as Pastor Andersen, confesses: 'I have often
asked myself for the motive, but I find no good reason to explain
why I acted as I did.'

Yet it is a decision which has altered the direction of his life.
Of course, this is an extreme case. But the qualitative leap of the
denouement, cancelling and at the same time renewing the conti-
nuity of individual consciousness, can never be predicted. The
concrete potentiality cannot be isolated from the myriad abstract
potentialities. Only actual decision reveals the distinction.

The literature of realism, aiming at a truthful reflection of
reality, must demonstrate both the concrete and abstract poten-
tialities of human beings in extreme situations of this kind. A
character's concrete potentiality once revealed, his abstract poten-
tialities will appear essentially inauthentic. Moravia, for instance,
in his novel The Indifferent Ones, describes the young son of a
decadent bourgeois family, Michel, who makes up his mind to
kill his sister's seducer. While Michel, having made his decision,
is planning the murder, a large number of abstract — but highly
suggestive — possibilities are laid before us. Unfortunately for
Michel the murder is actually carried out; and, from the sordid
details of the action, Michel's character emerges as what it is —
representative of that background from which, in subjective fan-
tasy, he had imagined he could escape.

Abstract potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectiv-
ity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic
between the individual's subjectivity and objective reality. The
literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of
actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world. Only in
the interaction of character and environment can the concrete
potentiality of a particular individual be singled out from the
'bad infinity' of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the
determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase
of his development. This principle alone enables the artist to
distinguish concrete potentiality from a myriad abstractions.

But the ontology on which the image of man in modernist
literature is based invalidates this principle. If the 'human condi-

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 255

tion' — man as a solitary being, incapable of meaningful relation-
ships— is identified with reality itself, the distinction between
abstract and concrete potentiality becomes null and void. The
categories tend to merge. Thus Cesare Pavese notes with John
Dos Passos, and his German contemporary, Alfred Doblin, a
sharp oscillation between 'superficial vcrisme' and 'abstract Ex-
pressionist schematism'. Criticizing Dos Passos, Pavese writes that
fictional characters 'ought to be created by deliberate selection
and description of individual features' — implying that Dos Pas-
sos' characterizations are transferable from one individual to
another. He describes the artistic consequences: by exalting
man's subjectivity, at the expense of the objective reality of his
environment, man's subjectivity itself is impoverished.

The problem, once again, is ideological. This is not to say that
the ideolog)' underlying modernist writings is identical in all
cases. On the contrary: the ideology exists in extremely various,
even contradictory forms. The rejection of narrative objectivity,
the surrender to subjectivity, may take the form of Joyce's stream
of consciousness, or of Musil's 'active passivity', his 'existence
without quality', or of Gide's 'action gratuite' , where abstract
potentiality achieves pseudo-realization. As individual character
manifests itself in life's moments of decision, so too in literature.
If the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality van-
ishes, if man's inwardness is identified with an abstract subjectiv-
ity, human personality must necessarily disintegrate.

T. S. Eliot described this phenomenon, this mode of portraying
human personality, as

Shape without form, shade without colour.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.

The disintegration of personality is matched by a disintegration
of the outer world. In one sense, this is simply a further conse-
quence of our argument. For the identification of abstract and
concrete human potentiality rests on the assumption that the
objective world is inherently inexplicable. Certain leading mod-
ernist writers, attempting a theoretical apolog)-, have admitted
this quite frankly. Often this theoretical impossibility of under-
standing reality is the point of departure, rather than the exalta-

256 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

tion of subjectivity. But in any case the connection between the
two is plain. The German poet Gottfried Benn, for instance,
informs us that 'there is no outer reahty, there is only human
consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new
•worlds out of its own creativity'. Musil, as always, gives a moral
twist to this line of thought. Ulrich, the hero of his The Man
without Qualities, when asked what he would do if he were in
God's place, replies: 'I should be compelled to abolish reality.'
Subjective existence 'without qualities' is the complement of the
negation of outward reality.

The negation of outward reality is not always demanded with
such theoretical rigour. But it is present in almost all modernist
literature. In conversation, Musil once gave as the period of his
great novel, 'between 1912 and 1914'. But he was quick to modify
this statement by adding: "I have not, I must insist, written a
historical novel. I am not concerned with actual events. . . .
Events, anyhow, are interchangeable. I am interested in what is
typical, in what one might call the ghostly aspect of reality.' The
word 'ghostly' is interesting. It points to a major tendency in
modernist literature: the attenuation of actuality. In Kafka, the
descriptive detail is of an extraordinary immediacy and authentic-
ity. But Kafka's artistic ingenuity is really directed towards sub-
stituting his angst-ridden vision of the world for objective reality.
The realistic detail is the expression of a ghostly un-reality, of a
nightmare world, whose function is to evoke angst. The same
phenomenon can be seen in writers who attempt to combine
Kafka's techniques with a critique of society — like the German
writer, Wolfgang Koeppen, in his satirical novel about Bonn, Das
Treibhaus. A similar attenuation of reality underlies Joyce's
stream of consciousness. It is, of course, intensified where the
stream of consciousness is itself the medium through which real-
ity is presented. And it is carried ad absurdum where the stream
of consciousness is that of an abnormal subject or of an idiot —
consider the first part of Faulkner's Sound and Fury or, a still
more extreme case, Beckett's Molloy.

Attenuation of reality and dissolution of personality are thus
interdependent: the stronger the one, the stronger the other.
Underlying both is the lack of a consistent view of human nature.

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 257

Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential frag-
ments; he is as inexplicable to others as to himself. In Eliot's
Cocktail Party the psychiatrist, \vho voices the opinions of the
author, describes the phenomenon:

Ah, but we die to each other daily

What we know of other people

Is only our memor\' of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember

That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

The dissolution of personality, originally the unconscious
product of the identification of concrete and abstract potential-
ity, is elevated to a deliberate principle in the light of conscious-
ness. It is no accident that Gottfried Benn called one of his
theoretical tracts 'Doppellehen'. For Benn, this dissolution of
personality took the form of a schizophrenic dichotomy, .\ccord-
ing to him, there was in man's personality no coherent pattern of
motivation or behaviour. Man's animal nature is opposed to his
denaturized, sublimated thought-processes. The unity of thought
and action is 'backwoods philosophy'; thought and being are
'quite separate entities'. Man must be either a moral or a think-
ing being — he cannot be both at once.

These are not, I think, purely private, eccentric speculations.
Of course, they are derived from Benn's specific experience. But
there is an inner connection between these ideas and a certain
tradition of bourgeois thought. It is more than a hundred years
since Kierkegaard first attacked the Hegelian view that the inner
and outer world form an objective dialectical unity, that they are
indissolubly married in spite of their apparent opposition. Kier-
kegaard denied any such unity. According to Kierkegaard, the
individual exists within an opaque, impenetrable 'incognito'.

This philosophy attained remarkable popularity after the Sec-
ond World \Var — proof that even the most abstruse theories may
reflect social reality. Men like Martin Heidegger. Ernst Jiinger,
the lawyer Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn and others passionately

258 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

embraced this doctrine of the eternal incognito which implies
that a man's external deeds are no guide to his motives. In this
case, the deeds obscured behind the mysterious incognito were,
needless to say, these intellectuals' participation in Nazism: Hei-
degger, as Rector of Freiburg University, had glorified Hitler's
seizure of power at his Inauguration; Carl Schmitt had put his
great legal gifts at Hitler's disposal. The facts were too well-
known to be simply denied. But, if this impenetrable incognito
were the true 'condition humaine', might not — concealed within
their incognito — Heidegger or Schmitt have been secret oppo-
nents of Hitler all the time, only supporting him in the world of
appearances? Ernst von Salomon's cynical frankness about his
opportunism in The Questionnaire (keeping his reservations to
himself or declaring them only in the presence of intimate
friends) may be read as an ironic commentary on this ideology of
the incognito as we find it, say, in the writings of Ernst Jiinger.
This digression may serve to show, taking an extreme example,
"what the social implications of such an ontology may be. In the
literary field, this particular ideology was of cardinal importance;
by destroying the complex tissue of man's relations with his
environment, it furthered the dissolution of personality. For it is
just the opposition between a man and his environment that
determines the development of his personality. There is no great
hero of fiction — from Homer's Achilles to Mann's Adrian Lev-
erkiihn or Sholochov's Grigory Melyekov — whose personality is
not the product of such an opposition. I have shown how disas-
trous the denial of the distinction between abstract and concrete
potentiality must be for the presentation of character. The de-
struction of the complex tissue of man's interaction with his
environment likewise saps the vitality of this opposition. Cer-
tainly, some writers who adhere to this ideology have attempted,
not unsuccessfully, to portray this opposition in concrete terms.
But the underlying ideology deprives these contradictions of
their dynamic, developmental significance. The contradictions
co-exist, unresolved, contributing to the further dissolution of the
personality in question.

It is to the credit of Robert Musil that he was quite conscious
of the implications of his method. Of his hero Ulrich he re-

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 259

marked: 'One is faced with a simple choice: either one must run
with the pack (when in Rome, do as the Romans do) ; or one
becomes a neurotic' Musil here introduces the problem, central
to all modernist literature, of the significance of psychopathology.

This problem was first widely discussed in the Naturalist pe-
riod. More than fifty years ago, that doyen of Berlin dramatic
critics, Alfred Kerr, was writing: 'Morbidity is the legitimate
poetry of Naturalism. For what is poetic in everyday life? Neu-
rotic aberration, escape from life's dreary routine. Only in this
way can a character be translated to a rarer clime and yet retain
an air of reality.' Interesting, here, is the notion that the poetic
necessity of the pathological derives from the prosaic quality of
life under capitalism. I would maintain — we shall return to this
point — that in modern writing there is a continuity from Natu-
ralism to the Modernism of our day — a continuity restricted,
admittedlv, to underlying ideological principles. What at first
was no more than dim anticipation of approaching catastrophe
developed, after 1914, into an all-pervading obsession. And I
would suggest that the ever-increasing part played by psychopath-
ology was one of the main features of the continuity. At each
period — depending on the prevailing social and historical condi-
tions— ps^chopatholo,g^' was given a new emphasis, a different
significance and artistic function. Kerr's description suggests that
in naturalism the interest in psychopathology sprang from an
aesthetic need; it was an attempt to escape from the dreariness of
life imder capitalism. The quotation from Musil shows that some
years later the opposition acquired a moral slant. The obsession
with morbiditv had ceased to have a merely decorative function,
bringing colour into the greyness of reality, and become a moral
protest against capitalism.

With Musil — and with many other modernist writers —
psychopathology- became the goal, the trrminus nd qurm, of their
artistic intention. But there is a double difficulty inherent in
their intention, which follows from its underlving ideology.
There is. first, a lack of definition. The protest expressed by this
flight into psychopathology is an abstract gesture; its rejection of
realitv is wholesale and simimarv, containing no concrete criti-
cism. It is a gesture, moreover, that is destined to lead nowhere; it
is an escape into nothingness. Thus the propagators of this ideol-

260 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

ogy are mistaken in thinking that such a protest could ever be
fruitful in literature. In any protest against particular social
conditions, these conditions themselves must have the central
place. The bourgeois protest against feudal society, the proleta-
rian against bourgeois society, made their point of departure a
criticism of the old order. In both cases the protest — reaching out
beyond the point of departure — was based on a concrete terminus
ad quem: the establishment of a new order. However indefinite
the structure and content of this new order, the will towards its
more exact definition was not lacking.

How dilTerent the protest of writers like Musil! The terminus a
quo (the corrupt society of our time) is inevitably the main
source of energy, since the terminus ad quem (the escape into
psychopathology) is a mere abstraction. The rejection of modern
reality is purely subjective. Considered in terms of man's relation
with his environment, it lacks both content and direction. And
this lack is exaggerated still further by the character of the
terminus ad quem. For the protest is an empty gesture, expressing
nausea, or discomfort, or longing. Its content — or rather lack of
content — derives from the fact that such a view of life cannot
impart a sense of direction. These writers are not wholly wrong
in believing that psychopathology is their surest refuge; it is the
ideological complement of their historical position.

This obsession with the pathological is not only to be found in
literature. Freudian psychoanalysis is its most obvious expression.
The treatment of the subject is only superficially different from
that in modern literature. As everybody knows, Freud's starting
point was 'everyday life'. In order to explain 'slips' and day-
dreams, however, he had to have recourse to psychopathology. In
his lectures, speaking of resistance and repression, he says: 'Our
interest in the general psychology of symptom-formation in-
creases as we understand to what extent the study of pathological
conditions can shed light on the workings of the normal mind.'
Freud believed he had found the key to the understanding of the
normal personality in the psychology of the abnormal. This
belief is still more evident in the typology of Kretschmer, which
also assumes that psychological abnormalities can explain normal
psychology. It is only when we compare Freud's psychology with

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukoCS 261

that of Pavlov, who takes the Hippocratic view that mental
abnormality is a deviation from a norm, that we see it in its true
light.

Clearly, this is not strictly a scientific or literary-critical prob-
lem. It is an ideological problem, deriving from the ontological
dogma of the solitariness of man. The literature of realism, based
on the Aristotelean concept of man as zoon politikon, is entitled
to develop a new typology for each new phase in the evolution of
a society. It displays the contradictions within society and within
tlie individual in the context of a dialectical unity. Here, individ-
uals embodying violent and extraordinary passions are still
within the range of a socially normal typology (Shakespeare,
Balzac, Stendhal) . For, in this literature, the average man is
simply a dimmer reflection of the contradictions always existing
in man and society; eccentricity is a socially-conditioned distor-
tion. Obviously, the passions of the great heroes must not be
confused with 'eccentricity' in the colloquial sense: Christian
Buddenbrook is an 'eccentric'; Adrian Leverkuhn is not.

The ontology of Geworjciihcit makes a true typology impossi-
ble; it is replaced by an abstract polarity of the eccentric and the
socially-average. We have seen why this polarity — which in tradi-
tional realism senses to increase our understanding of social
normality — leads in modernism to a fascination with morbid
eccentricity. Eccentricity becomes the necessary complement of
the average; and this polarity is held to exhaust human potential-
ity. The implications of this ideology are shown in another
remark of Musil's: 'If humanity dreamt collectively, it would
dream Moosbrugger.' Moosbrugger, you will remember, was a
mentally-retarded sexual pervert with homicidal tendencies.

What served, with Musil, as the ideological basis of a new
typology — escape into neurosis as a protest against the evils of
society — becomes with other modernist writers an immutable
condition humaine. Musil's statement loses its conditional 'if
and becomes a simple description of reality. Lack of objectivity
in the description of the outer world finds its conijilcment in the
reduction of reality to a nightmare. Beckett's Molloy is perhaps
the ne plus ultra of this development, although Joyce's vision of
reality as an incoherent stream of consciousness had already

262 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

assumed in Faulkner a nightmare quality. In Beckett's novel we
have the same vision twice over. He presents us with an image of
the utmost human degradation — an idiot's vegetative existence.
Then, as help is imminent from a mysterious unspecified source,
the rescuer himself sinks into idiocy. The story is told through
the parallel streams of consciousness of the idiot and of his
rescuer.

Along with the adoption of perversity and idiocy as types of
the condition humaine, we find what amounts to frank glorifica-
tion. Take Montherlant's Pasiphae, where sexual perversity — the
heroine's infatuation with a bull — is presented as a triumphant
return to nature, as the liberation of impulse from the slavery of
convention. The chorus — i.e. the author — puts the following
question (which, though rhetorical, clearly expects an affirmative
reply) : 'Si I'absence de pens^e et I'absence de morale ne contri-
buent pas beaucoup k la dignity des betes, des plantes et des eaux
. . . ?' Montherlant expresses as plainly as Musil, though with
different moral and emotional emphasis, the hidden — one might
say repressed — social character of the protest underlying this
obsession with psychopathology, its perverted Rousseauism, its^
anarchism. There are many illustrations of this in modernist
writing. A poem of Benn's will serve to make the point:

O tfiat we were our primal ancestors,
Small lumps of plasma in hot, sultry swamps;
Life, death, conception, parturition
Emerging from those juices soundlessly.

A frond of seaweed or a dune of sand,
Formed by the wind and heavy at the base;
A dragonfly or gull's wing — already, these
Would signify excessive suffering.

This is not overtly perverse in the manner of Beckett or Mon-
therlant. Yet, in his primitivism, Benn is at one with them. The
opposition of man as animal to man as social being (for instance,
Heidegger's devaluation of the social as 'das Man', Klages' asser-
tion of the incompatibility of Geist and Seele, or Rosenberg's
racial mythology) leads straight to a glorification of the abnor-
mal and to an undisguised anti-humanism.

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 263

A typolog)' limited in this way to the homme moyen sensuel
and the idiot also opens the door to 'experimental' stylistic distor-
tion. Distortion becomes as inseparable a part of tlie portrayal of
reality as the recourse to the pathological. But literature must
have a concept of the normal if it is to 'place' distortion correctly;
that is to say, to see it as distortion. AVith such a typology this
placing is impossible, since the normal is no longer a proper
object of literary interest. Life under capitalism is, often rightly,
presented as a distortion (a petrification or paralysis) of the
human substance. But to present psychopathology as a way of
escape from this distortion is itself a distortion. We are invited to
measure one type of distortion against another and arrive, neces-
sarily, at universal distortion. There is no principle to set against
the general pattern, no standard by which the petty-bourgeois
and the pathological can be seen in their social context. And
these tendencies, far from being relativized with time, become
ever more absolute. Distortion becomes the normal condition of
human existence; the proper study, the formative principle, of
art and literature.

I have demonstrated some of the literary implications of this
ideology. Let us now pursue the argument further. It is clear, I
think, that modernism must deprive literature of a sense of
perspective. This would not be surprising; rigorous modernists
such as Kafka, Benn, and Musil have always indignantly refused
to provide their readers with any such thing. I will return to the
ideological implications of the idea of perspective later. Let me
say here that, in any work of art, perspective is of overriding
importance. It determines the course and content; it draws to-
gether the threads of the narration; it enables the artist to choose
between the important and the superficial, the crucial and the
episodic. The direction in which characters develop is deter-
mined by perspective, only those features being described which
are material to their development. The more lucid the perspec-
tive— as in Moli^re or the Greeks — the more economical and
striking the selection.

Modernism drops this selective principle. It asserts that it can
dispense with it, or can replace it with its dogma of the condition

264 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

humaine. A naturalistic style is bound to be the result. This state
of affairs — which to my mind characterizes all modernist art of
the past fifty years — is disguised by critics who systematically
glorify the modernist movement. By concentrating on formal
criteria, by isolating technique from content and exaggerating its
importance, these critics refrain from judgment on the social or
artistic significance of subject-matter. They are unable, in conse-
quence, to make the aesthetic distinction between realism and
naturalism. This distinction depends on the presence or absence
in a work of art of a 'hierarchy of significance' in the situations
and characters presented. Compared with this, formal categories
are of secondary importance. That is why it is possible to speak of
the basically naturalistic character of modernist literature — and
to see here the literary expression of an ideological continuity.
This is not to deny that variations in style reflect changes in
society. But the particular form this principle of naturalistic
arbitrariness, this lack of hierarchic structure, may take is not
decisive. We encounter it in the all-determining 'social condi-
tions' of Naturalism, in Symbolism's impressionist methods and
its cultivation of the exotic, in the fragmentation of objective
reality in Futurism and Constructivism and the German Neue
Sachlichkeit, or, again, in Surrealism's stream of consciousness.

These schools have in common a basically static approach to
reality. This is closely related to their lack of perspective. Charac-
teristically, Gottfried Benn actually incorporated this in his artis-
tic programme. One of his volumes bears the title. Static Poems.
The denial of history, of development, and thus of perspective,
becomes the mark of true insight into the nature of reality.

The wise man is ignorant

of change and development

his children and children's children

are no part of his world.

The rejection of any concept of the future is for Benn the
criterion of wisdom. But even those modernist writers who are
less extreme in their rejection of history tend to present social
and historical phenomena as static. It is, then, of small impor-
tance whether this condition is 'eternal', or only a transitional

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 265

Stage punctuated by sudden catastrophes (even in early Natural-
ism the static presentation was often broken up by these catas-
troplies, without altering its basic character) . Musil, for instance,
writes in his essay. The Writer in our Age: 'One knows just as
little about the present. Partly, this is because we are, as always,
too close to the present. But it is also because the present into
which we were plunged some two decades ago is of a particularly
all-embracing and inescapable character.' Whether or not Musil
knew of Heidegger's philosophy, tlie idea of Geworfcnheit is
clearly at work here. And the following reveals plainly how, for
Musil, this static state was upset by the catastrophe of 1914: 'All
of a sudden, the world was full of violence. ... In European
civilization, there was a sudden rift. ..." In short: thus static
apprehension of reality in modernist literature is no passing
fashion; it is rooted in the ideology of modernism.

To establish the basic distinction between modernism and that
realism which, from Homer to Thomas Mann and Gorky, has
assumed change and development to be the proper subject of
literature, we must go deeper into the underlying ideological
problem. In The House of the Dead Dostoevsky gave an interest-
ing account of the convict's attitude to work. He described how
the prisoners, in spite of brutal discipline, loafed about, w^orking
badly or merely going through the motions of work until a new
overseer arrived and allotted them a new project, after which
they were allowed to go home. 'The work was hard,' Dostoevsky
continues, 'but, Christ, with what energy they threw themselves
into it! Gone was all their former indolence and pretended
incompetence.' Later in the book Dostoevsky sums up his experi-
ences: 'If a man loses hope and has no aim in view, sheer
boredom can turn him into a beast. . . .' I have said that the
problem of perspective in literature is directly related to the
principle of selection. Let me go further: underlying the problem
is a profound ethical complex, reflected in the composition of the
work itself. Ever)' human action is based on a presupposition of
its inherent meaningfulness, at least to the subject. Absence of
meaning makes a mockery of action and reduces art to naturalis-
tic description.

Clearly, there can be no literature without at least tiie appear-

266 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

ance of change or development. This conclusion should not be
interpreted in a narrowly metaphysical sense. We have already
diagnosed the obsession with psychopathology in modernist liter-
ature as a desire to escape from the reality of capitalism. But this
implies the absolute primacy of the terminus a quo, the condition
from which it is desired to escape. Any movement towards a
terminus ad quem is condemned to impotence. As the ideology of
most modernist writers asserts the unalterability of outward real-
ity (even if this is reduced to a mere state of consciousness)
human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of
meaning.

The apprehension of reality to which this leads is most consist-
ently and convincingly realized in the work of Kafka. Kafka
remarks of Josef K., as he is being led to execution: 'He thought of
flies, their tiny limbs breaking as they struggle away from the
fly-paper.' This mood of total impotence, of paralysis in the face
of the unintelligible power of circumstances, informs all his
work. Though the action of The Castle takes a different, even an
opposite, direction to that of The Trial, this view of the world,
from the perspective of a trapped and struggling fly, is all-perva-
sive. This experience, this vision of a world dominated by angst
and of man at the mercy of incomprehensible terrors, makes
Kafka's work the very type of modernist art. Techniques, else-
where of merely formal significance, are used here to evoke a
primitive awe in the presence of an utterly strange and hostile
reality. Kafka's angst is the experience par excellence of modern-
ism.

Two instances from musical criticism — which can afford to be
both franker and more theoretical than literary criticism — show
that it is indeed a universal experience with which we are deal-
ing. The composer, Hanns Eisler, says of Schonberg: 'Long before
the invention of the bomber, he expressed what people were to
feel in the air raid shelters.' Even more characteristic — though
seen from a modernist point of view — is Theodor W. Adorno's
analysis (in The Ageing of Modern Music) of symptoms of
decadence in modernist music: 'The sounds are still the same.
But the experience of angst, which made their originals great, has
vanished.' Modernist music, he continues, has lost touch with the

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 267

truth that was its raison d'etre. Composers are no longer equal to
the emotional presuppositions of their modernism. And that is
why modernist music has failed. The diminution of the original
ar^g,9^obsessed vision of life (whether clue, as Adorno thinks, to
inability to respond to the magnitude of the horror or, as I
believe, to the fact that this obsession with angst among bour-
geois intellectuals has already begun to recede) has brought
about a loss of substance in modern music, and destroyed its
authenticity as a modernist art-form.

This is a shrewd analysis of tlie paradoxical situation of the
modernist artist, particularly where he is trying to express deep
and genuine experience. The deeper the experience, the greater
the damage to the artistic whole. But this tendency towards
disintegration, this loss of artistic unity, cannot be written off as a
mere fashion, the product of experimental gimmicks. Modern
philosophy, after all, encountered these problems long before
modern literature, painting or music. A case in point is the
problem of time. Subjective Idealism had already separated time,
alistractly conceived, from historical cliange and particularity of
place. As if this separation were insufficient for the new age of
imperialism, Bergson widened it further. Experienced time, sub-
jective time, now became identical with real time; the rift be-
tween this time and that of the objective world was complete.
Bergson and other philosophers who took up and varied this
theme claimed that their concept of time alone afforded insight
into authentic, i.e. subjective, reality. The same tendency soon
made its appearance in literature.

The German left-wing critic and essayist of the Twenties,
Walter Benjamin, has well described Proust's vision and the
techniques he uses to present it in his great novel: 'We all know
tliat Proust does not describe a man's life as it actually happens,
but as it is remembered by a man who has lived through it. Yet
tiiis puts it far too crudely. For it is not actual experience that is
important, but the texture of reminiscence, the Penelope's tapes-
try of a man's memory.' The connection with Bergson's theories
of time is obvious. But whereas with Bergson, in the abstraction
of philosophy, the unity of perception is preserved, Benjamin
shows that with Proust, as a result of the radical disintegration of

268 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

the time sequence, objectivity is eliminated: 'A lived event is
finite, concluded at least on the level of experience. But a remem-
bered event is infinite, a possible key to everything that preceded
it and to everything that will follow it.'

It is the distinction between a philosophical and an artistic
vision of the world. However hard philosophy, under the in-
fluence of Idealism, tries to liberate the concepts of space and
time from temporal and spatial particularity, literature continues
to assume their unity. The fact that, nevertheless, the concept of
subjective time cropped up in literature only shows how deeply
subjectivism is rooted in the experience of the modern bourgeois
intellectual. The individual, retreating into himself in despair at
the cruelty of the age, may experience an intoxicated fascination
with his forlorn condition. But then a new horror breaks
through. If reality cannot be understood (or no effort is made to
understand it) , then the individual's subjectivity — alone in the
universe, reflecting only itself — takes on an equally incomprehen-
sible and horrific character. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was to
experience this condition very early in his poetic career:

It is a thing that no man cares to think on.
And far too terrible for mere complaint.
That all things slip from us and pass away,

And that my ego, bound by no outward force —
Once a small child's before it became mine —
Should now be strange to me, like a strange dog.

By separating time from the outer world of objective reality,
the inner world of the subject is transformed into a sinister,
inexplicable flux and acquires — paradoxically, as it may seem — a
static character.

On literature this tendency towards disintegration, of course,
will have an even greater impact than on philosophy. When time
is isolated in this way, the artist's world disintegrates into a
multiplicity of partial worlds. The static view of the world, now
combined with diminished objectivity, here rules unchallenged.
The world of man — the only subject-matter of literature — is shat-
tered if a single component is removed. I have shown the conse-
quences of isolating time and reducing it to a subjective category.

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukdCS 269

But time is by no means the only component whose removal can
lead to such disintegration. Here, again, Hofmannsthal antici-
pated later developments. His imaginary 'Lord Chandos' reflects:
'I have lost the ability to concentrate my thoughts or set them out
coherently.' The result is a condition of apathy, punctuated by
manic fits. The development towards a definitely pathological
protest is here anticipated — admittedly in glamorous, romantic
guise. But it is the same disintegration that is at work.

Previous realistic literature, however violent its criticism of
reality, had always assumed the unity of the world it described
and seen it as a living whole inseparable from man himself. But
the major realists of our time deliberately introduce elements of
disintegration into their work — for instance, the subjectivizing of
time — and use them to protray the contemporary world more
exactly. In this way, the once natural unity becomes a conscious,
constructed unity (I have shown elsewhere that the device of the
two temporal planes in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustiis serves to
emphasize its historicity) . But in modernist literature the disinte-
gration of the world of man — and consequently the disintegra-
tion of personality — coincides with the ideological intention.
Thus angst, this basic modern experience, this by-product of
Geworjenhrit, has its emotional origin in the experience of a
disintegrating society. But it attains its effects by evoking the
disintegration of the world of man.

To complete our examination of modernist literature, we must
consider for a moment the question of allegory. Allegory is that
aesthetic genre which lends itself par excellence to a description
of man's alienation from objective reality. Allegory is a problem-
atic genre because it rejects that assumption of an immanent
meaning to human existence which — however unconscious, how-
ever coml)ined with religious concepts of transcendence — is the
basis of traditional art. Thus in medieval art we observe a new
secularity (in spite of the continued use of religious subjects)
triumpliing more and more, from the time of Giotto, over the
allegorizing of an earlier period.

Certain reservations should be made at this point. First, we
must distinguish between literature and the visual arts. In the
latter, the limitations of allegory can be the more easily overcome

270 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

in that transcendental, allegorical subjects can be clothed in an
aesthetic immanence (even if of a merely decorative kind) and
the rift in reality in some sense be eliminated — we have only to
think of Byzantine mosaic art. This decorative element has no
real equivalent in literature; it exists only in a figurative sense,
and then only as a secondary component. Allegorical art of the
quality of Byzantine mosaic is only rarely possible in literature.
Secondly, we must bear in mind in examining allegory — and this
is of great importance for our argument — a historical distinction:
does the concept of transcendence in question contain within
itself tendencies towards immanence (as in Byzantine art or
Giotto) , or is it the product precisely of a rejection of these
tendencies?

Allegory, in modernist literature, is clearly of the latter kind.
Transcendence implies here, more or less consciously, the nega-
tion of any meaning immanent in the world or the life of
man. . . .

. . . For the conviction that phenomena are not ultimately
transferable is rooted in a belief in the world's rationality and in
man's ability to penetrate its secrets. In realistic literature each
descriptive detail is both individual and typical. Modern alle-
gory, and modernist ideology, however, deny the typical. By
destroying the coherence of the world, they reduce detail to the
level of mere particularity (once again, the connection between
modernism and naturalism is plain) . Detail, in its allegorical
transferability, though brought into a direct, if paradoxical con-
nection with transcendence, becomes an abstract function of the
transcendence to which it points. Modernist literature thus re-
places concrete typicality with abstract particularity. . . . The
only purpose of transcendence — the intangible nichtendes
Nichts — is to reveal the fades hippocratica of the world.

That abstract particularity which we saw to be the aesthetic
consequence of allegory reaches its high mark in Kafka. He is a
marvellous observer; the spectral character of reality affects him
so deeply that the simplest episodes have an oppressive, night-
marish immediacy. As an artist, he is not content to evoke the
surface of life. He is aware that individual detail must point to
general significance. But how does he go about the business of

THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNISM • LukaCS 271

abstraction? He has emptied everyday life of meaning by using
the allegorical method; he has allowed detail to be annihilated
by his transcendental Nothingness. This allegorical transcend-
ence bars Kafka's way to realism, prevents him from investing
observed detail with typical significance. Kafka is not able, in
spite of his extraordinary evocative power, in spite of his unique
sensibility, to achieve that fusion of the particular and the gen-
eral which is the essence of realistic art. His aim is to raise the
individual detail in its immediate particularity (without general-
izing its content) to the level of abstraction. Kafka's method is
typical, here, of modernism's allegorical approach. Specific sub-
ject-matter and stylistic variation tlo not matter; what matters is
the basic ideological determination of form and content. The
particularity we find in Beckett and Joyce, in Musil and Benn,
various as the treatment of it may be, is essentially of the same
kind.

If we combine what we have up to now discussed separately we
arrive at a consistent pattern. We see that modernism leads not
only to the destruction of traditional literary forms; it leads to
the destruction of literature as such. And this is true not only of
Joyce, or of the literature of Expressionism and Surrealism. It
was not Andre Gide's ambition, for instance, to bring about a
revohition in literary style; it was his philosophy that compelled
him to abandon conventional forms. He planned his Faux-Mon-
nayeurs as a novel. But its structure suffered from a characteris-
tically modernist schizophrenia: it was supposed to be written by
the man who was also the hero of the novel. And, in practice,
Gide was forced to admit that no novel, no work of literature
could be constructed in that way. We liave here a practical
demonstration that — as Benjamin showed in another
context — modernism means not the cnriciiment, but the negation
of art.

The Poetry of Reality

J. HILLIS MILLER

Reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it.
Reality is things as they are. The general sense of the word proliferates
its special senses. It is a jungle in itself.^

A change in literature as dramatic as the appearance of roman-
ticism in the late eighteenth century has been taking place during
the last fifty years. This book tries to explore the change through
a study of six writers who have participated in it. Each of the
chapters which follow attempts to show the configuration of
themes which permeates one writer's work and unifies it. This
chapter describes the historical milieu within which the particu-
lar worlds of the six writers may be followed in their planetary
trajectories.

My interpretation of these writers questions the assumption
that twentieth-century poetry is merely an extension of romanti-
cism. A new kind of poetry has appeared in our day, a poetry
which grows out of romanticism, but goes beyond it. Many twen-
tieth-century poets begin with an experience of the nihilism
which is one of the possible consequences of romanticism. My
chapter on Conrad attempts to identify this nihilism by analysis
of a writer who follows it into its darkness and so prepares the
way beyond it. Each succeeding chapter describes one version of

1 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagi-
nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) , pp. 25, 26.

From J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1965) .

272

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 273

the journey beyond nihilism toward a poetry of reality. The new
art which gradually emerges in the work of Yeats, Eliot, Thomas,
and Stevens reaches full development in the poetry of William
Carlos Williams.

Much romantic literature presupposes a double bifurcation.
Existence is divided into two realms, heaven and earth, supernat-
ural and natural, the "real" world and the derived world. It is
also divided into subjective and objective realms. Man as subjec-
tive ego opposes himself to everything else. This "everything
else" is set against the mind as object of its knowledge. Tliough
some preromantic and romantic writers (Smart, Macpherson,
Blake) speak from the perspective of a visionary or apocalyptic
union of subject and object, earth and heaven, many romantic
poets start with both forms of dualism. They must try through
the act of poetry to reach the supersensible world by bringing
together subject and object. To reach God through the object
presupposes the presence of God within the object, and the
romantic j)octs usually believe in one way or another that there is
a supernatural power deeply interfused in nature.

Writers of the middle nineteenth century, as I tried to show in
The Disappearance of God^- tend to accept tiie romantic dichot-
omy of subject and object, biu are no longer able to experience
God as both immanent and transcendent. God seems to Tenny-
son, to Arnold, or to the early Hopkins to have withdrawn
beyond the physical world. For such poets God still exists, but he
is no longer present in nature. What once was a unity, gathering
all together, has exploded into fragments. The isolated ego faces
the other dimensions of existence across an emj)ty space. Subject,
objects, words, other minds, the supernatural — each of these
realms is divorced from the others, and man finds himself one of
the "poor fragments of a broken world. "^ Accepting this situation
as a necessary beginning, the Victorian poets try to reunite the
fragments, to bring God back to earth as a "fusing flame" present

2 The Rdknap Press of Hanarfl Ihiivcrsity Press. \9G^.

' Matthew .Arnold's phrase, in "Obermann Once More," Poetical Works, cd.
C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford Universilv Press, 1950) , p.
320.

274 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

in man's heart, in nature, in society, and in language, binding
them together in "one common wave of thought and joy."*

Another way of thinking grows up side by side with that of the
mid-nineteenth-century poets. A God who has disappeared from
nature and from the human heart can come to be seen not as
invisible but as nonexistent. The unseen God of Arnold or Ten-
nyson becomes the dead God of Nietzsche. If the disappearance
of God is presupposed by much Victorian poetry, the death of
God is the starting point for many twentieth-century writers.

What does it mean to say that God is dead? Nietzsche's "mad-
man" in The Joyful Wisdom announces the death of God, and
explains it:

"Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have
killed him, — you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we
done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge
to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this
earth from its sun? Wliither does it now move? Whither do we move?
Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards,
sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below?
Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space
breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on
continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in
the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are
burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? — for even Gods
putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"^

Man has killed God by separating his subjectivity from every-
thing but itself. The ego has put everything in doubt, and has
defined all outside itself as the object of its thinking power.
Cogito ergo sum: the absolute certainty about the self reached by
Descartes' hyperbolic doubt leads to the assumption that things
exist, for me at least, only because I think them. When every-
thing exists only as reflected in the ego, then man has drunk up
the sea. If man is defined as subject, everything else turns into
object. This includes God, who now becomes merely the highest

4 "Obermann Once More," pp. 320, 323.

^ Book III, Section 125, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1960) , pp. 167, 168.

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 275

object of man's knowledge. God, once the creative sun, the power
establishing the horizon where heaven and earth come together,
becomes an object of thought like any other. ^Vhen man drinks
up the sea he also drinks up God, the creator of the sea. In this
way man is the murderer of God. Man once was a created being
among other created beings, existing in an objective world sus-
tained by its creator, and oriented by that creator as to high and
low, right and wrong. Now, to borrow the passage from Bradley
which Eliot quotes in the notes to "The Waste Land." "regarded
as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each
is peculiar and private to that soul."

When God and the creation become objects of consciousness,
man becomes a nihilist. Nihilism is the nothingness of conscious-
ness when consciousness becomes the foundation of everything.
Man the murderer of God and drinker of the sea of creation
wanders through the infinite nothingness of his own ego. Noth-
ing now has any worth except the arbitrary value he sets on
things as he assimilates them into his consciousness. Nietzsche's
transvaluation of values is the expunging of God as the absolute
value and source of the valuation of everything else. In the
emptiness left after the death of God, man becomes the sovereign
valuer, the measure of all things.

Many qualities of modern culture are consonant with the
definition of man as a hollow sphere within which everything
must appear in order to exist. The devouring nothingness of
consciousness is the will to power over things. The will wants to
assimilate everything to itself, to make everything a reflection
within its mirror. Seen from this perspective, romanticism and
technolog) appear to be similar rather than antithetical.

Romanticism attempts to marry subject and object through the
image. The romantic image may be the representation of object
within the sphere of the subject, as in Wordsworth, or the car-
rying of subject into the object, as in Keats, or the wedding of
subject and object, as in Coleridge, but in most of its varieties an
initial dualism, apparent or real, is assumed. Romanticism devel-
ops naturally into the various forms of perspectivism, whether in
the poetrv of the dramatic monologue or in the novel, which, in
its concern for point of view, is perfectly consonant with romanti-

276 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

cism. The development of fiction from Jane Austen to Conrad
and James is a gradual exploration of the fact that for modern
man nothing exists except as it is seen by someone viewing the
world from his own perspective. If romantic poetry most often
shows the mind assimilating natural objects — urns, nightingales,
daffodils, or windhovers — the novel turns its attention to the
relations between several minds, but both poetry and fiction
usually presuppose the isolation of each mind.

Science and technology, like romanticism, take all things as
objects for man's representation. This may appear in a theoreti-
cal form, as in the numbers and calculations which transform
into mathematical formulas everything from subatomic particles
to the farthest and largest galaxies. Or it may appear in a physi-
cal form, the humanization of nature, as earths and ores are
turned into automobiles, refrigerators, skyscrapers, and rockets,
so that no corner of the earth or sky has not been conquered by
man and made over in his image.

Romantic literature and modern technology are aspects of a
world-embracing evolution of culture. As this development pro-
ceeds, man comes even to forget that he has been the murderer of
God. The presence of God within the object, as it existed for the
early romantics, is forgotten, and forgotten is the pathos of the
Victorians' reaching out for a God disappearing over the horizon
of an objectified world. The triumph of technology is the forget-
ting of the death of God. In the silence of this forgetting the
process of universal calculation and reduction to order can go on
peacefully extending its dominion. The world no longer offers
any resistance to man's limitless hunger for conquest. This proc-
ess has continued through the first two-thirds of the twentieth
century, and is the chief determinant of man's sensibility in many
parts of the world today. Many people have forgotten that they
have forgotten the death of God, the living God of Abraham and
Isaac, Dante and Pascal. Many who believe that they believe in
God believe in him only as the highest value, that is, as a creation
of man, the inventor of values.

Only if the nihilism latent in our culture would appear as
nihilism would it be possible to go beyond it by understanding it.

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 277

In spite of two world wars, and the shadow of world annihila-
tion, this is a course which our civilization has not yet chosen, or
had chosen for it. Nevertheless, a central tradition of modern
literature has been a countercurrent moving against the direction
of history. In this literature, if not in our culture as a whole,
nihilism has gradually been exposed, experienced in its implica-
tions, and, in some cases, transcended.

The special place of Joseph Conrad in English literature lies in
the fact that in him the nihilism covertly dominant in modern
culture is brought to the surface and shown for what it is. Conrad
can best be understood as the culmination of a development
within the novel, a development particularly well-marked in
England, though of course it also exists on the continent and in
America. After the attempt to recover an absent God in nine-
teenth-century poetry, a subsequent stage in man's spiritual his-
ioT)' is expressed more fully in fiction than in poetry. The novel
shows man attempting to establish a human world based on
interpersonal relations. In the novel man comes more and more
to be defined in terms of the strength of his will, and the secret
nihilism resulting from his new place as the source of all value is
slowly revealed.

Conrad is part of European literature and takes his place with
Dostoevsky, Mann, Gide, Proust, and Camus as an explorer of
modern perspectivism and nihilism. Within the narrower limits
of the English novel, however, he comes at the end of a native
tradition. From Dickens and George Eliot through Trollope,
Meredith, and Hardy the negative implications of subjectivism
become more and more apparent. It remained for Conrad to
explore nihilism to its depths, and, in doing so, to point the way
toward the transcendence of nihilism by the poets of the twen-
tieth century.

In Conrad's fiction the focus of the novel turns outward from
its concentration on relations between man and man within
civilized society to a concern for the world-wide expansion of
Western man's will to power. Conrad is the novelist not of the
city but of imperialism. Several consequences follow from this.
He is able to show that society is an arbitrary set of rules and
judgments, a house of cards built over an abyss. It was relatively

278 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

easy for characters in Victorian fiction to be shown taking Eng-
lish society for granted as permanent and right. The fact that
Western culture has the fragility of an edifice which might have
been constructed differently is brought to light when Conrad sets
the "masquerade" of imperialism against the alien jungle. With
this revelation, the nature of man's will to power begins to
emerge, and at the same time there is a glimpse of an escape from
nihilism.

The will to power seemed a subjective thing, a private posses-
sion of each separate ego. Though the struggle for dominance of
mind against mind might lead to an impasse, nonhuman nature
seemed to yield passively to man's sovereign will. Everything, it
seemed, could be turned into an object of man's calculation,
control, or evaluation. In "Heart of Darkness" (1899) Conrad
shows how imperialism becomes the expansion of the will toward
unlimited dominion over existence. What begins as greed, the
desire for ivory, and as altruism, the desire to carry the torch of
civilization to the jungle, becomes the longing to "wring the
heart" of the wilderness and "exterminate all the brutes." The
benign project of civilizing the dark places of the world becomes
the conscious desire to annihilate everything which opposes
man's absolute will. Kurtz's megalomania finally becomes limit-
less. There is "nothing either above or below him." He has
"kicked himself loose of the earth," and in doing so has "kicked
the very earth to pieces."

It is just here, in the moment of its triumph, that nihilism
reverses itself, as, in Mann's Doktor Faustus, Leverkiihn's last and
most diabolical composition leads through the abyss to the sound
of children's voices singing, Conrad's work does not yet turn the
malign into the benign, but it leads to a reversal which prepares
for the daylight of later literature. When Kurtz's will has ex-
panded to boundless dimensions, it reveals itself to be what it has
secretly been all along: nothing. Kurtz is "hollow at the core."
Into his emptiness comes the darkness. The darkness is in the
heart of each man, but it is in the heart of nature too, and
transcends both man and nature as their hidden substance and
foundation.

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 279

When the wilderness finds Kurtz out and takes "a terrible
vengeance for the fantastic invasion,"^ then the dawn of an
escape from nihilism appears, an escape through the darkness. By
following the path of nihilism to the end, man confronts once
again a spiritual power external to himself. Though this power
appears as an inexpressibly threatening horror, still it is some-
thing beyond the self. It offers the possibility of an escape from
subjectivism.

The strategy of this escape will appear from the point of view
of the tradition it reverses, the most dangerous of choices, a leap
into the abyss. It will mean giving up the most clierished certain-
ties. The act by which man turns the world inside-out into his
mind leads to nihilism. This can be escaped only by a counterre-
volution in which man turns himself inside-out and steps, as
Wallace Stevens puts it, "barefoot into reality."" This leap into
the world characterizes the reversal enacted in one way or an-
other by the five poets studied here.

To walk barefoot into reality means abandoning the independ-
ence of the ego. Instead of making everything an object for the
self, the mind must efface itself before reality, or plunge into the
density of an exterior world, dispersing itself in a milieu which
exceeds it and which it has not made. The effaccment of the ego
before reality means abandoning the will to power over things.
This is the most difficult of acts for a modern man to perform. It
goes counter to all the penchants of our culture. To abandon its
project of dominion the will must will not to will. Only through
an abnegation of the will can objects begin to manifest them-
selves as they are, in the integrity of their presence. AVhen man is
willing to let things be then they appear in a space which is no
longer that of an objective world opposed to the mind. In this
new space the mind is dispersed everywhere in things and forms
one with them.

® Quotations from "Heart of Darkness" are cited from Youth and Two
Other Stories (Garden Citv, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925). pp. 118, 131, 144,
148.

^ "Large Red Nfan Reading," The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 19.54) . p. 423.

280 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

This new space is the realm of the twentieth-century poem. It
is a space in which things, the mind, and words coincide in closest
intimacy. In this space flower the chicory and Queen Anne's lace
of William Carlos Williams' poems. In this space his wheelbar-
row and his broken bits of green bottle glass appear. In a similar
poetic space appear "the pans above the stove, the pots on the
table, the tulips among them" of Stevens' "poem of life." The
"ghosts" who "return to earth" in Stevens' poems are those who
have been alienated in the false angelism of subjectivity. They
return from the emptiness of "the wilderness of stars" to step into
a tangible reality of things as they are. There they can "run
fingers over leaves/And against the most coiled thorn."*

The return to earth making twentieth-century poetry possible
is accompanied by the abandonment of still another quality of
the old world. This is the dimension of depth. In a number of
ways the world of nineteenth-century poetry is often character-
ized by extension and exclusion. The mind is separated from its
objects, and those objects are placed in a predominantly visual
space. In this space each object is detached from the others. To be
in one place is to be excluded from other places, and space
stretches out infinitely in all directions. Beyond those infinite
distances is the God who has absented himself from his creation.
The pathos of the disappearance of God is the pathos of infinite
space.

Along with spatial and theological depth go other distances:
the distance of mind from mind, the distance within each self sep
arating the self from itself. If each subject is separated from all
objects, it is no less divided from other subjects and can encoun-
ter them only across a gap generated by its tendency to turn
everything into an image. From the assumption of the isolation
of the ego develops that conflict of subjectivities which is a
central theme of fiction. For Matthew Arnold and other inheri-
tors of romanticism the self is also separated from its own depths,
the gulf within the mind which hides the deep buried self. To
reach that self is as difficult as to reach God beyond the silence of
infinite spaces.

8 "Large Red Man Reading," pp. 423, 424.

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 281

In the new art these depths tend to disappear. The space of
separation is turned inside-out, so that elements once dispersed
are gathered together in a new region of copresence. This space is
often more auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic than visual. To be
within it is to possess all of it, and there is no longer a sense of
endless distances extending in all directions. The mind, its ob-
jects, other minds, and the ground of both mind and things are
present in a single realm of proximity.

The disappearance of dimensions of depth in twentieth-cen-
tury art provides special difficulties for someone trained in the
habits of romanticism. An abstract expressionist painting does
not "mean" anything in the sense of referring beyond itself in
any version of traditional symbolism. It is what it is, paint on
canvas, just as Williams' wheelbarrow is what it is. In the space of
the new poetry the world is contracted to a point — the wheelbar-
row, the chicory flower, the bits of green glass. The poem is "not
ideas about the thing but the thing itself,"^ part of the world and
not about it. In the same way the characters of Williams' fiction,
like those of the French "new novel," have little psychological
depth. They exist as their thoughts, their gestures, their speech,
and these have the same objective existence as the wheelbarrow or
the flower. In such a world "anywhere is everywhere,"^" and the
romantic dialectic of movement through stages to attain a goal
disappears. In place of advance in steps toward an end there is
the continuous present of a poetry which matches in its speed the
constant flight of time. Each moment appears out of nothing in
the words of the poem and in that instant things emerge anew
and move and are dissolved."

If any spiritual power can exist for the new poetry it must be
an immanent presence. There can be for many writers no return
to the traditional conception of God as the highest existence,
creator of all other existences, transcending his creation as well as
dwelling within it. If there is to be a God in the new world it

" Stevens. The Collected Poema, p. 534.

1° William Carlos Williams. Patcrson (New York: New Directions, 1963) . p.
273.

^^ See Wallace Stevens. Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1957), p. 110.

282 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

must be a presence within things and not beyond them. The new
poets have at the farthest Hmit of their experience caught a
ghmpse of a fugitive presence, something shared by all things in
the fact that they are. This presence flows everywhere, like the
light which makes things visible, and yet can never be seen as a
thing in itself. It is the presence of things present, what Stevens
calls "the swarthy water/That flows round the earth and through
the skies,/Twisting among the universal spaces."^^ In the same
poem he gives this power its simplest name: "It is being." The
most familiar object, in coming into the light, reveals being, and
poetry brings being into the open by naming things as they are,
in their glistening immediacy, the wheelbarrow glazed with rain
water, the steeple at Farmington shining and swaying. The new
poetry is therefore "the outlines of being and its expressings, the
syllables of its law."^^ These outlines are glimpsed as the words of
the poem vanish with the moment which brought them into
existence. The space of such a poem is the space of the present in
its evanescence. This present holds men closely with discovery as,
"in the instant of speecli,/The breadth of an accelerando
moves,/Captives the being, widens — and was there."" The in-
stant's motion is a space grown wide, and within that brief space
of time all existence is named, captured, and revealed.

These are the characteristics of the domain which twentieth-
century literature has come to inhabit. The entry into the new
world is not easy to make and has not everywhere been made.
Our culture still moves along the track laid out for it by science
and dualistic thinking, and many writers remain enclosed within
the old world. Moreover, every artist who crosses the frontier
does so in his own way, a way to some degree unlike any other. I
do not wish to minimize the differences between twentieth-cen-
tury writers, but to suggest a context in which those differences
may be fruitfully explored.

Examples of the new immediacy may be found in widely
divergent areas of contemporary thought and art: in the flatness
of the paintings of Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, as opposed to

12 "Metaphor as Degeneration," The Collected Poems, p. 444.

13 "Large Red Man Reading," p. 424.

1* Wallace Stevens, "A Primitive Like an Orb," The Collected Poems, p.
440.

THE POETRY OF REALITY • Miller 283

the romantic depth in the work, of Paul Kiee; in the "superfici-
ality," as of a mystery which is all on the surface, of the novels of
Ivy Compton-Burneit or Alain Robbe-Grillet; in the philosophy
of Martin Heidegger or the German and French phenomenolo-
gists; in the descriptive linguistic analysis of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein and the British common language philosophers; in the
poetry of Jorge Guillen, Rene Char, or Charles Olson; in the
literary criticism of Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Pierre Richard, or
Marcel Raymond. All these writers and artists have in one way or
another entered a new realm, and, for all of them, if there is a
fugitive spiritual power it will be within things and people, not
altogether beyond them.

Yeats, Eliot, Thomas, Stevens, and Williams have played im-
portant roles in this twentieth-century revolution in man's ex-
perience of existence. Each begins with an experience of nihilism
or its concomitants, and each in his own way enters the new
reality: Yeats by his affirmation of the infinite richness of the
finite moment; Eliot by his discovery that the Incarnation is here
and now; Thomas by an acceptance of death which makes the
poet an ark rescuing all things; Stevens by his identification of
imagination and reality in the poetry of being; Williams by his
plunge into the "filthy Passaic." This book traces the itineraries
leading these writers to goals which are different and yet have a
family resemblance. The unity of twentieth-century poetry is
suggested by the fact that these authors are in the end poets not
of absence but of proximity. In their work reality comes to be
present to the senses, present to the mind which possesses it
through the senses, and present in the words of the poems which
ratify tliis possession. Such poetry is often open-ended in form. It
follows in its motion the flowing of time and reveals, through this
mobility, the reality of things as they are. Wallace Stevens speaks
for all these poets when he affirms the imion of inner and outer,
natural and supernatural, in the transience and nearness of the
real:

We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Evcrvthing, the spirit's alclicniicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
,\nd through inchided, not merely the visible.

284 THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

The solid, but the movable, the moment,

The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints.

The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.^^

Before following my five poets in their journeys of homecom-
ing toward reality it will be necessary to investigate the spiritual
adventure which takes Conrad to the limit of nihilism, and so
opens the way beyond it.

i*" "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," The Collected Poems, pp. 471,
472.

A Modern Chronology, 1900-1941

-. Ji

1 5

■ii ii

-At work: Sir Arthur Evans, G. Mach,
Pavlov, M. Planck, Poincar6; Dewey,
VV. James; Bradley, Moore; Husserl;
Bergson, Croce; Veblen.

First Zeppelin flight
Bergson: On Comedy
Freud : The Interpretation oJ Dreams
Symons: The Symbolist Movement in Lit-
erature

Marconi: transatlantic wireless
J. P. Morgan: U.S. Steel Corp.
Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit

oJ Capitalism

At work: Clijzannc, Degas, Gauguin,
Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso,
Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec in paint-
ing; Debussy, Dvorak, Elgar, Lehar,
Puccini, Ravel, Schonberg, Sibelius,
R. Strauss in nmsic; Chekhov, D'An-
nunzio, Gorki, Ibsen, Mann, Rilke,
Strindberg, Tolstoy in continental
literature.

Conrad: Lord Jim
Dunne: Mr. Dooley s Philosophy
Dreiser: Sister Carrie

Howells: Literary Friends and Acquaint-
ances

Butler: Krewhon Revisited
James: The Sacred Fount
Kipling: Kim
Norris: The Octopus

"5
V

c
a

'-^

"a
1

Conservative Party dominant since 1874

1900

Workers Party established (renamed La-
bour Party, 1906)
Boxer Rebellion and Open Door Policy
d. S. Crane (1871-)
d. F. Nietzsche (1844-)
b. S. O'Faolain
d. Ruskin (1819-)
d. Wilde (1856-)
b. Th. Wolfe (-1938)

1901

d. Victoria (181 9-; r. 1837-)
r. Edward VII (-1910)
McKinley assassinated, T. Roosevelt
President (-1909)

287

■ S

Croce: Esthetics

W. James: The Varieties of Religious Ex-
perience

Ford Motors founded
Wright brothers' flight
G. E. Moore: Principia Ethica
Yeats : Ideas of Good and Evil

Marie Curie: radioactivity
World Olympics, St. Louis
Bradley: Shakespearean Tragedy
Freud : Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Saintsbury: History of Criticism (1900-)
Veblen: The Theory of Business Enter-
prise

1.5
§ S

Bennett: Anna of the Five Towns
Gide: The Immoralist
Glasgow: The Battleground
Hardy : Poems of Past and Present
James : The Wings of the Dove
Masefield: Salt-Water Ballads
Yeats : Cathleen ni Houlihan

Butler: The Way of All Flesh
James: The Ambassadors
London: The Call of the Wild
Norris: The Pit
Syngc : In the Shadow of the Glen

Isadora Duncan in Berlin

Adams : Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Barrie : Peter Pan

Conrad: Nostromo

O. Henry: Cabbages and Kings

Hudson: Green Mansions

James : The Golden Bowl

London: The Sea-Wolf

-5
1

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1901 (continued)
d. Verdi (18 13-)

1902

Anglo -Japanese Pact against Russia

End of Boer War

Elementary Education Act (British)

d. S. Butler (1835-)

d. B. Harte (1836-)

d. E. Zola (1840-)

1903

d. Gauguin (1848-)
d. Gissing (1857-)
*. Orwell (-1950)
d. Spencer (1820-)
d. Whistler (1834-)

1904

Russo-Japanese War
d. Chekhov (I860-)
b. C. Day-Lewii
b. G. Greene

288

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Cou6: autosuggestion

Halley's comet

Manhattan Bridge

Ellis: Studies in the Psychology oj Sex

(1897-)
Frazer: Totemism and Exogamy
Saintsbury : A History oj English Prosody

(1906-)

France: Penguin Island
Hardy: The Dynasts (1900-)
O. Henry: The Voice oj the City
Stein: Three Lives

Diaghilev in Paris

Mary Pickford directed by D. W. Grif-
fith
Futurist manifestos
Hardy: Time's Laughingstocks
Maeterlinck : The Bluebird
Meredith : Last Poems
Pound: Personae

First Post -Impressionist art exhibit in

London
In music: Bartok, Berg, Schonberg,

Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams

flourishing
F. L. Wright recognized in Europe
Aldington: Images
Claudel: Five Great Odes
Forster : Howard's End
Noyes : Collected Poems
Robinson : The Town Down the River
Yeats : The Green Helmet

"5
1

1908 (continued)

1909

Lloyd George's budget fight with the

Lords
Taft President (-1913)
d. Meredith (1828-)
b. Spender
d. Swinburne (1837-)
d. Synge (1871-)

1910

d. Edward VII (1841-; r. 1901-)

r. George V (-1936)

Pan American Union

China abolishes slavery

d. W. Homer (1836-)

d. H. Hunt (1827-)

d. W.James (1842-)

d. Tolstoy (1828-)

d. Twain (1835-)

290

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Brooks: America's Coming of Age
Dewey : Democracy and Education
Frazer: The Golden Bough, rev. (1890-)
Wolfflin: Foundations of Art History

a
v>

Mackenzie : Sinister Street
Proust: Swann's Way {Remembrance of
Things Past, -1927)

Chaplin movies

Jazz and Dixieland develop

Vorticist manifesto in Blast

Frost : J\forth of Boston

Hardy : Satires of Circumstance

Joyce: Dubliners

Lindsay: The Congo

A. Lowell : Sword-Blades and Poppy Seed

Pound (ed.), Des Imagistes

Yeats, Responsibilities

Conrad: Victory
Ford : The Good Soldier
Frost: A Bofs Will
Lawrence : The Rainbow
Masters : Spoon River Anthology
Maugham : Of Human Bondage
Rosenberg: Touth
E. Sitwell: Mother
Woolf: The Voyage Out

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1914

The Great War (-1918)
Opening of Panama Canal
d. C. Peirce (1839-)
b. D. Thomas (-1953)

1915

Dardanelles disaster

Lusitania sunk by U-boats

Gas attacks on the Western Front

Asquith coalition

d. R. Brooke (1887-)

292

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Neurath, Schlick
Richards: Practical Criticism

33 Hearst-chain papers
Burgum, ed., The New Criticism
Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity
Freud : Civilization and Its Discontents
Fugitives : /'// Take My Stand
Keynes : A Treatise on Money
G. W. Knight: The Wheel of Fire
Ortega : The Revolt of the Masses
Parrington: Main Currents in American
Thought

<3
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Le Corbusier active

The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.)

founded
Bridges : The Testament of Beauty
Cocteau : Les Enfants terribles
Compton -Burnett: Brothers and Sisters
Connelly: The Green Pastures
Day -Lewis : Transitional Poem
Faulkner : The Sound and the Fury
Galsworthy : Modern Comedy
Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
Lewis: Dodsworth
Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel

Auden: Poems
Coward : Private Lives
H. Crane: The Bridge
Eliot: Ash Wednesday
Giradoux: Amphytrion 38
Joyce : Anna Livia Plurabelle
Maugham: Cakes and Ale
Musil : The Man without Qualities
Porter : Flowering Judas
Spender: Twenty Poems

"S
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1929

Hoover President (-1933)
Trotsky exiled
Stock-market collapse
d. Clemenceau (1841-)
d. Diaghilev (1872-)
d. Veblen (1857-)

1930

Nazi gains in elections

Maginot Line built

Widespread unemployment

d. Bridges (1844-)

d. A. C. Doyle (1859-)

d. D. H. Lawrence (1885-)

1931

Japanese occupy Manchuria
King Alfonso of Spain abdicates

298

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Korzybski : Science and Sanity
Mumford : Technics and Civilization
Toynbee: A Study of History (-1961)

Boulder Dam built

Fermi : statistics on electrons

Barth: Credo

Jaspers : Reason and Existenz

Ludendorf: Total War

Spender : The Destructive Element

Berlin Olympics
Queen Mary built
Ayers : Language, Truth and Logic
Croce: On Poetry

Keynes : The General Theory of Employ-
ment, Interest, and Money
Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia

>->

e
Si

•2J

Orwell : Burmese Days

H. Roth: Call It Sleep

Thomas : 18 Poems

E. Waugh: A Handful of Dust

M. Anderson: Winterset
Auden and Isherwood: The Dog Be-
neath the Skin
Barker: Poems

Day -Lewis: A Time to Dance
De la Mare : Poems 1919-1934
Eliot : Murder in the Cathedral
Empson: Poems
MacNeice: Poems
Odets: Waiting for Lefty
Steinbeck: Tortilla Flat
Stevens : Ideas of Order
Wolfe : Of Time and the River

Auden: Look, Stranger

Barnes: Nightwood

Dos Passos: The Big Money (last of

U.S.A., 1930-)
Eliot : Collected Poems
Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
Frost : A Further Range
Huxley : Eyeless in Gaza

■-5

e
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1

T-t

1935

Wagner labor act (U.S.)

CIO founded

Gallup polls

Soviet purge and trials

Gandhi hunger protests

d. JE (Russell; 1867-)

d. A. Berg (1885-)

d. E. A. Robinson (1869-)

1936

d. George V (1865-, r. 1910-)

Edward VIII abdicates; r. George VI

(-1952)
Italian conquest of Ethiopia
German-Italian Axis
d. Gorki (1868-)
d. Kipling (1865-)
d. Lorca (1899-)

300

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.1 §

Development of radar

New York World's Fair

Eliot : The Idea oj a Christian Society

Namier : In the Margin oj History

•i2

Campbell: Flowering Rifle
Eliot: The Family Reunion
Frost : Collected Poems
Green: Party Going
Housman : Collected Poems
Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin
Joyce: Finnegans Wake
MacNeice: Autumn Journal
Porter : Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Spender : The Still Centre
Steinbeck : The Grapes oj Wrath
D. Thomas : The Map oj Love
N. West : Day oj the Locust

Chaplin : The Great Dictator (movie)

Auden: Another Time

Gary : Charlie Is My Darling

Eliot: East Coker (2nd of Four Quartets,

-1943)
Empson: The Gathering Storm
Faulkner: The Hamlet
G. Greene : The Power and the Glory
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Koestler: Darkness at Noon
Pound : Cantos LII-LXXI
E. Sitwell : Poems New and Old
Snow: Strangers and Brothers

1939

Nazi-Soviet Pact
World War H begins
Fall of Poland
d. F. M. Ford (1873-)
d. Freud (1856-)
d. Yeats (1865-)

1940

Churchill coahtion (-1945)

Hitler overruns Western Europe

Japan joins Axis

d. Chamberlain (1869-)

d. Fitzgerald (1896-)

d. H. Garland (I860-)

d. Trotsky (1879-)

302

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303

A Selected Bibliography

I. The Cultural Context

A. THE UNITED STATES

B. GREAT BRITAIN AND GENERAL ANGLO-AMERICAN
CULTURE

II. General English and American Literary History,
Literary Criticism, and Relations in the Modem Age

A Selected Bil3liography

I. The Cultural Context. (A) The United States

Allen, Frederick Lewis. The Big Change: America Transforms Itself,

1900-1950. New York, 1952.
. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-twenties.

New York, 1931.
. Since Yesterday: The Nineteen Thirties in America. New York,

1940.
Allen, Harry C. Great Britain and the United States: A History of

Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1952. New York, 1955.
Barck, Oscar T., and Nelson M. Blake. Since 1900. New York, 1947.
Baritz, Lx)ren. City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America.

New York, 1964.
Barzun, Jacques. Teacher in America. Rev. ed. New York, 1960.
Baur, John I. H. Revolution and Tradition in Modern American Art.

Cambridge, Mass., 1951.
Bellows, G. K., and John T. Howard. A Short History of Music in

America. New York, 1957.
Blesh, Rudi. Modern Art USA: Men, Rebellion, Conquest, 1900-1956.

New York, 1956.
Brogan, Denis. The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt. New Haven, Conn.,

1950.
Brown, Milton W. American Painting from the Armory Show to the

Depression. Princeton, 1955.
Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York,

1941.
Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York, 1941.
Chalmers, Gordon Keith. The Republic and the Person. New York,

1952.
Chamberlain, John. The Enterprising Americans: A Business History of

the United States. New York, 1965. Fortune series.
Chase, John W.. ed. Years of the Modern: An American Appraisal. New

York, 1949.
Cochran, Thomas C. The American Business System: A Historical

Perspective, 1900-1953. Cambridge, Mass., 1957.
Cohen, Morris R. American Thought: A Critical Sketch. Glencoe, 111.,

1954.

307

308 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohn, Alfred E. Minerva's Progress: Tradition and Dissent in American

Culture. New York, 1946.
Cohn, David L. The Good Old Days: A History of American Morals

and Manners as Seen Through the Sears, Roebuck Catalogs 1905 to

the Present. New York, 1940.
Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind . . . Since 1880. New

Haven, Conn., 1950.
Crane, Milton, ed. The Roosevelt Era. New York, 1947.
Daniels, Jonathan. The Time Between the Wars. New York, 1966.
Daniels, Walter M., ed. The American Labor Movement. New York,

1958.
Dexter, Dave, Jr. The Jazz Story from the 90's to the 60's. Englewood

Cliffs, N.J., 1964.
Dulles, Foster Rhea. The United States Since 1865. Ann Arbor, Mich.,

1959.
Dumond, Dwight L. America in Our Time, 1896-1946. New York, 1947.
Faulkner, Harold U. From Versailles to the New Deal. New Haven,

Conn., 1950.

. The Decline of Laissez-Faire, 1897-1917. New York, 1951.

Finer, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States.

New York, 1947.
Goldman, Eric F. Rendezvous With Destiny: A History of Modern

American Reform. New York, 1952.
Gray, William Scott, and Ruth Monroe. The Reading Interests and

Habits of Adults. New York, 1929.
Hamlin, Talbot, ed. Forms and Functions of Twentieth Century Ameri-
can Architecture. 4 vols. New York, 1952.
Handlin, Oscar. The American People in the Twentieth Century.

Cambridge, Mass., 1954.
, et al., eds. Harvard Guide to American History. Cambridge,

Mass., 1954. On the arts, sciences, philosophy, and similar topics.
Harris, Seymour E. American Economic History. New York, 1961.
Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary

Taste. Oxford, 1950.
Hicks, John Donald. The Republican Ascendancy, 1921-1933. New

York, 1964.
Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought,

1860-1915. New York, 1944.

. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York, 1955.

Horton, Rod W., and Herbert W. Edwards. Backgrounds of American

Literary Thought. New York, 1952.

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 309

Howard, John Trasker. Our Contemporary Composers: American

Music in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1941.
Johnson. Gerald W. Incredible Tale: The Odyssey of the Average

American in the Last Half Century. New York, 1950.
Jones, Howard Mumford. Ideas in America. Cambridge, Mass.,

1944.
Jones, Peter d'Alroy. America's ]Vealth: The Economic History of an

Open Society. New York, 1963.
Kempton, Murray. Part of Our Times: Some Ruins and Monuments of

the Thirties. New York, 1955.
Kennedy, Gail, ed. Evolution and Religion: The Conflict Between

Science and Theology in Modern America. Boston, 1957.
Knight, Edgar W. Fifty Years of American Education: A Historical

Review and Critical Appraisal. New York, 1952.
Knoles, George H. The Jazz Age Revisited: British Criticism of Ameri-
can Civilization during the 1920's. Stanford, 1955.
Kouwenhoven, John A. Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civiliza-
tion. New York. 1948.
Larkin, O. W. Art and Life in America. New York, 1949.
Leighton, Isabel, ed. The Aspirin Age, 191 9-1 94 1. New York, 1949.
Lerner, Max. America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the

United States Today. New York, 1957.
Lifton, Robert J., ed. Woman in America. Boston, 1965.
Lord, Walter. The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War.

New York, 1960.
McCIuskey, Neil G., ed. Catholic Education in America. New York,

1964.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral

Ideal in America. New York, 1964.
May, Henry Farnham. The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917.

New York, 1959.
Meyer, Adolphe E. An Educational History of the American People.

New York, 1957.
Miller, Perry. American Thought: The Civil War to World War I. New

York, 1954.
Mitchell, Broadus. Depression Decade: From New Era Through New

Deal, 1929-1941. New York, 1947.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People.

Oxford, 1965.
Morris, Lloyd R. Postscript to Yesterday: America, the Last 50 Years.

New York, 1947.

310 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mosier, Richard D. The American Temper: Patterns of Our Intellec-
tual Heritage. Berkeley, 1952.
Mott, Frank Luther. The News in America. Cambridge, Mass., 1952.
Mowry, George Edwin. The Urban Nation: 1920-1960. New York, 1965.
Nelson, Lowry. American Farm Life. Cambridge, Mass., 1954. In the

20th Century.
Norris, Allen, ed. America Through British Eyes. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1948.
Perkins, Dexter. The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt, 1931-1945.

Chicago, 1957.
Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the

American Character. Chicago, 1957.
Richardson, E. P. Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years. New

York, 1956.
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. New York, 1950.
Robertson, Ross M. History of the American Economy. 2nd ed. New

York, 1964.
Rogers, Agnes, ed. / Remember Distinctly: A Family Album of the

American People, 1918-1941. New York, 1947.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White, eds. Mass Culture:

The Popular Arts in America. Glencoe, 111., 1957.
Rostow, Walt Whitman. The United States in the World Arena. New

York, 1960.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Learning How To Behave: A Historical Study of

American Etiquette Books. New York, 1946.

. The Rise of Modern America, 1865-1951. New York, 1951.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt. Boston, 1957.
Schneider, Herbert W. History of American Philosophy. New York,

1946.
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. On Modern Poets. New York, 1959.

Young, Stark. The Flower in Drama and Glamour: Theatre Essays and
Criticism. Rev. ed. New York, 1955.

Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Craft and Character: Text, Method, and Voca-
tion in Modern Fiction. New York, 1957.

, ed. Literary Opinion in America. 3rd ed., 2 vols. New York,

1962.

LITERATURE
CRITICISM

^1 ^.

SRA Reorder No. 23-10530

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