Literary Essays

29265

LITERARY ESSAYS

LITERARY ESSAYS

BY

DAVID DAICHES

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY
Publishers

15 EAST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK l6, N.Y.

PUBLISHED, 1957, BY PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, INC.,
15 EAST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK 1 6, N.Y.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY BY
ROBERT CUNNINGHAM AND SONS LTD., ALVA

PREFACE

THESE TWELVE essays were written for various periodi-
cals and occasions, on both sides of the Atlantic, during
the past six years. They reflect three of my principal
interests English literature, Scottish literature and modern
American literature and criticism. The essay on translating the
Bible derives from a concern with this question which first led
me to write my doctoral dissertation at Oxford on English Bible
translation some twenty years ago. The one essay in this collec-
tion which cannot properly come under the general tide of
'Literary Essays' is the light-hearted Cambridge piece I wrote
to provide an ironic note for the Cambridge number of the
Twentieth Century. When it first appeared, everybody assumed
that Mr Brightly spoke for myself, and I take this opportunity
of pointing out that I was mocking all the speakers in the dia-
logue equally and that none speaks for me though each does
occasionally say something with which I agree. What my own
views are on some of the questions discussed in the Cambridge
dialogue may perhaps be gathered from the final essay.

Acknowledgements are due to the periodicals and institutions
which first published or commissioned these essays; their names
appear in the text, though I should add here that the essay on
Scott, while it first appeared in print in Nineteenth Century Fiction,
was originally delivered as a lecture at the English Institute,
New York.

DAVID DAICHES

St. John's College,
Cambridge.

CONTENTS

Guilt and Justice in Shakespeare I

Samuel Richardson 26

The Poetry of Dylan Thomas 50

Walt Whitman's Philosophy 62

Scott's achievement as a Novelist 88

Christopher North 122

The writing of Scottish Literary History 132

A Cambridge Dialogue 154

The 'New Criticism*: Some Qualifications 167
The Criticism of Fiction: Some Second Thoughts 180

Translating the Hebrew Bible 191

Religion, Poetry, and the 'Dilemma' of the

Modern Writer 206

vn

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 1

IN PROPOSING TO DISCUSS guilt and justice in Shakespeare, I am
aware that I am asking for trouble from two quarters. There
are those who believe that the only way to understand fully
the general ideas which underlie Shakespeare's plays is first to
familiarize oneself with the Elizabethan view of the world and
the moral order, and then to apply this view to an interpretation
of the plays. There is, of course, much common sense in this
position, and I for one am not disposed to deny that if we under-
stand what Dr Tillyard has called 'the Elizabethan world picture*
we shall see clearly certain patterns of meaning in Shakespeare
that would otherwise remain obscure. But we must beware of
laying the dead hand of historical uniformity on a great poetic
dramatist. There is always some disparity between the view of
the age and the individual poetic vision; Shakespeare's universe
is not Kyd's or Marlowe's or Fletcher's, and his plays present a
picture of the world that we will not find in the work of any
other Elizabethan. We distort the meaning of Shakespeare's plays
sadly if we lay them on the Procrustean bed of a synthetic 'Eliza-
bethan point of view*. I should plead that we should listen to what
the plays say, as carefully and sensitively as we can, and rely on
what we learn that way for our primary understanding of Shakes-
peare, using our knowledge of the period as a help and a corrective
where helps and correctives are needed, but not imposing that
knowledge in such a way as to blur Shakespeare's individual
meaning.

The second source of objection to my tide might well be that
kind of modern critic who insists on the uniqueness of the
individual play and who deprecates any generalizations about the
author's attitude based on his work as a whole. Each play creates

1 A talk delivered in the Conference Hall of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre,
Stratford-upon-Avon, on 25th August 1954.

2 LITERARY ESSAYS

its own moral universe, such critics would maintain, not only by
the pattern of action but by the pattern of imagery and symbol
which runs through it, and evidence of meaning cannot be carried
over from one play into another. Again, I concede the element
of sense in this position; obviously plays are plays, individual
works of dramatic art, not merely documents illustrating the
history of a mind; but it is a curious kind of nominalism which
denies that the total impression of a group of plays by a single
great writer is of interest or value or asserts that one somehow
does violence to the aesthetic uniqueness of the individual work
by going on to discuss some of the dominant attitudes re-
vealed by the author in several of them. I believe that we can
work from the individual plays to a larger view of how Shakes-
peare's mind and imagination were moving during certain periods
of his career, and thence back to the individual plays with
heightened interest and enlarged understanding.

So much by way of preliminary defence of my approach. Let
me now begin my inquiry by asking : What is guilt? If we assume
that there are forces of good and of evil both at work in the world,
then we might say that the guilty man is one who co-operates
with the forces of evil to increase evil's effectiveness in human
affairs. Innocence is on the side of the good, guilt on the side of
evil. Or so it would be pleasant to believe. A closer look at life
convinces us that innocence often achieves evil. If Brutus had
been a less simply virtuous man, he would not have helped to
kill one of his best friends and brought tyranny to Rome (the
opposite of what he intended). If Othello had been less innocent,
he would not have trusted lago and so he would not have been
brought to murder his wife. If Hamlet had been less of a sensitive
idealist, he would not have destroyed his own house as well as the
house of Polonius. A more worldly Brutus, a less morally sensi-
tive Hamlet, a tougher and more cunning Othello, would have
done less harm in the world. The first tragic problem faced by
Shakespeare in his maturity concerns the ambiguity of innocence.

This problem goes far deeper than the relation between private
and public virtue, which is in some degree the theme

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 3

Caesar. It includes, among other problems, that of tiie relation
between innocence and virtue, or at least between innocence of
character and effectiveness of moral action. It is an old dilemma.
Milton was to treat it, in his own way, in Paradise Lost, where
'our credulous mother, Eve' allowed herself to be fooled by
Satan into tasting of the forbidden tree. If Satan, in the form of
the serpent, had been telling the truth, then Eve would have done
right to believe him and to eat of the fatal fruit. Eve's real fault
was lack of sophistication; she was unsuspicious of what the
serpent told her; she was, to use the American slang term, a
'sucker' and swallowed his story. But is it morally wrong to be
a sucker as Eve was with respect to the serpent, as Othello was
with respect to lago, as Brutus was with respect to such political
sophisticates as Antony, as Hamlet was, we might almost say,
with respect to life?

Innocence pkys into the hands of evil; only the tarnished and
sophisticated mind can achieve that approximate good which
alone lies within human reach. Is this one of the themes of
Shakespearean tragedy? Perhaps; but before we conclude that it
is we must inquire a litde more closely. The case of Brutus is that
of the liberal intellectual in a world of Realpoltiik a familiar
enough case in the modern world. Cassius is the co-hero of the
play, and, skilled politician though he is, with little scruple in
playing on Brutus' finer feelings, he admires Brutus and cannot
help allowing Brutus to achieve moral ascendancy over him,
once the murder of Caesar is accomplished. The coarser nature
is dominated by the finer, to the destruction of both of them and
of the ideal to which they had sacrificed everything. In the
quarrel scene it is Cassius who first gives way, and it is under the
influence of this moral domination by Brutus that, against his
better judgment, Cassius allows Brutus to have his way in the
ill-advised plan of seeking immediate battle at Philippi. Nowhere
is the Epicurean Cassius more like the Stoic Brutus than when he
commits suicide because he is ashamed of having lived *so long,
to see my best friend ta'en before my face'. And that suicide,
ratter than military defeat, seals the doom of the republican cause.

4 LITERARY ESSAYS

But Cassius is not as unlike Brutus as he thinks he is. Though he
is die shrewder and the more practical, he is basically an idealist
too, an intellectual, whom Caesar had come to suspect because
'he thinks too much'. If he appears as a cunning man of action
beside Brutus, he is almost equally a babe in the wood when seen
beside Antony, the man without innocence, the man who knows
how to unite his personal affections with his political ambitions.
(Though Shakespeare shows us in Antony and Cleopatra what
happens when that unstable equilibrium collapses.) In Julius
Caesar Antony's is the success story; he is the tarnished man who
knows how to come to terms with life. He is not evil he is
generous, noble and kind-hearted but he lacks innocence: he is
postlapsarian man, who has adapted himself to life after the Fall.

Whereinlies Antony's success? Is it not in his ability to manipu-
late people, to act the puppeteer and utilize the worthy emotions
of innocent people for his own purposes? Cassius does this in a very
mild way with Brutus, but Antony is the great puppeteer of the
play, and his famous oration is the work of a supreme puppet
master. He manipulates other people's innocence. So does
Richard III, and Edmund in King Lear, and lago. But we are
not to conclude from this that Antony is intended to be a villain
like these characters : that would be manifestly absurd. Richard III
and Edmund and lago are evil; Antony is sophisticated and
cunning, but far from evil. All four manipulate the innocence of
others for their own ends. Antony stands midway between
innocence and evil, the tarnished sensual man, the man whose
way of life is to use a term the politicians are now so fond of
above all viable. 'Human nature being what it is', Antony's way
is not to be rejected out of hand. But I have a friend who says
that whenever he has had a guest at dinner who has begun a
political conversation with the remark, 'human nature being what
it is*, he always counts the spoons. The argument is an excuse
for being content with imperfection: one could not imagine
Brutus or Hamlet using it.

Antony manipulates his self-interest and his ideals into a com-
promise that is above all practicable. He is too good to be a tragic

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 5

villain, too bad to be a tragic hero. Are we to say, then, that he is
Shakespeare's ideal practical man? Shakespeare answers that
question for us in his Antony and Cleopatra, which shows us, as
Granville-Barker has said, the nemesis of the sensual man. The
unstable equilibrium cannot last; Antony in the end surrenders
wholly to his passions and loses the political world to young
Octavius Caesar, the man whose fortunes he had earlier saved.
There, perhaps, is Shakespeare's ideal practical man, Octavius
Caesar, shrewd, cool-headed, altogether a cold fish. Obviously
it is not the ideal practical man who is the glory of the human
species, and we do not need Octavius to tell us that practical
success was not, for Shakespeare, the greatest thing in life. But
to return to Antony. Antony and Cleopatra is among many other
things the story of a tawdry sensual love raised to tragic heights
by sheer poetry. Antony, who had formerly manipulated the
passions of the Roman crowd with such success, now manipulates
his own emotions, even though he is not really in control over
them. And while most at their mercy, he seems to be exploiting
them most. The poetry is no longer rhetoric, designed to influence
other people, but that enlarging and exploratory poetry whose
function is to raise human passion above its lonely and trivial
reality. Here is love without innocence, in sharp contrast to the
love of Romeo and Juliet. This affair between an ageing roue and
a royal prostitute is, from one point of view, sordid and ludicrous.
Cleopatra is shrewish, hysterical, sadistic, dishonest and cowardly,
as well as beautiful, queenly and heroic. Antony is selfish and
fatuous as well as generous and noble. Are they great lovers or
merely great sensualists? They are both experienced in the ways
of sexual pleasure and often talk as though that is all that love
involves. Yet this is far from being a disillusioned or a cynical
play. We are continually fascinated by the richness and variety
of character and the way in which history is bound up with
psychology. There is little pity or fear in tlie pky, but rather a
lively humane curiosity throughout. And the poetry keeps en-
larging the moment, showing experience as ever livelier and
richer. We watch fascinated as Antony, most Roman when

6 LITERARY ESSAYS

most enslaved by Egypt, goes to his self-inflicted death, and then
follow Cleopatra's twistings and turnings with ever-increasing
interest and wonder. We make no new moral judgments on
either, because that is decided at the beginning and is never in
question: they are neither innocent nor admirable. But perhaps
they are admirable in the literal Latin sense of the word, something
to wonder at. For there is a wonder in it all, and Cleopatra in her
death finds, as it were, the objective correlative of that wonder.
The sensual life ends in a blaze of ritual pageantry: it has its own
amoral nobility.

So Antony in some sense controls his destiny after all, which is
one thing the innocent man cannot do. Antony's kind of failure
is at least redeemable; it ends with a bang, not a whimper,
striking a blow for human glory. Can we say this of the ends of
Shakespeare's innocents, of Brutus and Hamlet and Othello, who
are destroyed by their own naive idealism? Let me pause for a
moment at Hamlet, and say a word about the play from this point
of view. The central problem of the play is that knowledge of
guilt has destroyed the hero's innocent picture of the world, and
it can never be restored. What can one do about evil? One can
ignore it, or come to terms with it, or use it in the creation of a
workable compromise world. One thing one cannot do is undo
it. Evil, once performed, is irrevocable. And that is one thing that
the wholly innocent man cannot accept. Of the many meanings
that can be extracted from the action of Hamlet, perhaps the most
tragic, and the one which fits in best with what appears to have
been Shakespeare's view of the essential tragedy of human life at
this time, is that here is a presentation of the paradox of guilt and
justice. Justice demands appropriate action where a crime has
been committed, but in fact no action is ever appropriate. The
tragedy of Hamlet, as in some degree of Othello, is that moral
outrage as seen by the innocent demands action, when no action
can be of any use. In a sense, we can say that the Ghost was at
fault in appearing to Hamlet in the first place, and setting him,
for what might be called purely selfish reasons, a task which, even
if accomplished, could do no possible good. When Hamlet's

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 7

whole nature was outraged by his mother's behaviour and then
by the news of his father's murder, he naturally felt that some-
thing must be done. But what? What could be done that would
make any difference any difference at all to the things that really
mattered? Would a dagger through Claudius' ribs restore Ham-
let's shattered universe? Would it restore the earlier idealized
image of his mother or remove the 'blister' that had been set on
innocent love? This is a tragedy of moral frustration. What are
you going to do about past crimes which have shattered your
preconceptions about the nature of life? There is nothing you
can ever do about the past: 'forget it, brother', is the only possible
advice. And yet of course Hamlet could not forget. Revenge is
no real help: what sort of action, then, is of help? "None that is
directed towards undoing the past: only purposive action directed
towards the future can ever get anywhere. Antony would have
seen that; so would Octavius Caesar. The real problem is not to
restore your private image of the world, but to make an imperfect
world a degree or two better than it is. But the moral innocent
can never accept this view. And that is at least one explanation
of Hamlet's long delay in carrying out the Ghost's command: he
wanted action that would undo the past, and no action could do
that, revenge least of all, for that would only re-enact the past.

The punishment can never fit the crime, for it can never undo
it. We may think we may be able to find appropriate action, as
Lear thought:

I will have such revenges on. you both
That all the world shall I will do such things
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth;

but in fact we never do, and it is impossible that we ever should.
Lear's frustration at feeling a deep moral indignation which can
have no 'objective correlative' in action is, in part, the cause of
his madness, as it is of Hamlet's moods and Othello's self torture
(for in Othello there is no action that can take care of the supposed
feet of Desdemona's infidelity). Only when he gives up the
whole idea of action does Lear recover and achieve redemption.

8 LITERARY ESSAYS

The morally outraged man, the finer and more sensitive he is,
will feel all the more need for action, the need to do something
about his shocking revelation; and his frustration at finding no
adequate action produces one kind of tragedy. As I have sug-
gested, the Ghost is in a sense the real villain in Hamlet, for he
destroys his son by setting him an impossible task. And the
Ghost learns, perhaps sooner than Hamlet himself, the futility of
trying to undo the past by physical action. He declines from the
armed warrior whom we first see to become on his last appearance
a pathetic domestic figure ('enter the ghost in his night gown'),
only interested in trying to mate contact with his morally lost
wife and in saving her from Hamlet's morbid rage, the rage of
outraged innocence. True, he states that his object is to whet
Hamlet's almost blunted purpose, but his manner and behaviour
belie this : he is there to try and save his family. This remarkable
scene the only one in which we see the Hamlet family together,
father, mother and son has a strange kind of pathos, with the
Queen unable because of her guilt to see her husband's spirit, so
that the Ghost, after a vain effort to re-establish the family unit,
as it were, departs in silence for ever. On the other side is the
Polonius family, all destroyed too through involvement in this
tragedy of outraged innocence, guiltless involvement on Ophelia's
part, almost guiltless on Laertes', and only relatively guilty on the
part of Polonius. We last see them together fairly early in the
play, when Laertes is being seen off by his devoted father and
sister also a touching domestic tableau, with its own meaning in
the play. The tragedy of Hamlet concerns more than the wreck
of a noble spirit, and the longer he dwells on the past and searches
for a way of undoing it, the more do guiltless, as well as guilty,
people become involved in it.

In. Othello the hero's romantic innocence is clearer and more
bound up with ignorance of the world than in any of the other
tragedies. lago is Othello's anti-type, the 'realist', the man who
thinks he knows how to get on in the world, who knows that
innocence is folly. He is more than a mere device to set the plot
in motion, as some modern critics have seen him, or than the

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE p

embodiment of 'motiveless malignity' that Coleridge saw. he is
both the disgruntled professional soldier and the hard-boiled
cynic who feels personally outraged when a simple-minded hero
like Othello gets ahead in the world and he, who knows the
world so much better, fails to get on. By all the rules, which
lago knows so well, innocence ought not to prosper, and lago
cannot be happy until he manipulates Othello to his destruction.
The dignity and self-confidence that Othello displays in the first
act must be destroyed. And because Othello is a Moor, and
noble, and so deeply in love with Desdemona that he can scarcely
believe his good fortune, and inexperienced and therefore self-
distrustful in domestic matters (especially where Venetians are
concerned), lago succeeds in destroying him. That he destroys
Desdemona too is incidental; he has no malice against her; he
is out to destroy successful innocence, which to him ought to be
a contradiction in terms, and he can only get at that through
Desdemona. He wants nothing out of it all except the destruction
of Othello : he makes this heroic figure dance to his piping, makes
a puppet out of him and what is to happen after that, he scarcely
thinks about. If he had thought, he would have known that
sooner or later the truth would come to light, but he never looked
beyond his immediate aim.

What makes it all possible is Othello's incredulity in the iace
of his own supreme happiness a kind of modesty, which makes
him vulnerable to lago's suggestion that he does not in feet enjoy
the happiness he has thought was his.

If it were now to die

'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

Desdemona does not share his sense of insecurity, and replies:

The heavens forbid

But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow.

She has defied her father and chosen Othello, and takes her

10 LITERARY ESSAYS

happiness as a right. She is no innocent idealist, but an enterprising
and practical young woman who went after the man she wanted.
When Othello, inflamed by lago's cunning and plausible lies,
turns on her, she is hurt and bewildered, but her world does not
come crashing about her ears. She goes to her death puzzled and
horrified, but confident that Othello's behaviour is all due to
some terrible mistake. She loses faith neither in life nor in him.
Othello is not a study in jealousy. For that, as Coleridge pointed
out, we must go to Leontes in The Winter's Tale. lago has to
work desperately hard to catch Othello in his trap, and even then
he is helped by coincidence before he can succeed. It is not
jealousy, but anguish that this beautiful and virtuous-seeming
creature, whom he loved, could be so horribly guilty, that so
torments him. It is an offence against his picture of the universe.
All reason and order and beauty are shattered : 'chaos is come again/
A soldier, a man who was used to meeting a situation with the
appropriate action, he here confronts a situation so monstrous, so
destructive of reason, chat nothing can be done about it. Some-
thing had to be done, but nothing could be done. Othello was
not a philosopher like Hamlet, who could at least mark time by
introspection and speculation while pondering the problem of
the irrevocability of performed evil. The man of action must do
something but what? 'Othello's occupation's gone', his world
is shattered, here was the outrage of irreversible evil. Something
had to be done, and the only action that seemed at all relevant and
proper in the circumstances was to kill Desdemona. He did not
kill her in jealous rage. He made no move himself to kill his
supposed rival Cassio. He killed Desdemona for the sake of his
moral universe, as the only action somehow appropriate to the
situation. 'It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.' And when the
truth is finally known, though it cannot make life tolerable for
Othello, it at least restores his moral universe and he can resume
his former dignity of bearing before performing the now inevi-
table act of sdf-slaughter. lago becomes for him simply the
Devil, expelled from the world he had destroyed, so that that
world can exist again.

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE II

I asked a little while back: 'What can one do about evil?' and
I replied that one can ignore it, or come to terms with it, or make
use of it, but one can never undo it. I might have added that one
can punish it. After all, does not justice reside in the punishment
of the wicked? Punishment is, from one point of view, a form of
revenge an impersonal form of revenge, shall we say and to
the outraged innocent who demands the rehabilitation of his lost
world it is as barren. Other Elizabethan dramatists than Shakes-
peare had been concerned to show that revenge was stultifying.
Shakespeare, in several of his plays, goes further and suggests that
punishment might be stultifying too. If one of his tragic themes
was outraged innocence becoming the tool of evil, another was
the futility of the quest for punishment. If human, affairs can be
successfully managed only by the tarnished man, the man who
compromises in some degree with evil, who has the right to
administer justice?

Measure for Measure is, of course, the pky which handles this
theme most directly. Its basic plot is an old one, which goes back
into the mists of folklore: the story of the judge or ruler who
offers to save a girl's lover or husband or brother if she will yield
herself to him, and who, after the girl has yielded, deliberately
breaks his promise. In pre-Shakespearean versions the girl does
yield to the ruler, but Shakespeare, by means of a device he had
already used in All's Well the secret substitution of one girl for
another in the bed of the seducer keeps his heroine chaste
throughout; further he follows George Whetstone rather than
Geraldi Cinthio in saving the girl's brother and having the ruler
only imagine that he has been put to death.

Several themes are woven together in this apparently simple
story. In the first place there is the ironical theme of the judge
himself guilty of what he has others punished for. Quis custodiet
ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the State's guardians, and what
happens when the judge is more guilty than the man he con-
demns? This is bound up with a theme not unrelated to the deep-
seated Oedipus motif: the ruler, in an honest attempt to uncover
guilt, reveals that he is himself the guilty one. This is the detective

12 LITERARY ESSAYS

story where the detective, conscientiously following the clues,
proves himself to be the criminal. Such a notion has both its
comic and its tragic side. The uncovering of the hypocritical
judge as the true villain can easily be made the subject of pure
comedy, as was done by Heinrich von Kleist in his comedy Der
zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), in which a judge is forced by
circumstances to conduct a careful cross-examination which proves
himself to have been the criminal in the case under investigation.
Finally, there is the Christian element in the story, which
Shakespeare emphasizes in the title. (Cf. Luke, Chapter 6: 'J u clge
not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be

condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven For with the

same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you
again.') In Measure for Measure everybody is in some degree
guilty, and it is only after the much-injured heroine has pleaded
for mercy for the man who has injured her that it is revealed that
the injury was in intention only. All are guilty, and mercy rather
than justice saves the day.

Shakespeare further complicates the story by having a dis-
guised duke, the real ruler, watch over the proceedings unknown
to the actors. The Duke, before leaving the country on a tem-
porary absence, gives over his rule to Angelo, hoping that Angelo,
a sternly puritanical character, will have the firmness to revive
laws which the Duke himself has been too kind-hearted to enforce,
with a resulting increase in sexual immorality among all classes.
Angelo begins by sentencing to death young Claudio for inter-
course with his fiancee and refusing to listen to any pleas for
mercy. Claudio's sister Isabella, passionately chaste and about to
enter a nunnery, pleads with Angelo for her brother's life, and
Angelo, suddenly smitten with lust for Isabella, agrees to save
him if she yields herself to him for one night. She of course
refuses, but the Duke, disguised as a friar, persuades her to agree
to a plot whereby Mariana, formerly betrothed to Angelo but
later deserted by him when her dowry was not forthcoming
(Angelo's original sin), is substituted for Isabella without Angelo's
being aware of the substitution. After spending some hours

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 13

secretly at night with the supposed Isabella, Angelo goes hack on
his word and orders Claudio to be immediately executed, but the
disguised Duke arranges for the head of a man who has died in
prison to be brought to Angelo as Claudio's, and Claudio is
spared. Finally, in a carefully contrived denouement, Angelo is
exposed, and, after a plea for forgiveness made by Isabella while
she still thinks Claudio has been executed, forgiven. Behind this
main action runs a stream of sordid low life, with bawds, brothels
and much talk of venereal disease.

The play has puzzled some, largely because of the different
and sometimes apparently conflicting themes bound up in the
story as Shakespeare develops it. The 'gulling' of the hypocrite
(in the manner of Ben Jonson's comedies) is one way of treating
Angelo, but he is at the same time presented as a genuinely
puritanical character who suddenly discovers, to his dismay and
even horror, that he is as much subject to sensual temptation as
ordinary men. He might even be said to be a man who has
sublimated his tendencies towards sadistic sensuality in the prac-
tice of stern justice, but who, on being faced with a beautiful
woman pleading for mercy for a brother condemned to death,
regresses into the sensualist and sadist. Similarly, Isabella is both
a stern, other-worldly character who fiercely abuses her brother
for a momentary lapse in his desire to face death rather than have
his sister lose her chastity and at the same time cheerfully plays the
procuress with Mariana, and a symbol of radiant purity who, at
the end of the play, embodies its Christian moral of mercy before
strict justice. The gulling of the hypocrite, the testing of the
puritan, the revelation of the judge as the criminal, the discovery
that all are guilty and none has the right to judge, and that mercy
rather than justice is the proper 'measure for measure' as between
man and man- here is indeed an intermingling of comic and
tragic themes. No wonder that Measure for Measure has elements
of Jonsonian comedy, Sophoclean irony and Christian morality.

But the pky is a unity nevertheless, and underlying the whole
complex action is the question: How can we forgive each other?
Only by realizing that we all in some degree partake of the nature

14 LITERARY ESSAYS

of die guilty. The theme is that of Dostoievsky's Brothers Kara-
mazoff, the morality Sossima's. Yet not quite. There is no
passion of saindiness in Shakespeare's play. The dark theme of
sex misused the forces of life used to produce disease runs
through it like a stain. And the mockery of human designs and
pretensions by the event emphasizes the impossibility of judging
the human heart. There is, I suppose, no point in complaining
that no character in the play seems wholly sympathetic, that even
virtue is made to appear uncongenial, if one realizes that a basic
theme in it is precisely that none are guildess and diat in judging
one anodier we have no right to condemn but only to forgive.
This is in a sense a deeply pessimistic position, and it implies at
one level the denial of die possibility of order and justice.

We see the implications of this in King Lear, when Lear's moral
insight is achieved at the expense of his pretensions to kingship.
Lear is a complex and tremendous play, which I cannot attempt
to deal with here. I want to draw attention only to the point that
as Lear's madness grows he acquires a new moral vision which
ends in the recognition that there is no division into the just and
die unjust. 'None does offend, none.' This is the other side of the
medal presented by Measure for Measure, the obverse of the view
diat we all share in everybody else's guilt, we all offend. The
artifice of rank can produce an apparent division into judge and
criminal, but with the 'natural' vision of madness this is seen to
be a false picture. This is more than the movement from ven-
geance to compassion, which it is often taken to be; the statement
that 'none does offend' follows a fierce picture of universal
lechery and deceit which shows the same kind of bitter disgust
with sex that some of Hamlet's speeches show. It is because all
are equally guilty that none does offend. The road to true humi-
lity runs through these bitter insights.

But are such bitter insights any more helpful in living than the
naive idealism of die innocent? If all are guilty and none does
offend, if judge and criminal can change places at will, what
becomes of human society? Lear's vision may be the way to his
personal redemption, but it is not the road back to efficient

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 15

kingship. Ignorant innocence and bitter knowledge are two ex-
tremes, one deriving from too little experience and the other
from too much, and neither is a viable human attitude. The old
argument about whether Lear should have been restored to his
throne could have been answered simply on these grounds : the
restoration of a man who had reached his point of view about the
nature of justice was morally impossible. Hamlet was no fit prince
because his moral innocence made him believe that evil was
always other people's evil, destroying his own moral world; he
never saw himself in Claudius; but the view that other people's
evil is always your own evil is equally untenable in a ruler. I am
not suggesting that Shakespeare's pkys are concerned with the
ideal ruler Shakespeare found great failures more interesting
than prim success stories but an extension of the argument in
this way does help, I think, to show some of the moral patterns in
some of the plays.

In his final plays, the so-called romances or tragi-comedies,
Shakespeare tackled these problems from a quite different point
of view. Is moral innocence always self-destructive? In Marina
and Imogen and Perdita and Miranda Shakespeare said *no\ Is
the administration of justice by humans to humans possible? In
the character of Prospero he gave a rather dubious *y es> - Can
past evil be undone? It can, symbolically, if we find the proper
ritual. In Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale and The Tempest
Shakespeare deals, in one way or another, with evil and innocence,
guilt and atonement, uncorrupted youth undoing original sin and
starting afresh. Mythology, folklore and magic find their way
into these plays to a greater degree than in any other of Shakes-
peare's mature work, so that it can hardly be claimed (as many
have asserted) that they represent a new faith in the essential
goodness of man: the remoteness of the setting and the intro-
duction of the magical element indicate a different level of pro-
bability from that found in Hamlet or Othello, a symbolic world
where (unlike the real world) innocence can triumph and the gods
enable the past to be undone. In Pericles, Marina and her mother,
both assumed to be dead, are found in the end alive and innocent;

16 LITERARY ESSAYS

in Cywbeline Imogen similarly comes alive again; in The Winters
Tale the statue of Hermione proves in the end to be the living
Hermione, long thought dead; and in The Tempest Alonso and
his company are miraculously redeemed from drowning to find
repentance and new virtue. The dramaturgy in these plays is
relaxed, almost casual, with masque elements and other spectacular
devices introduced to emphasize the note of symbol and ritual.
Shakespeare has done with probing directly the tragic paradoxes
of human nature, and he now reaches out to a. larger poetic
symbolism through which the moral patterns and possibilities of
human life can be presented with the calm beauty of one who is
no longer tortured by his own involvement.

Pericles, with its corrupt text and composite authorship, is the
least satisfactory of these plays, and the story, deriving ultimately
from a widely dispersed tale of Greek origin, is too crowded with
incident to be easily rendered dramatically. Since it is not a
commonly read play, let me give a brief summary of its plot.
Antiochus, king of Antioch, has incestuous relations with his own
daughter; Pericles, prince of Tyre, discovers this, thereby arousing
Antiochus' anger. To avoid the effects of Antiochus' wrath,
Pericles flees from his own kingdom of Tyre and after succouring
starving Tarsus sets sail again, is shipwrecked, lands at Pentapolis,
where he marries the King's daughter, Thaisa, then sets off by sea
again for Tyre. But he is again shipwrecked; during the storm
Thaisa gives birth to a daughter, Marina, before apparently dying,
and her body is committed to the sea in a chest. The chest is
washed up at Ephesus, where Cerimon restores the apparently
dead Thaisa to life and she becomes a priestess of Diana. Mean-
while, Pericles and Marina arrive at Tarsus, where Pericles stays
a year before returning to Tyre, leaving Marina in the care of
Cleon, governor of Tarsus, and Cleon's wife Dionyza. But
Dionyza grows jealous of Marina, who outshines her own
daughter, and plans her murder. Before she can be murdered,
however, she is carried off by pirates to Mytilene, where she is
sold to a brothel, but her angelic innocence converts the customers
to virtue and she retains her chastity. Pericles is told by Cleon

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 17

and Dionyza that his daughter is dead, and he devotes himself to
grief. But fate brings his ship to Mytilene, where he finds Marina
in a moving scene of mutual discovery. Finally, under Diana's
guidance, he proceeds to Ephesus, where he finds his wife, long
supposed dead.

To get the whole of this complicated story across requires the
use of choruses and dumb-shows, employed clumsily enough.
But the main theme centres on Marina, lost and found again,
subjected to the corrupting influence of the brothel yet preserving
always her shining innocence. And the sea, on which Marina was
born and into which Thaisa disappears to be cast up later alive,
dominates the play, a symbol of purification, of 'death by water'
which precedes resurrection. T. S. Eliot's poem 'Marina' distills
the essential meaning :

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What water lapping the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return

O my daughter.

Pericles is a symbolic play, a religious play, dealing with death and
resurrection, with ritual purification and the redemptive power
of innocence. Uneven and botched up in places as it is, it has its
Shakespearean moments of grave beauty, and though by itself,
so uncertain is the text and the authorship, it could tell us little
about the direction in which the later Shakespeare's imagination
was moving, with the following three plays it helps to build up a
picture of a Shakespeare who has turned away from what (with
all the necessary qualifications) might be called the psychological
realism of the great tragedies to a new, more symbolic kind of
play in which he could come to terms with the problem of evil
in a different way.

Cymbeline is another curiously complicated story, with ele-
ments from Holinshed and from folklore. A strain of fairy tale
runs right through the play. The princess who marries against
her parents' wishes, the wicked stepmother, the potion which
brings apparent death but which really only sends the drinker into

l8 LITERARY ESSAYS

a prolonged swoon, the 'Snow White' theme of the apparently
dead girl being covered with flowers by her simple companions
these are familiar enough elements in any folk literature. The
evil Cloten, son of the wicked stepmother, is also a folk-character,
though Shakespeare gives him a fully individualized personality.
Imogen herself is pure Shakespeare, idealized yet real, one of those
spirited heroines whom he created so happily in his 'middle
comedies' and who here is subjected to much more grievous trials
than anything which befell Rosalind or Viola. For the theme of
this play, as of Pericles, is innocence triumphant, emerging vic-
torious from the darkest possible circumstances.

Evil mounts to an ugly climax before the counter-movement
sets in, and Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt of its reality. lachimo,
the subtle Italian, is as nasty a case of small-minded pride and
perverted ingenuity as one can find in literature, and Cloten is a
sadistic boor. Only the Queen, the wicked stepmother, with her
stagey asides and her poison potions, remains a purely fairy tale
character, and her final suicide is as unreal as the rest of her actions.
This is tragi-comedy, where all the terror of tragedy is given full
vent before the tide is allowed to turn. Those who maintain that
Shakespeare now felt in a kindly mood towards life have surely
paid too little attention to Cloten or to the tortured speech that
Posthumus makes when he thinks his wife has betrayed him, a
speech full of the sex nausea we find in Hamlet.

Of course, tragi-comedy had become the fashion; the Black-
friars audiences wanted all the thrills of tragedy with the happy
ending of comedy, and they wanted, too, the masque-like devices,
the music and pageantry, which Shakespeare, yielding to public
taste, now freely gave them. It may be that this is the only
explanation one needs for these final romances or tragi-comedies :
Shakespeare the professional playwright was changing his style in
response to public demand. Yet one cannot be satisfied with this
explanation. The themes of these final plays are too similar, and
the ritual of forgiveness runs too persistently through them all,
for this not to be a reflection in some way of Shakespeare's mind
at this time. The point is, however, that it was not an easy for-

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 19

giveness resulting from a new optimistic belief that vice is always
defeated by virtue. Evil in all its horror is confronted directly in
these plays. Salvation comes by magic or coincidence, and the
ritual of pardon is performed in the serenity of a brave new world
in which we cannot literally believe. Even so, the grosser villains
are exempt from pardon. In Pericles the incestuous Antiochus and
his daughter are destroyed by a blast from heaven; Cloten in
Cymbeline has his head cut off by Guilderius with gruesome
cheerfulness, and the Queen conveniently ends her own life.
Those who are pardoned are those whose acts, in spite of them-
selves, turn out to have brought forth nothing but good. As in
Measure for Measure, time has brought good results out of evil
intentions, and no one standing on the stage in the remarkable
last act of Cymbeline has managed to achieve any lasting evil.
That is their good luck, or rather the playwright's magical mani-
pulation of events. And so, as Cymbeline says, 'Pardon's the
word to all'.

This bringing of good out of evil is, of course, a theological
theme, the theme of the fortunate fall. 'Ofelix culpa!' When, in
Paradise Lost, Adam hears from Michael God's plan for the
redemption of mankind, he replies:

O goodness infinite, goodness immense !
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good.

In Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter s Tale it is the playwright
who demonstrates this goodness, who brings good out of all this
evil; in The Tempest, it is one of his characters, Prospero, who
plays God within the play and arranges his own scheme of re-
demption for the little society which comes under his control.
This is the precise reverse of the tragic theme Shakespeare had
handled so profoundly in earlier plays the theme of innocence
unwittingly co-operating with evil, of moral idealism playing
into the hands of the lagos of the world. With luck, with magic,
with constant divine control, innocence is saved from betraying
itself and others, and evil can be made to bring forth good. But

20 LITERARY ESSAYS

not in the real world, only in the wish-fulfilment world, the
symbolic world where the sea gives back its dead and the mur-
dered god comes to life again. Shakespeare in these plays has
made contact with that archetypal myth with which man has
always consoled himself for the harsh paradoxes of the human
situation as we know it.

The Winters Tale is the greatest of Shakespeare's tragi-
comedies, and the play where the implications of his attitude at
this time can be most clearly seen. The first three acts constitute
a complete tragic play in themselves. Leontes, obsessed with his
self-begotten notion that his wife has played him false with his
friend Polixenes, brings her savagely to trial, thus causing the
death of their young son Mamillius; orders the destruction of her
new-born baby on the grounds that it must be Polixenes' bastard;
and only realizes the monstrous fatuity of his obsession when he
has been shocked out of it by the report of his wife's death.
Shakespeare spares us nothing. The presentation of Leontes'
sudden access of jealousy, and its wildfire growth, is brilliant and
accurate; Mamillius, before he goes to his death, gives us the best
and most attractive child scene in Shakespeare; Paulina, faithful
and outspoken, the only one who says what we want to say
throughout, meets nothing but rebuffs; and Hermione's splendid
dignity does not save her. At the end, Mamillius dead, Hermione
dead, and her infant daughter on the way to destruction, the
consequences of Leontes' wicked jealousy appear to have worked
themselves out. He knows better now, but it is too late to do
anything about it.

This is a tragedy, yet a simple tragedy, resulting from the
destruction done by evil, Leontes' jealousy. Virtue does not
destroy itself; Leontes' jealousy is not, like Othello's rage, de-
pendent for its existence on his very virtue. It is a pity that the
innocent are destroyed by the guilty, but it is less disturbing than
that the innocent should produce evil by their very innocence.
The first movement of The Winters Tale would, indeed, be like
the first part of a melodrama with evil triumphant and the
machinery of saving coincidence not yet set in motion were it

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 21

not that it ends with evil subdued, only too late. Leontes is no
longer the villain, but a sadder and a wiser man.

Part of the essential tragedy of Hamlet and Othello, I have
suggested, is that one cannot undo the past; evil once done is
done, and there is no way of restoring the lost world of innocence.
But in these last plays Shakespeare finds a way of at least partially
undoing evil. It is done by trickery, one might say Hermione
is not really dead, but hidden by Paulina; the infant daughter is
saved and brought up as a shepherdess but it is a symbolic
trickery, whose function is to suggest, once again, a. ritual of
redemption. Act IV of The Winter's Tale takes us to Bohemia
sixteen years later, and it is a new world, where even roguery is
innocent. Thejbst princess is now Perdita, a shepherd's supposed
daughter, and, true to the logic of fairy tale, she bears in her face
and manners the hereditary stamp of her royal birth, so that she
attracts Prince Florizel, Polixenes' son, and the two fall in love.
Bohemia is fairyland, real enough in its pastoral atmosphere, its
sheep-shearing feast and its flowering countryside, but fairyland
none the less, where Time keeps Innocence until the opportunity
has come for sending it back to do its redeeming work in the real
world. When Polixenes breaks up the idyllic pastoral to discover
FlorizeTs identity and abuses both Florizel and Perdita for daring
to fall in love so out of their degree, his vile temper and cruel
threats do not seriously disturb us: fairy tale fathers are always
angry in such circumstances, and Polixenes' anger, though mean-
spirited and selfish, has not the tragic overtones of Leontes'
jealousy.

In the end we come back to the real world. The young lovers
flee to Sicily, pursued by Polixenes, and eventually the discovery
of Perdita's identity makes all well. But this, significantly, is not
the end of the play, and the climax of reconciliation between the
young lovers and their parents is not presented on the stage, only
related in conversation between other characters. The climax is^
reserved for the discovery by Leontes that Hermione is still alive./
Paulina introduces her as a newly-finished statue of the dead
queen, but the statue turns out to be the living queen, kept in

22 LITERARY ESSAYS

seclusion all these sixteen years. But is the past really undone?
Are we back before Leontes' fatal outburst of jealousy? For
sixteen years Hermione has deliberately allowed her husband to
think her dead, and she returns to life now to greet her long-lost
daughter. The text gives her no greeting to her husband; her
first words are to ask a-blessing on Perdita. And there is no return
to life for Mamillius. The curse is not fully lifted from the older
generation: what Leontes has done he has done, and it cannot
after all be undone. The younger generation can do better; they
bring new innocence and new hope, and Hermione returns from
the grave to give her blessing to them. She says to Perdita:

thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved
Myself to see the issue.

She says nothing about being happy to live with Leontes again,
or of the waste of those sixteen years: all her thought is for her
daughter. The play ends with Leontes trying in his pattering
speech to act the part of the leader of this group who have eyes
for one another rather than for him. Murdered innocence comes
to life again, with promise of a happy future, but the murderer can
never again be the man he was before the crime.

So one cannot altogether undo the past, after all. Or perhaps,
if we stay in Bohemia and instead of sending our innocents back
to Sicily bring the guilty over to the Bohemian fairyland, the past
can be undone for all. But at a cost. A solution that is valid for
fairyland may not be valid for the real world. We cannot help
wondering what is "going to happen to the characters in The
Tempest when they return from the magic isle to Italy.

In The Tempest Shakespeare pushes die theme of forgiveness
farthest of all: there is no Antiochus, no Cloten, no dead Mamil-
lius. Prosperous island is not subject to the normal laws of human
destiny, for Prospero controls all with his magic and he can set
the stage for the desired solution. In a sense the play is less
Christian than any of Shakespeare's earlier treatments of guilt
and justice. Measure for Measure leaves us with a sense of identity

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 23

with the guilty, and we forgive each other for that reason. But
Prospero has no real kinship with the other characters; he stands
outside the action and stage-manages it, with Ariel's help. The
ritual of forgiveness is conducted by a priest who is not himself
in need of pardon. That is perhaps why many readers and spec-
tators of The Tempest have found Prospero a pompous bore, with
his prosy expositions of earlier events to both Miranda and Ariel
and his easy loss of temper with inattention or weakness. Though
he may not be, as was once widely thought, Shakespeare himself
taking his farewell of the stage, he is certainly in a sense the creator
of the other characters in the play, controlling them from above,
a god-like figure who renounces his godhead only at the end of
the play when, the action satisfactorily concluded, he breaks his
magic staff to take his place among common humanity. He is in
some respects like the Duke in Measure for Measure, for both
manipulate the other characters in a god-like way (perfect con-
trast to the malevolent puppeteering of lago), but the Duke is
involved in his world more than Prospero is, and symbolizes that
involvement by marrying Isabella in the end.

Miranda is youth and innocence, and her union with Ferdinand
has the same symbolic meaning as that of Florizel and Perdita.
Trinculo and Stephano represent gross animality, mankind at its
lowest, and the spirits that serve them are not like Ariel, but
alcoholic spirits which destroy the judgment and it is the alcohol
that attracts Caliban: ,

That's a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him.

Ariel is the wise man's spirit, representing the scientist's control
over nature, almost a Baconian symbol. The other characters
represent different degrees of good and evil at the human level
except for Caliban, who remains a somewhat puzzling character.
He is the conquered savage who has rejected the education of his
master and is punished by slavery for that rejection. Yet the island
was his, 'by Sycorax my mother', and Prospero took it from him
by force. Prospero, as the superior order of being, would have,

24 LITERARY ESSAYS

on the Elizabethan view, the right to dominate the inferior, so
Shakespeare seems to be posing no ethical problem here. Caliban,
savage son of a witch, the denier of civilization who refuses to fit
into Prosperous scheme of things and is punished for his refusal,
is in a strange way both evil and innocent. He is, in his own way,
a child of nature; he loves music, he is credulous, and easily fooled
by human art There is perhaps more to be said for him than for
the human villains whose treachery to each other constitutes a
deeper evil than Caliban's crude villainy: corruptio optimi pessima.
The action takes place throughout on the island, washed by
the purifying sea. It is shipwreck that saves Alonso and Antonio
from their wickedness; as in Pericles, death by water proves to be
redemption. It is shipwreck, too, that brings Ferdinand to
Miranda, and having done that, brings to her gaze other repre-
sentatives of the outside world, causing her to exclaim:

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here !
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

She is deceived : it is not a brave new world but a shabby old one.
Her innocence is ignorance; she takes the motley assortment of
schemers and traitors to be angels; and one is left wondering how
she will cope with the realities of the everyday world when she
has left the island for Italy. We remember that it was Othello's
ignorance of the 'civilized' way of life that led him to trust lago.
So in the end Shakespeare avoids tragedy by shifting his action
to a magic island in which all can be controlled by a benevolent
will : The Tempest is a magical play, full of grave beauty and rich
poetry, a play out of this world, a wish-fulfilment play in which
virtue has all the power and innocence meets its appropriate
destiny. This is the Garden of Eden, with God, as Prospero,
personally in charge to prevent Satan from prevailing; Miranda
is a prelapsarian character who, as the play ends, is about to leave
the shelter of Paradise to test her virtue in the wicked world.
When Eve, 'our credulous mother', left Paradise she had already
been tempted and had fallen, and she and Adam went out into

GUILT AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE 25

the world disillusioned and knowledgeable. But credulous Mir-
anda goes out unfallen into die world, whither Shakespeare refuses
to follow her. His last gesture is to avert his eyes from the
workaday world at the same time as he sends his characters back
into it. There they may become figures in other plays, tragedies
no less than comedies, since they will now be unprotected by
Prosperous magic.

Shakespeare's last word can hardly be Prospero's :

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,

for if that is all that life is, it is an odd thing to spend one's career
interpreting it dramatically. No; life is worth something after
all. The characters in The Tempest leave the magical island of
redemption to go back into civilization with all its imperfections
and temptations, and this is a good thing, for man belongs with
his kind, and there is a glory even in the tragic paradoxes of the
human situation. In the Epilogue Prospero asks to be released,
by the applause of the audience, from 'this bare island', and the
adjective is significant. 'Let me not', he says,

Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon* d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell; . . .

The magic world is but a 'bare island' after all, compared with the
ordinary world of men. Just as, in Paradise Lost, 'all th' Eastern
side of Paradise, so late their happy seat', appeared to Adam and
Eve as flaming and terrible when they looked back for a moment
before going down into the world that was all before them, so
Prospero's Eden becomes uninhabitable in the end. Perhaps
Shakespeare's last word, like Milton's, was that man cannot live
in Paradise.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 1

1~- ^EW WRITERS have suffered as much as Richardson for their

r historical importance. He is, we all know, 'the father of the
English novel'. Generations of students have noted the fact
at university lectures. Pamela, they will confide in examinations,
is the first true English novel; it is written in epistolary form and
tells the story of a virtuous maid who resisted her wealthy master's
advances to the point where she won his hand in marriage.
Clarissa is longer, and tells the story of an equally virtuous lady
who was dishonoured by a rake while under the influence of
drugs and who consequently died, life after dishonour being
impossible. Sir Charles Grandison, also long, gives the picture of
an ideal gentleman and his ultimate happy marriage with one of
the many females who adore him. So much is common know-
ledge. Most of the students will go on to add that Richardson's
morality is bourgeois in the extreme; that Pamela, whose whole
endeavour is to sell her chastity in the dearest market, is more of
a designing minx than a paragon of virtue, and that Ckrissa's
languishing into her grave after a purely technical loss of chastity
is a typical example of the unacceptable Puritan attitude to sex.
Nevertheless, the report will conclude, the fact that all three
novels are told in the form of letters passing between the characters
enables Richardson to give a fine psychological immediacy to the
action; he did understand the female heart, if not the male, and
records with commendable subtlety its fluctuations and vagaries;
and after all he is the father of the English novel. A few more
enterprising students might perhaps go on to vindicate Richard-
son's progenitive claims against those of Defoe or to contrast
Richardson's hot-house atmosphere with the fresh air of Fielding.
None of them will have read Richardson.

1 An address given to the National Book League, London, on 23 rd September
1954-

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 2J

This has been the authorized version of Richardson for some
time now, and of course there is some truth in it. Richardson is
historically important, his morality is typical of the middle class
of his day, his understanding of the female heart is impressive.
But the true nature and value of his achievement can be obscured
by these parrotted generalizations: it is time we removed the
literary historian's ticket from the novels and read them with
attention. And it would be as well if in reading them we forgot
about 'the novel', about the subsequent history of the literary
form which Richardson pioneered in England, and concentrated
on what was before us. If we did that, we should find, I think,
many unexpected patterns of meaning, particularly in Pamela and
Clarissa. We should find that these works were in some ways
more closely related to mediaeval saints' lives than to the novel
as we now know it, or that they are a kind of Paradise Lest and
Paradise Regained, set not in Eden or the wilderness but in the
mundane world of social convention and obligation. Milton and
Bunyan were concerned, in their different ways, with the exercise
of free-will in resisting temptation and thus achieving salvation,
Richardson is concerned with the exercise of prudence in order
to achieve success through virtue and thus attain salvation in both
worlds. Where the wiles of the devil make this double achieve-
ment impossible, as in Clarissa, prudence yields to saindiness and
the next world provides the only refuge.

The ideas that Richardson employs and manipulates in his
novels are : prudence and virtue, gentility and morality, reputation
and character. The relation between them is often complex.
Gentility is sometimes opposed to morality, sometimes a sign of
morality. Reputation is generally the reward of good character
but not always a guarantee of it. Prudence and virtue often go
together, but sometimes (as in the latter part of Clarissa) lead in
opposite directions. Richardson is very much aware of tie social
context; he is, one might say, obsessed with it. Rank mattered
to him; the difference between classes was something he could
never forget, and his moral patterns are built up against a back-
ground of social relationships which, provide the most real and

28 LITERARY ESSAYS

ineluctable facts about human life. For Richardson, all the tests
of life are public, carried out in full view of society and condi-
tioned by the structure of society. Eden for him is no garden but
an estate, and Adam is a landlord with tenants, Eve a lady with
social duties and dangers, and the serpent a neighbouring squire
who violates the rules of the game by combining the genuine
attractiveness of rank with an immoral character. There is no
private wrestling with one's soul or with the devil here; Richard-
son's moral dramas are acted out on a public stage, and any
moments of private anguish are promptly communicated by the
sufferer to a friend in a letter. The epistolary technique is no
incidental device: it is bound up with the social context of
Richardson's moral patterns. And if there is no purely private
anguish, there is similarly no purely private victory. Virtue must
be recognized to be real, and Clarissa's death is made into a moral
victory and indeed a beatification in virtue of the universal re-
cognition of her saintliness which it produces. Richardson was
the first important English writer to deal with basic moral prob-
lems imaginatively in a detailed social context.

This, then, is what is meant by the claim that Richardson's
novels enshrine an eighteenth-century bourgeois morality. Virtue
is consistently related to prudence on the one hand and to reputa-
tion on the other, and the arena of moral struggle is the stratified
society of contemporary England. Further, in the eyes of Rich-
ardson and his fellows the aristocracy is still a class to be envied
and aspired to. Pamela, the serving maid, has her virtue rewarded
by marrying into the squirearchy; Clarissa's upper middle class
family want to consolidate their position as property owners and
achieve a tide, and Clarissa's pursuer, the aristocratic Lovelace,
has never any doubt that marriage to him is a desirable thing for
her. Prosperous tradesmen and master craftsmen may have be-
lieved that their class was the sole repository of true virtue and
respectability in the nation, but the aristocracy was still admired
and looked up to as the class which the successful bourgeois hoped
ultimately to enter. The implications of this double view of the
aristocracy as representing both rakishness and the heights of

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 29

that worldly felicity which was the proper reward of a life of
combined prudence and virtue can be seen again and again in
the working out of Richardson's plots.

Richardson more than once stated that his primary aim in
writing these novels was moral instruction rather than mere
entertainment. It is perhaps worth quoting his own summary of
his intentions, which he gives us retrospectively in the preface to
Sir Charles Grandison. Pamela, he tells us, 'exhibited the beauty
and superiority of virtue in an innocent and unpolished mind,
with the reward which often, even in this life, a protecting Provi-
dence bestows on goodness. A young woman of low degree,
relating to her honest parents the severe trials she met with from
a master who ought to have been the protector, not the assailer
of her honour, shows the character of a libertine in its truly con-
temptible light. This libertine, however, from the foundation of
good principles laid in his early years by an excellent mother ; by
his passion for a virtuous young woman; and by her amiable
example and unwearied patience, when she became his wife, is,
after a length of time, perfectly reclaimed/ Clarissa, he goes on,
'displayed a more melancholy scene. A young lady of higher
fortune, and born to happier hopes, is seen involved in such
variety of distresses as lead her to an untimely death; affording a
warning to parents against forcing the inclinations of their chil-
dren in the most important article of their lives, and to children
against hoping too far from the fairest assurances of a man void
of principle. The heroine, however, as a truly Christian heroine,
proves superior to her trials; and her heart, always excellent,
refined and exalted by every one of them, rejoices in the approach
of a happy eternity. Her cruel destroyer appears wretched and
disappointed, even by the boasted success of his vile machinations :
but still (buoyed up with self-conceit and vain presumption) he
goes on, after every short fit of imperfect, yet terrifying convic-
tion, hardening himself more and more; till, unreclaimed by the
most affecting warnings and repeated admonitions, he perishes
miserably in die bloom of life, and sinks into the grave oppressed
with guilt, remorse and horror. His letters, it is hoped, afford

30 LITERARY ESSAYS

many useful lessons to the gay part of mankind against that misuse
of wit and youth, of rant and fortune, and of every outward
accomplishment, which turns them into a curse to the miserable
possessor, as well as to all around him.' And now, he tells us, he
presents in Sir Charles Grandison 'the example of a man acting
uniformly well through a variety of trying scenes, because all his
actions are regulated by one steady principle; a man of religion
and virtue; of liveliness and spirit; accomplished and agreeable;
happy in himself, and a blessing to others.'

Thus there can be no doubt that Richardson saw his novels as
essentially moral works, comparable, as I have suggested, to
mediaeval saints' lives. But of course a writer's statement of his
intentions never tells us all the important things about a work,
particularly when it is made, as here, after the books have been
completed. There was, no doubt, a certain amount of complacent
rationalization about Richardson's descriptions of the nature and
purpose of his novels. The novels themselves are more complex
than he ever seems to have realized, works of art by accident, one
might almost say, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The subtle
moral and emotional pattern in Clarissa, which the modern
reader finds so brilliant, derives from areas of Richardson's mind
of which he cannot have been fully conscious. I shall return to
this point when I come to discuss in more detail the individual
novels.

Richardson was a printer by trade, and a good and prosperous
one. He was born in 1689, and produced Pamela, his first novel,
in 1740, when he was fifty-one years old. His belated discovery
of his talent as a novelist emerged when he was in the process of
compiling a volume of letters designed to serve as models for
humble people not sufficiently educated to be able to write easily
and confidently on those occasions when letters might be called
for. He was working on this collectionin 1739 probably writing
letter no. 138, entitled *A Father to a Daughter in Service, on
hearing of her Master's attempting her Virtue' when it occurred
to him that he might work up a complete novel out of a series of
letters written by a virtuous servant girl to her parents in. the

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 31

intervals of dodging her master's attempts at rape. He remem-
bered a true story of a virtuous servant girl who eventually
married her master after successfully repulsing his more irregular
approaches, and this exemplary combination of prudence and
virtue appealed to him. He dropped his collection of letters, and
embarked at white heat on Pamela, Part I of which he finished in
a couple of months.

The original volume of letters was then completed, and pub-
lished in 1741, entitled Letters Written to and for particular friends,
Directing the Requisite Style and Forms To be Observed in writing
'Familiar Letters. It is more than a collection of model letters.
Some of his friends, Richardson tells us in his preface, 'are of
opinion, that they will answer several good ends, as they may
not only direct the forms requisite to be observed on the most
important occasions; but, what is more to the purpose, by the
rules and instructions contained in them, contribute to mend the
heart, and improve the understanding. . . . The writer . . . has en-
deavoured ... to inculcate the principles of virtue and bene-
volence; to describe properly, and recommend strongly, the
social and relative duties; and to place them in such practical
lights, that the letters may serve for rules to think and act by, as
well as forms to write after/ The tides of the letters indicate the
sort of thing. 'To a Father, against putting a Youth of but
moderate Parts to a Profession that requires more extensive
Abilities.' 'From an Uncle to a Nephew, on his keeping bad
Company, bad Hours, etc., in his Apprenticeship.' 'General
Rules for agreeable Conversation in a young Man. From a
Father to a Son/ 'A young Man in Business, to a Father, desiring
Leave to address his Daughter/ 'From a young Lady to her
Father, acquainting him with a Proposal of Marriage made to her/
c The Father's Answer, on a Supposition, that he approves not of
the young Man's Addresses/ *A Father to a Son, to dissuade him
from the Vice of drinking to Excess/ 'A young Woman in Town
to her Sister in the Country, recounting her narrow Escape from
a Snare laid for her, on her first arrival, by a wicked Procuress/
'To rebuke an irregular Address, when it is not thought proper

32 LITERARY ESSAYS

wholly to discourage it.' 'An Excuse to a Person who wants to
borrow Money/ *A Lady to her Friend, a young Widow Lady,
who, having buried a polite and excellent Husband, inclines to
marry a less deserving Gentleman, and of unequal Fortune.*
There is only one letter that has no moral relevance at all; that is
'A humorous Epistle of neighbourly Occurrences and News, to
a Bottle-Companion abroad', and here we see Richardson trying
his hand at something rather in the Lovelace manner. Some of
the letters almost sketch out an incipient plot, but the plan of the
book does not allow Richardson to pause long enough over any
situation to develop it into a story. But clearly he was itching to
do so.

Perhaps it is relevant to add that Richardson had always been
an assiduous letter-writer, and not only on his own behalf. For,
according to his own account, when still *a bashful and not
forward boy' of not more than thirteen, three young women
entrusted him with their love secrets in order to have him write
answers to their lovers' letters. *I have been directed to chide and
even repulse when an offence was either taken or given, at the
very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before
me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser,
dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word or that
expression to be softened or changed.' This was good training
for the future novelist of the female heart, and helps to explain
why Richardson understood women at any rate, certain kinds
of women so much better than he understood men. Men for
Richardson the novelist were interesting only in so far as they
aroused emotion in women; like Harriet Byron in Sir Charles
Grandison, he first reacted to a new male character by imagining
him in the role of a lover or a husband and estimated his character
in the light of his probable behaviour in that role. That, inci-
dentally, is the trouble with Sir Charles Grandison: in a novel
whose object is to depict the ideal gentleman, Richardson could
only achieve his purpose by introducing a sufficient number of
female characters whose unanimity in worshipping the hero
would sufficiently testify to his qualities. But a handsome,

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 33

virtuous and wealthy baronet who is surrounded by females who
are all in love with him and eventually coolly chooses as his bride
the one who wins on points, as it were, is neither a very interesting
nor a very edifying spectacle.

Richardson's volume of model letters reveals, or at least
suggests, the moral world in which his novels take place. It is a
world in which relationships are of the first importance : the relation
between master and servant, between parents and children, be-
tween debtor and creditor, between suitor and sought these and
other relationships condition what is proper in human behaviour,
and they are all, in some sense, symbolic of the relationship
between man and God. They reveal a nexus oErights and duties,
the rights being parental and proprietary, the duties being filial
and, in a sense, feudal. Interspersed with the letters revealing, and
indeed commanding, these rights and duties, are calls to repen-
tance and amendment addressed to those who have gone astray.
We thus have both the Law and the Prophets. The rewards for
duty well done are clearly defined; they are both earthly and
heavenly. Family and social relationships in this world being a
microcosm of the larger relationship between man and God,
there is an obvious analogy between prosperity in this world (the
result of the proper management of human relationships) and
eternal felicity in the next. The analogy between the two worlds
is, throughout Richardson's work, complex but consistent. One
moves into the next world only if the present world fails one.
Pamela was able to combine prudence with virtue and, literally,
make the best of both worlds. The title of the novel is Pamela: or,
Virtue Rewarded. Clarissa, cheated out of prudence, fails to secure
earthly prosperity but is instead rewarded in Heaven. I have
already suggested that Richardson manipulated such ideas as
prudence and virtue, gentility and morality, with considerable
subtlety. Prudence guarantees earthly happiness, while virtue
guarantees heavenly happiness, and the truly fortunate are those
to whom circumstances allow both. Respectability is the outward
and visible sign of prudence, and often, but not always, of true
virtue. (Clarissa loses her external respectability while fully pre-

34 LITERARY ESSAYS

serving her true virtue.) Similarly, gentility is the social behaviour
and the conventions within which virtue is likely to flourish but
does not necessarily flourish. Clarissa shows that otherworldliness
is not a virtue until this world has failed one. Good management,
economy, methodical disposition of one's time, prudence and
efEciency in managing property and business are important quali-
ties in all Richardson's heroes and heroines; Clarissa has them all
at first, and, though Lovelace cheats her into the imprudent act of
going off with him, she retains them to the end, changing only
the objects to which she applies them: she gets ready for death
with exemplary efficiency, even ordering and paying for her
coffin in advance. It might well be asked whether Richardson is
playing fair in endowing his heroines also with inimitable beauty.
What has beauty to do with moral patterns he is tracing? The
answer, I think, is simply that beauty is dangerous; it is more
difficult to be virtuous with beauty than without it, because beauty
attracts impure desire and provokes outrage. If, therefore, like
Pamela, one can combine prudence, virtue and beauty, one is
truly secure in both worlds. If, like Clarissa, one has virtue and
beauty but is cheated by the devil out of the exercise of prudence
on one critical occasion, one can compensate by raising virtue to
the level of saindiness and, confident of the next world, cheerfully
repudiate this one. Pamela is held up for our imitation (though
Richardson makes it very clear that only a most exceptionally
gifted servant can hope to marry her master), Clarissa for our
adoration. The latter's is the true saint's life.

Richardson's epistolary method was not only a natural one for
him, and an inevitable one in view of the road by which he
approached the novel; it was also the appropriate one for a
novelist concerned with the moment-to-moment recording of
the fluctuations of emotion in the midst of moral struggle. It
serves a similar purpose to that of the soliloquy in drama and the
so-called stream of consciousness technique in modern fiction.
We are brought immediately and directly into the consciousness
of the character. It is, of course, a convention, in itself no better
and no worse than other conventions in fiction. There is no

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 35

point in speculating on how the characters could possibly have
found time to write their hundreds of thousands of words, or
how they could have had the presence of mind, in the midst of
so much anguish, to sit down to write out everything, recalling
every word spoken by themselves and by those with whom they
have conversed; nor should we be distressed to find that they
managed even to make copies of their letters and send them to
other correspondents, and to transcribe other people's letters to
them, and send them around. That Lovelace, rake and daredevil
and man of action, impatient of delay and control, should in his
turn find both the time and the inclination to write to his friend
in the most intimate detail all his nefarious designs against Clarissa,
and give a play-by-play account of everything he and she do and
say, is of course improbable, but this kind of improbability does
not touch the level of probability on which the novel moves.
Quite apart from the fact that in the eighteenth century people
wrote letters oftener and in more detail than could be imagined
in our own age, there is the basic fact that all art requires conven-
tions, and the criterion to be applied is the degree to which the
author's use of the convention enables him to build up the proper
life in the work. The letters do indeed take the reader into the
heart of the developing situation and enable him to follow with
extraordinary immediacy the psychological implications of the
working out of the moral pattern.

One great difference there is between the epistolary technique
and the stream of consciousness method: the latter emphasizes the
privateness, the uniqueness, of individual experience, and is there-
fore appropriate for novels in which the essential loneliness of the
individual is stressed and the possibility of adequate communica-
tion between individuals is a major problem (as it is, for example,
in the novels of Virginia Woolf). The great theme of the eigh-
teenth and often of the nineteenth century novelist is the relation
between gentility and virtue; that of the modern novelist is the
relationship between loneliness and love. The former theme re-
quires a more public kind of elaboration than is appropriate for
die latter, and letters are a most effective way of publicizing pri-

36 LITERARY ESSAYS

vate experience. Publicity is important for Richardson. For him,
virtue is not a matter between oneself and God ; it must be publicly
known and admired. Clarissa's death scene, for example, is most
carefully staged; it is a device for demonstrating saindiness in
action. For the saint to arrange such a demonstration implies a
certain degree of self-approval, but that was no problem for
Richardson, for whom self-approval must always co-exist with
virtue, even with modesty. Clarissa is humble, yet she is full of
conscious superiority, which she expresses quite unaffectedly, and
the same can be said of Sir Charles Grandison. The moral life is a
public life; it is an exemplum, something to be seen, approved and
imitated or at least admired. Martyrdom would be useless if no
one knew of it, and the exemplary life could not be exemplary if
no one observed it. Clarissa represents the former, Pamela the
latter.

Pamela, which came out in 1740 (though dated 1741), is an
altogether simpler novel than Clarissa. Its theme is a folk theme,
but the treatment is very different from anything one will find in
folk literature. The class background is far from being the simple
one of low-born maiden and high-born lord. Richardson's class
was committed to the view that worth depended on individual
effort rather than on status, yet they were fascinated by status and
could not help admiring and envying it. This gives an ironic
ambivalence to the whole moral pattern of the novel. Squire B.
is bent first on seduction and then on rape; he is dishonest, male-
volent, cruel and persecuting. He does everything he can to get
Pamela into his physical power, and at one stage is on the point of
committing rape when Pamela providentially falls into fits and
scares him off. (All the while the horrible Mrs Jewkes, the house-
keeper to whom Mr B. had entrusted Pamela in the hope of
softening her up for seduction, looks on with glee and exhorts
her master not to 'stand dilly dallying' but to get the act of
violation over with at once. Likewise, in Clarissa, the rape of the
heroine is watched and encouraged by Mrs Sinclair and her band
of trollops. Even rape must be public in Richardson.) Yet, after
Mr B. has relented and sent Pamela home, she returns voluntarily

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 37

when he sends for her, loving and admiring him all the time,
though disapproving of his attempts to dishonour her. Whenever
he relaxes his attempts for a moment, she is all respect and admira-
tion for him; and when he finally convinces her that her continued
successful resistance has led him to offer marriage, she is all humble
love and passionate gratitude. Successful resistance turns lust to
love; once Squire B. has got over his weakness for seduction and
rape he is seen by Richardson as a wholly admirable person, not
only worthy of the love of a virtuous girl like Pamela but deser-
ving of her humblest obedience and veneration. She considers
herself unworthy of him. 'My good master,' she writes, 'my kind
friend, my generous benefactor, my worthy protector, and oh!
all the good words in one, my affectionate husband, that is soon
to be (be curbed in, my proud heart, know thyself, and be
conscious of thy unworthiness!) has just left me, with the kindest,
tenderest expressions, and gentlest behaviour that ever blest a
happy maiden. 5 If a man is a wealthy landowner, and handsome
and graceful in manners to boot, he must be considered wholly
good so long as he is not being actively bad. Printers do not
become angels by merely ceasing to threaten girls with sexual
violence, but evidently squires do. Richardson, of course, would
have been horrified by such a comment. He claimed that he was
showing a genuine reformation of character, wrought by Pamela's
virtue in a young man who had the advantage of an excellent
moral grounding in childhood. But we know better, and I suspect
Pamela did.

This counter pattern which crosses the moral pattern which
Richardson consciously planned for the work does not, of course,
spoil the novel; on the contrary, it makes it richer and truer.
Human nature is like that; motivation is complex, and the
relation between our moral professions and the full psychological
explanation of our actions is far from simple. Sometimes it
almost seems that Richardson knew this and was deliberately
writing a sly, ironic novel. After Mr B.'s first attempts on her,
before she has been deceitfully carried off to the country house
where Mrs Jewkes presides, Pamela very properly decides to go

38 LITERARY ESSAYS

home to her parents and leave the scene of temptation; but she
finds excuse after excuse for not going, and postpones her de-
parture until Mr B. has managed to mature his plan for tricking
her into going instead to the house he has waiting for her. And
though she professes to prefer honest poverty to vicious luxury,
she makes it quite clear in her letters home that she has grown
used to a much better way of life than they can afford in their
humble cottage. She notes all the fine clothes given her by her
late mistress and her master, and, having completed an inventory
of what she has, noting what she can in conscience retain, makes
such remarks as: 'Here is a calico night-gown, that I used to wear
o* mornings. 'Twill be rather too good for me when I get home;
but I must have something. . . . And here are four other shifts,
one the fellow to that I have on; another pretty good one, and
the other two old fine ones, that will serve me to turn and wind
with at home, for they are not worth leaving behind me; and
here are two pairs of shoes; I have taken the lace off, which I will
burn, and may-be will fetch me some little matter at a pinch, with
an old silver buckle or two.' Most suggestive of all, she gives up
the fine clothes her lady had given her, determined not to sail
under false colours, and provides herself with a new, simpler
outfit.

And so when I had dined, up stairs I went, and locked myself up in my little
room. There I dressed myself in my new garb, and put on my round-eared
ordinary cap, but with a green knot, my home-spun gown and petticoat, and
plain leather shoes, but yet they are what they call Spanish leather; and my
ordinary hose, ordinary I mean to what I have been lately used to, though I
should think good yarn may do very well for every day, when I come home.
A plain muslin tucker I put on, and my black silk necklace, instead of the French
necklace my lady gave me; and put the ear-rings out of my ears. When I was
quite equipped, I took my straw hat in my hand, with its two blue strings, and
looked in the glass, as proud as any thing. To say truth, I never liked myself
so well in my life.

O the pleasure of descending with ease, innocence, and resignation!
Indeed, there is nothing like it! An humble mind, I plainly see, cannot meet
with any very shocking disappointment, let Fortune's wheel turn round as
it will.

And down she trips, looking, as she very well knows, more

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 39

ravishing than ever, and runs straight into her master, who
pretends not to recognize the 'pretty neat damsel'.

He came up to me, and took me by the hand, and said, 'Whose pretty maiden
are you? I dare say you are Pamela's sister, you are so like her. So neat, so
clean, so pretty! Why, child, you far surpass your sister, Pamela!'

I was all confusion, and would have spoken, but he took me about the neck:
'Why,' said he, 'you are very pretty, child: I would not be so free with your
sister, you may believe; but I must kiss you.' *O Sir,' said I, 'I am Pamela,
indeed I am: indeed I am Pamela, her own-self I'

This, and scenes like this, are admirably done, whatever
Richardson thought he was really doing. It is as though Richard-
son knows Pamela so well that he has simply to let himself be
Pamek in order to write the letters. He does not have to under-
stand her or to analyse her motives, any more than she understands
and analyses herself. She sets herself out to attract her master from
the beginning, though she herself does not realize it and perhaps
her creator does not; but prudence as well as morality demands
that she keep herself unravished while keeping his interest in her
at fever pitch. She thinks she is trying to escape his clutches, but
allows herself to be deflected from her attempts at escape by the
slightest obstacles (even to the point of supposing an inoffensive
cow to be a fierce bull), and when he finally lets her go she flies
back to him at his summons.

When he releases her, she leaves with a reluctance that surprises
herself. 'I think I was loth to leave the house. Can you believe it?
What could be the matter with me, I wonder? I felt something
so strange at my heart! I wonder what ailed me/ She writes
home in this troubled state of mind from a village where the
coach has paused. 'Here I am, at a little poor village, almost such
a one as yours !' The smallness and poverty of the village (and by
implication of her parents' home) are mentioned more than once.
And when Mr B.'s letter arrives, asking her to return (though
only in the most oblique way promising marriage) she writes in
her journal, 'O my exulting heart!' She knows now what she
has wanted all along.

The rest of Part I and all of Part II are much less interesting.

40 LITERARY ESSAYS

The marriage duly takes place, and there is a lively scene a little
while afterwards when, the Squire being temporarily away from
home, his sister Lady Davers calls and, assuming that Pamela is
her brother's mistress and not his wife, abuses her with fine
snobbish scorn. But after this the book swells into a chorus of
admiration from the neighbouring gentry. Pamela's story is
known, and she is trotted around aristocratic drawing-rooms to
be admired for her successful defence of her chastity and her
nobility of character. She has perfect manners, and conducts
herself everywhere with model decorum. Lady Davers is re-
conciled and joins the chorus of admiration. One of Pamela's
last acts in Part I is to exercise her benevolence on an illegitimate
daughter of her adoring husband, product of an early and fully
confessed amour.

Part II, added in 1742, to replace and discredit continuations
(both serious and satirical) by other hands, is a dull marriage
manual showing the ideal couple in action, with a mild and
temporary break in perfect felicity when Squire B. becomes
involved with a widowed countess at a masked ball. (Thus show-
ing the immorality of masked balls, which Richardson was never
tired of preaching.) Pamela becomes the oracle, dispensing
wisdom in her letters on everything from the state of the drama
to Locke's views on education. The most interesting part of
Pamela is over by the time her marriage is accomplished.

Pamela is thus a psychologically realistic fairy tale grounded in
middle class morality which achieves a level of ironic counter-
statement by the sheer honesty and accuracy of its heroine's
self-revelation. Air B. is less successful than the heroine; Richard-
son had little first-hand knowledge of the manners and conver-
sation of the higher squirearchy and nobility, and Mr B. is
interesting only for the reactions he produces in Pamela. It has
long been the fashion to complain about the morality of the book,
with its attempt to reconcile virtue with material self-interest.
But what is wrong with reconciling virtue with self-interest if you
can? There are three factors involved: what you are really like
(psychology); what will get you success in this life (prudence) ;

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 41

what will get you success in the next life and may with luck also
do so in this (virtue). Pamela is true to her psychology (as one
might say) and manipulates her virtue into prudence with un-
conscious art. (One assumes that it is unconscious.) All one can
say is: nice work if you can get it.

There is surely nothing immoral in refusing to have sexual
relations with the man you are in love with until marriage secures
you a permanent relationship with him. It is not that which seems
to me the moral flaw in the novel. What I object to is something
that appears equally clearly in Clarissa, namely Richardson's
narrow and mechanical view of sex, and indeed of love. Pamela's
love for Squire B. cannot be easily dissociated from her admiration
of his position and wealth; once he has been prevailed on to
behave decently his position and wealth can be allowed to make
him desirable. It is not that Squire B. marries Pamela because he
cannot satisfy his lust outside marriage; it is rather that her
continued defence of her chastity, and his reading of her letters
and journal, have aroused in him a moral admiration of her
character which changes his sexual desire into moral approval.
Sex, wherever it is treated in Richardson, is presented as some-
thing violent and violating. The notion of mutual sexual
satisfaction never seems to have occurred to him. None of
Richardson's rakes seeks such satisfaction; they want to rape;
they are not sensualists but competitive collectors of virginities
by violence. In Clarissa, Lovelace achieves his nefarious purpose
on a drugged and passive victim. It is a purely quantitative
business, a matter of arithmetic: the more people you can violate,
the greater your glory as a rake. This is a Kinsey report view of
sex, a mechanical as well as an unrealistic view. And the rake's
view of sex as violence' done by the man to the woman is lower
even than Kinsey. The woman is sacrificed to male violence, and
even marriage but provides the proper arena for such a sacrifice.
In Clarissa images of the victim stretched out before the knife
recur again and again, directly and obliquely. In Sir Charles
Grandison the wedding night of the hero and heroine is described
in terms suggestive of the bride as a sacrifice. Richardson under-

42 LITERARY ESSAYS

stood the housemaid's quiver of joy at the thought of marrying
her handsome master, and reproduces this kind of sensibility with
great brilliance. But that has as little to do either with sex or with
love as has the attitude of his rakes, for whom a seduction or a
rape (it is all one to them) is, like climbing Mount Everest, a
matter of planning and stamina. There is no pleasure in it: the
pleasure lies in the satisfaction of having done it. One can, if one
likes, relate this characteristic of Richardson's to the Puritan
suspicion of sex, but I for one am dissatisfied with such easy
generalizations. Many Puritans, because of their very suspicion of
sex perhaps, had an uncanny insight into its nature and working.
I suspect it has something to do with Richardson's own tempera-
ment and history.

Clarissa appeared in eight volumes in 1748. It is a subtler and
profounder work than Pamela, and by general agreement Richard-
son's masterpiece. It is impossible to give an adequate account of
this long and complex novel here, and I must be content with
noting aspects which I think interesting and significant. In the
first place, the deployment of the plot is a remarkable achieve-
ment. Clarissa, the virtuous, beautiful, talented younger daughter
of the wealthy Harlowes, with a fortune of her own left her by
her grandfather (but which she has filially surrendered to her
father), is manipulated from a position which combines the
height of virtue with the height of material good fortune to one
in which she is despised and rejected, becoming an almost Christ-
like figure of the Suffering Servant. This is achieved by no sudden
peripeteia, no dramatic reversal, but by a brilliantly deployed
series of little incidents which combine to deny Clarissa the fruits
of prudence without actually making her an imprudent character
and eventually close in on her to prevent any return to the world
of material happiness. Clarissa is manoeuvred into sainthood by
a cunningly woven mesh of circumstance which seems always
until almost the very end to allow the possibility of escape back
into the world of lost prosperity. She is given the appearance of
guilt without real guilt; she is made to appear to fall without
having really fallen; almost everybody comes at one time or

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 43

another to doubt the purity of her motives or the perfection of
her character. Then, in the end, when public opinion seems to
have disposed of her for ever, she rises in death from her degra-
dation to shine on high in glorious resurrection.

Let me briefly recall the main movements of the story. The
first major phase of the action concerns the Harlowe family's
sustained attempt to force Clarissa to marry the stupid, ugly and
mean-spirited Mr Solmes. The leading spirit here is her con-
temptible brother, who sees financial advantage to himself in the
match, while her jealous sister Arabella, suspicious that Clarissa
is in love with Lovelace (whom she loves but pretends to hate), is
equally determined to have her married off to Solmes. Her father,
a gouty autocrat, finds his authority and what he calls his honour
involved, and insists on the match. Her mother, weakly giving
in to pressure from the rest of the family, adds her persuasions.
Meanwhile, Clarissa's brother has insulted Lovelace, who has
overcome and wounded him in a duel, while Clarissa reluctantly
consents to a clandestine correspondence with Lovelace in
order to prevent him from taldng a bloody revenge on the
Harlowe family. Clarissa is in continuous correspondence
with her friend Anna Howe, to whom she recounts each clay's
events.

The situation here developed enables Richardson to develop a
much richer moral pattern than anything to be found in Pamela.
Clarissa, the perfection of whose character is made clear from the
beginning, finds herself obliged to disobey her parents and at the
same time involved in clandestine correspondence with a rake.
Richardson is here exploring, as fully as he can, the borderland of
his moral universe. Children must obey their parents; but on the
other hand parents must never force a child into marriage against
the child's inclinations. These principles Richardson had already
made clear elsewhere, but they are clear enough in the story.
Clarissa offers to give up all thoughts of marriage and to live
single either on the estate her grandfather had left her or anywhere
else acceptable to her parents. She is suspected of being really in
love with Lovelace, but she protests that she will have nothing

44 LITERARY ESSAYS

more to do with him or any other man if she is allowed to remain
free of Solmes. But her brother has organized the family to press
for her marriage with Solmes, and she is confined to her room
and subjected to every kind of pressure in the hope that she will
consent to the marriage, in connection with which the most
elaborate and (to the Harlowe family) favourable settlements
have been drawn up. The picture of family pressure operating
on Clarissa is drawn with magnificent vividness. The spiteful
brother and sister, the tender but insistent mother, the hectoring
uncles, and in the background the father egotistically insistent on
his parental rights all this comes through with vividness and
immediacy from Clarissa's letters to Anna Howe. At the same
time Anna herself is revealed in her replies as a sprightly and witty
girl whose chief pleasure in life (to Clarissa's distress) is teasing the
worthy gentleman whom her mother wants her to marry and
whom, it is clear, she will eventually marry. (Another piece of
evidence, incidentally, that Richardson did not understand the
nature of love between the sexes.)

We also get occasional glimpses of Lovelace, who is revealed
as the master mind behind the preposterous behaviour of the
Harlowe family. By bribing servants to report his determination
to perform various rash acts in pursuit of his vengeance against
the Hatlowes and his love for Clarissa, he whips them into a fury
of determination that Clarissa shall marry the odious Mr Solmes
at the earliest possible moment. Pressure on Clarissa grows
stronger and stronger; Lovelace presents himself continually as a
source of refuge, offering to provide unconditional sanctuary for
the persecuted girl among the ladies of his family (who, of course,
all adore her, though by reputation only). Finally, when it looks
as though Clarissa is to be forced by physical compulsion into
marriage with Solmes, she momentarily yields to Lovelace's
suggestion of rescue, only to revoke her acceptance of his offer
shortly afterwards. But Lovelace refuses to take cognizance of
her letter of revocation and awaits her at the garden gate with all
necessary equipment for escape. On her going out to inform
him that she cannot take advantage of his offer, he contrives a

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 45

scene which enables him to whisk her off, and henceforth she is
in Lovelace's power.

The second movement of the story deals with the struggle
between Clarissa and Lovelace. He is a rake, and therefore is
reluctant to marry, though he adores Clarissa. He contrives
matters so that she is made more and more dependent on him,
and eventually brings her to London, to an apparently respectable
lodging house which is in fact a brothel run by an old friend of
his and staffed by girls whom he has ruined. After much coming
and going, and a complex series of movements in Clarissa's heart
towards and away from Lovelace the documentation of this
shows us Richardson at the height of his powers he attempts her
virtue by arranging a mock fire and bringing her out of her room
in her night dress to escape the supposed conflagration. She sees
his purpose, discovers his trick, and successfully repulses him,
shaken to the core by his villainy. He is repentant and offers
immediate marriage, which she proudly rejects. She despises
him, and will not marry a man whom she despises. He exerts
himself to restore himself to favour in her eyes, arranging for
friends of his to play the part of an emissary from her relatives
offering reconciliation if only she is married to the man she eloped
with, and even to personate his own noble relations. He succeeds
to the point of manoeuvring her back to the house of ill fame, and
there, with the co-operation of the inmates, he first drugs and
then violates her. Now that he has climbed his Everest and proved
that it cannot be done without carrying oxygen, as it were, he is
prepared to concede her true virtue and to marry her. (Of course
he had pretended to be dying to marry her all the time, but had
adroitly phrased his offers so as to compel her refusal on each
occasion.) After illness and hysteria, she escapes from him, and
ignores his frenzied appeals for forgiveness and immediate mar-
riage. Meanwhile her friends and relations consider her a ruined
woman who has wilfully contributed to her own dishonour. Her
family regard her as a wicked runaway who deliberately chose
ruin at the hands of a rake.

The third and final movement of the book deals with Clarissa's

46 LITERARY ESSAYS

vindication and sanctification. By means of letters appropriately
copied and circulated the truth begins to emerge. But her family
are prevented from knowing the truth until after her death, while
her dear friend Anna Howe is kept from her by a number of
contrived circumstances, and even her sympathetic cousin Mor-
den, who finally arrives home from Italy, is not allowed to come
to see her until her death is inevitable. All this time the unfortu-
nate Lovelace is frantically pleading for forgiveness and marriage,
backed by his powerful family. But Clarissa remains alone, in
lodgings, befriended by strangers, cut off from friends and
relations. And there, having made all suitable preparations, she
dies, before an audience of new-found admirers. Her death is a
studied presentation of ars moriendi, a high example of the art of
dying like a Christian. Her family, on finally learning the whole
truth about her conduct, are consumed by remorse, and her
funeral is the occasion of its exhibition. Every single wicked
character in the book then meets an appropriate sticky end.

Such a sketchy account of the plot can give no impression of
the book's richness and subtlety, nor can it illustrate the effective
way in which Richardson moves his heroine from the context of
this world to her glorious martyr's inheritance of the next. And
almost until the end he keeps the possibility of marriage with
Lovelace open. Her friend Ajina Howe urges her that this is the
way to bring everything to a reasonably happy ending, and the
Lovelace family, who love and admire her, plead with her to
reform by marriage the attractive but wayward author of all the
mischief. At one time she had been prepared to marry him in
order to reform him, and she admitted, if not love for him, at
least a predisposition in his favour. But there is no forgiveness for
violation; she cannot marry a man so wicked, nor can she con-
sider herself, a violated woman, as someone who ought to marry.
The grave, and Heaven beyond it, are now her only resource.
The book, which had begun as an exercise in Holy Living, ends
as a case history of Holy Dying. *

Before her violation Clarissa had been prepared to consider
marriage to the fascinating Lovelace for the purpose of reforming

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 47

him, and Lovelace himself cunningly played on his need for
reformation by such means. But that temptation is over once the
rape has taken place; marriage is henceforth unthinkable to
Clarissa (but not to her friends), whose thoughts are more and
more centred on the next world. Attempted violation (such as
Pamela met with) is one thing; successful violation is another.
Richardson is not as clear as he might be on the relation between
guilt and misfortune. Sometimes he suggests that Clarissa (though
through no fault of her own) is 'ruined', made permanently unfit
for matrimony by having been forcibly rendered a fallen woman.
Like so many of his generation and later, Richardson had a purely
technical view of chastity. Clarissa, though a saint, had lost her
chastity, so she must give up any hope of accommodation with
this world. She could not, of course, consider marriage with her
violator (and Richardson is a cut above many nineteenth-century
moralists in this), but neither could she respect aay other man
willing to marry a woman who had lost her 'honour* however
innocently.

Perhaps Clarissa could have escaped Lovelace's clutches in time
if she had really tried. She could easily, it has been suggested,
have put herself under the protection of the nearest magistrate.
But to look at her confinement in Mrs Sinclair's house in this way
is to misunderstand what Richardson is doing. That house has
by this time become a microcosm of the world, and Clarissa's
confinement in it is a symbol of her confinement in this wicked
mundane sphere; the only escape now can be into the next world.
After her violation, all men are vile. Nothing in this remarkable
book is more psychologically convincing than Clarissa's horror
of anything in trousers after her experience at the hands of Love-
lace. She uses the word 'man' as a term of abuse and contempt,
and at first refuses to have a doctor in her room during her final
illness because he is of the male sex. This world, in whose
social duties man may, with luck, imitate heavenly felicity and
anticipate his ultimate reward, has become for Clarissa a den of
iniquity. Her family, obedience to whom is a condition of earthly
prosperity, have made her obedience impossible. She cannot go

48 LITERARY ESSAYS

back to them. She is going home to her father, as she tells Lovelace
in a deliberately ambiguous note, but it is her Heavenly Father;
her family relationship is subsumed in the higher relationship to
God, the Father of all.

It might be argued that by making Clarissa perfect in beauty,
virtue and wealth Richardson was deliberately restricting the
implications of the story. What universal application can be
drawn from the fate of a character who is endowed with all
possible good qualities of character and fortune? It can, however,
be argued with equal plausibility that Richardson, by putting the
extreme case, by showing how even this perfect creature can be
caught in the mesh of the wicked world, is extending rather than
limiting his context. But this whole argument is academic.
Clarissa is a novel both realistic in its psychology and symbolic in
its scope and meaning : it elaborates the conditions under which
virtue can be driven to sainthood. Further it must be remembered
that for all her saintliness Clarissa is human. She can be proud
and obstinate, and she has her moments of weakness. And the
origin of her troubles lay in her breaking of the social rules,
however innocently.

Lovelace is a more interesting character than Mr B., though
no more convincing. He is a mild and timid man's picture of the
ideal rake, of Satan as gentleman, witty, boisterous, adventurous,
courageous, ruthless. His letters to his friend Belford are pre-
posterous enough, showing him as they do congratulating him-
self on being a rake and introspecting on his rakishness with
incredible self-consciousness. To us he is less a fascinating villain
than a cad and a fool, who does not even know how to handle
his women. But he serves his purpose, which is after all little
more than that of a catalyst.

There is much more to be said about Clarissa indeed, I feel
that I have only touched the fringe of its meaning and its interest
but I must say a brief word about Richardson's last novel, Sir
Charles Grandison, published in seven volumes in 1754. The
relative lack of moral conflict in this work makes it less interesting
than the other two. Further, Richardson is here concerned ex-

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 49

clusively with high life, which was unfamiliar to him, and the
result is a stiffiiess that compares most unfavourably with Pamela's
vulgar self-revelations. Who can be convinced by a hero who
has absolutely everything life has to offer fortune, supreme good
looks, perfect virtue and perfect prudence? He goes through life
settling other people's affairs with calm assurance, making friends
of enemies, disarming those who seek duels with him by a flick
of his wrist (for he disapproves of duelling), arranging marriages,
making up quarrels, mingling seemly mirth with grave reproof.
Nowhere else in Richardson is the public nature of the emotional
life made so apparent. Everyone reveals his (or, more often, her)
inmost emotions to everyone else. Letters are shown, copied,
exchanged. Sir Charles, who first meets the beautiful and virtuous
Harriet Byron through rescuing her from being carried off by
the villainous Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, soon reveals to her the
complicated story of his emotional entanglements in Italy,. and
she is referred to letters in the hands of the Rev. Dr Bardett, Sir
Charles' chaplain, for further details. The Italian subplot is melo-
dramatic and artificial, and the lovely Clementina, 'who would
have married Sir Charles but for a difference in religion, is an odd
creature to find in Richardson's pages. But in high life anything
can happen, and Sir Charles speaks Italian perfectly. The book is
not, however, as dull as this description might lead one to suppose.
Lady G.'s accounts of her tiffs with her husband are often lively
and amusing, and there are other 'humours' in the book to relieve
the complacent virtue of the hero.

But if Richardson had written only Sir Charles Grandison he
would not be remembered today as a novelist. The detail here,
which is profuse, does not weave the fine psychological and moral
mesh of Clarissa, nor has it the naive conviction of Pamela. I
could make a case for Sir Charles Grandison, but it would be
disproportionate to attempt to do so here at the end of an already
too crowded discussion of the other novels. I would rather end
by returning to Clarissa, and urge you to forget what the textbooks
of literary history say and read this brilliant and original novel
with a fresh mind.

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 1

THE SUDDEN and premature death of Dylan Thomas pro-
duced elegies and appreciations in extraordinary numbers
on both sides of the Atlantic. Thomas was the most poetical
poet of our time. He talked and dressed and behaved and lived
like a poet; he was reckless, flamboyant, irreverent, innocent,
bawdy and bibulous. His verse, too, had a romantic wildness
about it that even the reader who could make nothing of it
recognized as 'poetic'. In the February 1954 issue of the London
Magazine a twenty-six-year-old poet wrote a letter saying that
Thomas represented the 'archetypal picture of the Poet' for his
generation, and that the death of this wild and generous character
produced 'something like a panic' in the world of letters. He was
answered in the next issue of the magazine by a thirty-one-year-
old poet who said that this was puerile nonsense and deplored
what he called the 'fulsome ballyhoo' which Thomas's death
evoked in both England and America. There was perhaps an
element of ballyhoo in the spate of articles about Thomas, but
sober critical judgment is difficult when one is writing of a
brilliant young man who has died at the very height of his career
(or at the very height of his promise; we shall never tell now).
And surely the exaggeration of the sense of loss at the death of a
poet is a sign of health in any culture? Now that the shock has
worn off, however, we can turn more soberly to ask the question :
What sort of poetry did Dylan Thomas write, and how good
is it?

In a note to the collected edition of his poems, Thomas wrote:
'These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions,
are written for the love of Man and in praise of God. . . . ' And
in his prologue to the same volume he proclaimed his intention of
celebrating the world and all that is in it:

1 First published in The English Journal (Chicago), October 1954.

50

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 51

... as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,

From fish to jumping hill ! Look :

I build my bellowing ark

To the best of my love

As the flood begins,

Out of the fountainhead

Of fear, rage red, manalive, . . .

This prologue is a great hail to the natural world, and man as a
part of it, and might be taken by the careless reader as an im-
pressionist outpouring of celebratory exclamations:

Huloo, my pro wed dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!

My ark sings in the sun

At God speeded summer's end

And the flood flowers now.

Yet in fact this spontaneous-seeming poem is a cunningly con-
trived work in two movements of fifty-one lines each, with, the
second section rhyming backwards with the first the first line
rhyming with the last, the second with the second last, and so on,
the only pair of adjacent lines which rhyme being the fifty-first
and the fifty-second. Whether the ear catches this complicated
cross rhyming or not, it is part of a cunning pattern of ebb and
flow, of movement and counter-movement, which runs through
the poem. This single piece of evidence is perhaps enough to
prove that, for all the appearance of spontaneity and sometimes of
free association that his poems present to some readers, Thomas
was a remarkably conscientious craftsman for whom meaning
was bound up with pattern and order. No modern poet in
English has had a keener sense of form or has handled stanzas and
verse paragraphs whether traditional or original with more
deliberate cunning.

52 LITERARY ESSAYS

It is worth stressing this at the outset because there are still
some people who talk of Thomas as though he were a writer of
an inspired mad rhetoric, of glorious, tumbling, swirling language
which fell from his pen in magnificent disorder. He has been
held up by some as the antithesis of Eliot and his school, renoun-
cing the cerebral orderliness of the 19205 and the 19305 in favour
of a new romanticism, an engaging irresponsibility. On the
other hand there are those who discuss his poems as though they
are merely texts for exposition, ignoring the rhyme scheme and
the complicated verbal and visual patterning to concentrate solely
on the intellectual implications of the images. The truth is that
Thomas is neither a whirling romantic nor a metaphysical imagist,
but a poet who uses pattern and metaphor in a complex crafts-
manship in order to create a ritual of celebration. He sees life as a
continuous process, sees the workings of biology as a magical
transformation producing unity out of identity, identity out of
unity, the generations linked with one another and man linked
with nature. Again and again in his early poems he seeks to find
a poetic ritual for the celebration of this identity:

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

Or again:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

And most clearly of all:

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree

Plunged in its fruit;

Man in the day or wind at night

Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy . . .

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 53

This flesh you break, this blood you let

Make desolation in the vein,

Were oat and grape

Born of the sensual root and sap;

My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Man is locked in a round of identities; the beginning of growth
is also the first movement towards death, the beginning of love
is the first move towards procreation, which in turn moves
towards new growth, and the only way out of time's squirrel-cage
is to embrace the unity of man with nature, of the generations
with each other, of the divine with the human, of life with death,
to see the glory and the wonder of it. If we ignore the cosmic
round to seize the moment when we think we have it, we are
both deluded and doomed:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

There in their heat the winter floods

Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

Those boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey; . . .

This is from an early poem; and several of these early poems strike
this note the note of doom in the midst of present pleasure, for
concealed in each moment He change and death. Thomas did not
rush towards the celebration of unity in all life and all time which
later became an important theme of comfort for him; he moved
to it through disillusion and experiment. The force that drives
the flower and the tree to full burgeoning and then to death
would destroy him also. Only later came the realization that such
destruction is no destruction, but a guarantee of immortality, of
perpetual life in a cosmic eternity:

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man, in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

54 LITERARY ESSAYS

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not,

And death shall have no dominion.

It is this thought that sounds the note of triumph in 'Ceremony
after a Fire Raid' and which provides the comfort in 'A Refusal
to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London'.

*A Refusal to Mourn' is a poem worth pausing at, for it illus-
trates not only a characteristic theme of what might be called the
middle Thomas, but also a characteristic way of handling the
theme. The poem is ritualistic in tone; its dominant images are
sacramental; and the cunningly contrived rise and fall of the
cadence of each stanza adds to the note of formal ceremony.
There are four stanzas, the first two and one line of the third
containing a single sentence which swells out to a magnificent
surge of meaning. Then, after a pause, the final stanza makes a
concluding ritual statement, an antiphonal chant answering the
first three stanzas. The paraphrasable meaning of the poem is
simple enough: the poet is saying that never, until the end of the
world and the final return of all things to their primal elements,
will he distort the meaning of the child's death by mourning.
One dies but once, and through that death becomes reunited with
the timeless unity of things. But the paraphrasable meaning is
not, of course, the meaning of the poem, which is expanded at
each point through a deliberately sacramental imagery while at
the same time the emotion is controlled and organized by the
cadences of the stanza. The first stanza and a half describe the end
of the world as a return from differentiated identity to elemental
unity;

Never until die mankind making

Bkd beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

And the still hour

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 55

And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death . . .

There is no obscurity here, to anybody who knows Thomas's
idiom. We have only to recall 'This bread I break was once the
oat' to realize the significance of the first three lines of the second
stanza. The water bead and the ear of corn are symbolic primal
elements, to which all return at the end. But why 'Zion of the
water bead' and 'synagogue of the ear of corn'? The answer is
simply that these are sacramental images intended to give a
sacramental meaning to the statement. It is a kind of imagery of
which Thomas is very fond (one can find numerous other ex-
amples, among them such a phrase as 'the parables of sun light'
in 'Poem in October' or his use of Adam and Christ in his earlier
poems). One might still ask why he says 'synagogue' and not
'church'. The answer, I think, is that he wants to shock the reader
into attention to the sacramental meaning. A more everyday
religious word might pass by as a conventional poetic image, but
'synagogue' attracts our attention at once; it has no meaning
other than its literal one, and therefore can be used freshly in a
non-literal way. The third stanza continues:

I shall not murder

The mankind of her going with a grave truth

Nor blaspheme down the stations of her breath

With any further

Elegy of innocence and youth.

Here words like 'mankind', 'blaspheme*, 'stations of her breath
(recalling 'station of the Cross') play an easily discernible part in
the expansion of the meaning, while the pun in 'grave truth*
represents a device common enough in modern poetry. The
concluding stanza gives the reason, the counter-statement:

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

56 LITERARY ESSAYS

Secret by the umnouraing water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

This echoes, in its own way, the opening stanza; but its tone is
new; it is that of liturgical proclamation. We need not wince at
the suggestion that long friends' means (among other things)
worms; worms for Thomas were not disgusting, but profoundly
symbolic: like maggots they are elements of corruption and thus
of reunification, of eternity.

How much a poem of this kind owes to the imagery and to the
cadence, as well as to the careful patterning, can be seen at once if
one takes the perhaps extreme method of turning its paraphrasable
content into conventional rhymed verse:

Not until doomsday's final call
And all the earth returns once more
To that primaeval home of all,
When on that insubstantial shore
The tumbling primal waters foam
And silence rules her lonely home,

And I return to whence I came,
The sacramental child of earth,
Joining with nature to proclaim
A death that is a second birth
No, not until that final sleep
Will I for this dead infant weep.

She lies with her ancestral dead,
The child of London, home at last
To earth from whence all life is bred
And present mingles with the past.
The unmourning waters lap her feet:
She has no second death to meet.

This is doggerel, of course, but it contains, in however crude a
form, the essential paraphrasable meaning of the Thomas poem
yet misses everything of any significance about it. The note of
ritual, of sacrament, of celebration, achieved through his special
use of imagery and by other devices, is central in Thomas's
poetry.

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 57

I have not given a critical analysis of the poem, but merely
suggested a way of looking at it. 'A Refusal to Mourn* is a
characteristic poem of one phase of Thomas's career, during
which he was drawing together his impressions of the unity of
all creation and all time to serve the purpose of a specific occasion.
His earlier poems often fail by being too packed with metaphor
suggestive of identity. Words like 'Adam', 'Christ', 'ghost',
'worm', 'womb', phrases like 'the mouth of time', 'death's
feather', 'beach of flesh', 'hatching hair', 'half-tracked thigh',
abound, and though each has its orderly place in the poem the
reader often feels dulled by the continuous impact of repeated
words of this kind. The sonnet-sequence, 'Altarwise by owl-light',
contains some brilliant identifying imagery (suggesting the identity
of man with Christ, of creation with death, of history with the
present), but it is altogether too closely packed, too dense, to
come across effectively. The opening is almost a self-parody:

Altarwise by owl-light in die halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow's scream

The careful explicator will be able to produce informative glosses
on each of these phrases, but the fact remains that the poem is
congested with its metaphors, and the reader is left with a feeling
of oppression. A fair number of Thomas's earlier poems are
obscure for this reason. It is not the obscurity of free association
or of references to private reading, but an obscurity which results
from an attempt to pack too much into a short space, to make
every comma tell, as it were. With his continuous emphasis on.
birth, pre-natal life, the relation of parent to child, growth, the
relation of body and spirit, of life to death, of human and animal
to vegetable, and similar themes, and his constant search for de-
vices to celebrate these and identify them with each other, he does
not want one word to slip which may help in building up the
total pattern of meaning. One of his poems shows how the

58 LITERARY ESSAYS

making of continuous connections and identities can bewilder

the reader:

Today, this insect, and die world I breathe,

Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,

Time at the city spectacles, and half

The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,

In trust and tale have I divided sense,

Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double

Of head and tail made witnesses to this

Murder of Eden and green genesis.

He is saying here, in his compact metaphorical way, that expres-
sion in language (which means expression in time) breaks up and
so distorts the original vision. In his desire to avoid that breaking
up he sometimes piles up the images and metaphors until the
reader simply cannot construe the lines (as in the sixth stanza of
'When, like a Running Grace'). But it must be emphasized that
this is not the fault of a bad romantic poetry, too loose and ex-
clamatory, but comes from what can perhaps be called the classical
vice of attempting to press too much into a little space.

Thomas progressed from those poems in which his techniques
of identification are sometimes pressed too far, through a period
of 'occasional' verse in which he focussed his general notions on
particular incidents and situations to give a grave and formal
ceremonial poetry ('A Refusal to Mourn', 'Do not go gentle into
that good night', 'On the Marriage of a Virgin', etc.) to a period
of more limpid, open-worked poetry in which, instead of en-
deavouring to leap outside time into a pantheistic cosmos beyond
the dimensions, he accepts time and change and uses memory as
an elegiac device ('Poem in October', 'Fern Hill', 'Over Sir John's
Hill', 'Poem on His Birthday'). But these divisions are not strictly
chronological, nor do they take account of all the kinds of verse
he was writing. There is, for example, 'A Winter's Tale', a
'middle' poem, which handles a universal folk theme with a quiet
beauty that results from perfect control of the imagery. It is far
too long a poem to quote, and it needs to be read as a whole to
be appreciated; it is one of Thomas's half dozen truly magnificent
poems.

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 59

Another remarkable poem, which, does not quite fit into my
threefold classification is 'Vision and Prayer', a finely wrought
pattern-poem in two parts of six stanzas each. In no other poem
has Thomas so successfully handled the theme of the identity of
himself, everyman, and Christ. He imagines himself addressing
the unborn Christ, who, in his mother's womb, seems separated
from himself by a 'wall thin as a wren's bone'. The infant in the
next room replies, explaining that it is his destiny to storm out
across the partition that separates man from God, and the poet
identifies himself with the glory and suffering of Christ's re-
demptive career. The first part of the poem blazes to a conclusion
with a vision of the triumph and pain of Christ's death. The
second movement begins in a slow, hushed, almost muttering
cadence: the poet prays that Christ remain in the womb, for men
are indifferent and wanton and not worth redemption. Let the
splendour of Christ's martyrdom remain unrevealed; *May the
crimson/ Sun spin a grave grey/ And the colour of clay/ Stream
upon his martyrdom'. But as he ends this sad prayer the sun of
God blazes forth and takes up the poet in its lightning. 'The sun
roars at the prayer's end.' No summary or partial quotation can
do justice to the force and brilliance of this most cunningly
modulated poem. The stanzas of the first part are diamond-
shaped, and those of the second part shaped like an hour-glass,
and this visual device is not arbitrary but reflects and answers the
movement of the thought and emotion at each point.

Of the more limpid, open-worked poems of the third period,
'Poem in October', though written earlier than the others in this
group, can stand as an excellent example. The poet, on his
thirtieth birthday, is remembering his past and seeing himself in
the familiar Welsh landscape as a boy with his mother:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook

60 LITERARY ESSAYS

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

Again we have the sacramentalizing of nature ('heron priested
shore') and we have also a sense of glory in the natural world
which Thomas learned to render more and more effectively as
his art matured. Again, one cannot see the quality of the poem
from an extract; elegy is combined with remembrance and com-
memoration, and the emotion rises and. falls in a fine movement.
Thomas's radio play, Under Milk Wood, was broadcast by the
B.B.C. and. won instant approval among professional critics and
laymen alike. In writing for the radio Thomas naturally avoided
any too close packing of the imagery, and chose a style closer to
that of c Poem in October' than to that of his earlier poems. In.
spite of an occasional touch of sentimentality Under Milk Wood is
a remarkable performance, one of the few examples in our time of
spoken poetry 1 which is both good and popular. In estimating
the loss to literature caused by Thomas's early death, I should be
inclined to put the cutting short of his career as a poet for the
radio as the most serious of all. Thomas was by instinct a popular
poet as he wrote:

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spendthrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, then: arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

He had no desire to be difficult or esoteric. He drew on the Bible
and on universal folk themes rather than on obscure late classical

1 1 call the language of Under Milk Wood poetry, though it is prose to the eye.
When I wrote this I had heard the play twice but I had not read it, and there is no
doubt that to the ear it is poetry. The opposite is true of T. S. Eliot's later plays,
where the language is verse to the eye but prose to the ear.

THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS 6l

writers or Jessie Western's From Ritual to Romance. In Under Milk
Wood he puts into simple yet powerful and cunning words a day
in the life of a Welsh village, with each character rendered in
terms of some particular human weakness or folly. Unlike Eliot,
Thomas accepted man as he was: he had a relish for humanity.
By the end of his life he had learned to be both poetically honest
and poetically simple a difficult combination, especially in our
time. And in choosing the spoken verse of the radio as a medium
he was pointing the way towards a bridging of the appalling gap
in our culture between professional critic and ordinary reader.

Was he a great poet? Against him it can be argued that his
range was severely limited, that (in his earlier poems) he overdid
a handful of images and phrases to the point almost of parodying
himself, that many of his poems are clotted with an excess of
parallel-seeking metaphors. I doubt if he wrote a dozen really
first-rate poems; these would include, among those not hitherto
mentioned here, 'In the White Giant's Thigh' and 'In Country
Sleep'. In his favour it can be claimed that at his best he is
magnificent, as well as original in tone and technique, and that
he was growing in poetic stature to the last. Perhaps the question
is, in the most literal sense, academic. It is enough that he wrote
some poems that the world will not willingly let die.

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 1

POETS ARE RARELY systematic philosophers. Their vision of
life is embodied in their poetry, with all the rich overtones
of symbolic meaning which poetic statement can provide;
to paraphrase their ideas in prose generalizations is to risk losing
all that is most valuable in the original. How can we ever discuss
the philosophy of a poet apart from, his poetry? In 'Song of
Myself Whitman warned us: *I have no chair, no church, no
philosophy/ And although, with his characteristic disregard for
mere consistency, he made many other statements with an exactly
contrary meaning, the fact remains that to treat Whitman as a
systematic philosopher is an unrealistic and unprofitable procedure.
He did, however, have a vision of man, and throughout his life
he kept exploring ways of communicating it. We can, I think,
helpfully discuss that vision, examine the ways in which he sought
to project it and the fundamental attitudes which it implies.
When Whitman said, C I have no chair, no church, no philosophy/
he continued:

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and thepublic road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

This is not a philosophical formulation, but a symbolic gesture,
in which the poet's self is linked both to other selves and to the
world of external nature; it is a gesture which brings into one
relationship the three factors of individual identity, love, and
'landscapes of continents'. Whitman's most memorable utter-

1 A lecture delivered at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., in January
I955> as part of the celebrations commemorating the looth anniversary of the
publication of Leaves of Grass.

62

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 63

ances are all symbolic gestures of embracing, pointing, hailing;
devices for joining the unique and mystical identity of the self
with the world of his fellow men, of the other unique and mystical
identities. In the well-known words of his opening 'Inscription' :

One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

I am not here concerned with questions of poetic style, and I shall
not comment on the perhaps embarrassing term 'En-Masse*
except to note in passing that the strange foreign and supposedly
foreign, words which "Whitman scattered throughout his poetry,
often so unhappily, represent a device which he hoped would
enable him to move from the literal to the symbolic, to- shock the
reader into recognition of what is really there, to give a new tilt to
the vision. The simple point about this familiar declaration to
which I wish to draw attention is that it presents a polarity which
is a basic preoccupation of Whitman's. The uniqueness and all-
importance of the identity of the individual, and the human
necessity of contact both are basic. This is not, perhaps, a
philosophical tenet; but it is a central part of Whitman's vision.

Underneath all, individuals,

I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
The American compact is altogether with individuals,
The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single
individual namely to You.

But a few lines further on in the same poem he declares:
Underneath all is the Expression of love for men and women.

The dialectic consists sometimes of two terms (the 'Me* and the
'Not-Me'), sometimes of three (the self, other selves, Nature).
The poet, says Wordsworth, carries 'everywhere with him re-
lationship and love*. With this Whitman (who, incidentally,
refers to Wordsworth very rarely) would have thoroughly agreed.
He would have agreed, too, with Wordsworth's statement that
the poet 'considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each
other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest

64 LITERARY ESSAYS

and most interesting properties of nature'. But he was more in-
sistent than Wordsworth ever was on the compelling mystery of
identity, and thus knew from the beginning that relationship and
love involve a paradox. In one of the many advertising blurbs
for Leaves of Grass which Whitman himself wrote anonymously,
he said:

That he writes about himself [Whitman's italics] a criticism often sneeringly
brought against him is, in fact, the very object of his appearance in literature,
which is, briefly, to formulate in a poem, with unprecedented candor, a com-
plete human being, body, mind, emotions, soul.

But he goes on to add:

The book weaves and twines in everywhere the different products, climates,
and all and each of the several United States, by their nomenclature, the South
as much as the North not a single State or city, and hardly a river or mountain
left out; all knitted and twisted together, so that their entire geography and
hydrography are fused in its pages.

That was in 1873. In 1882, in Specimen Days, he wrote:

The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man ... is doubtless
involved in the query: Wnat is the fusing explanation and tie what is the
relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of under-
standing, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side, of and with the (conservative)
Not-Me, the whole of the material universe and laws, with what is behind
them in time and space, on the other side?

It is the old Cartesian dilemma, of the relation between the
perceiving mind and external reality, complicated by the fact
that for Whitman external reality included both 'the whole of the
material universe and laws' and the world of other perceiving
selves. He solved his dilemma, not philosophically, but poetically.
The sympathetic imagination, which was the poetic mind at
work, was by a process of Einfuhlung, of empathy, able to project
the poet's self into other selves. 'I am the man, I suffer'd, I was
there,' Whitman exclaims in 'Song of Myself ' after listing varie-
ties of individuals and their experiences. Indeed, that is the very
theme of 'Song of Myself, paradoxical though it may sound. It
is a song of identification. 'I am the hounded skve, I wince at the
bite of the dogs,' or again, 'Not a mutineer walks handcuff 'd to

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 65

jail but I am handcuffed to him and walk by his side* we all know
the familiar passages in which Whitman projects himself into
other identities. The poetic imagination both realizes the full,
uiuque identity of the self, and identifies that self with other
selves. The same point is made, again and again, in that strangely
moving poem, 'The Sleepers* :

I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in

turn,

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers

I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,
The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,
He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after today,
The stammerer, the well-form'd person, the wasted or feeble person.

Just as the sympathetic imagination helps Whitman to solve
one aspect of his dilemma, so sensation and memory together help
to solve the other, to join man and Nature. Here again he would
have agreed with Wordsworth, that the poet 'will follow where-
soever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move
his wings/ Sensation for Whitman was not merely a bridge
between the self and the external world; it was a method of
learning to know the external world from the inside, so that it
ceases to be external and becomes part of one's self:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

This sense of anidentity between man and Nature is familiar enough
in Romantic poetry, and Emerson has his own version of it. But,
however much Emerson may have influenced Whitman and
Whitman contradicted himself more than once on this question
Whitman's view of the relation between man and Nature is
essentially his own. Perception of Nature, and remembered per-
ception of Nature, help at the same time to disperse identity, as it
were, among different natural scenes and objects, and to enrich
personality by making those scenes and objects part of the self.

66 LITERARY ESSAYS

So by love the individual both disperses and fulfils himself, both
scatters his ego and concentrates it.

The true personality is thus a microcosm, containing within
itself potential identification with all other true personalities and
(in a somewhat obscure sense, it is true) all of Nature. His well-
known description of himself as

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
them, . . .

emphasizes the paradox: in being most himself, his complete
bodily self, without repression or emotional over-compensation,
he becomes the proper equal of others and can, by the exercise
of the sympathetic imagination, identify himself with them. The
complete self is both bodily and spiritual, and Whitman is em-
phatic in declaring that both aspects are equal:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul

To be capable of the proper kind of imaginative expansion, the
self must not deny any of its aspects. All human functions, all
human capabilities, are sacred, and the fulfilled personality who
is at once most himself and most capable of entering into the lives
of others denies none. Sex is thus accepted frankly and freely,
in its physical as well as its other aspects; and, by the same token,
as he insists so often, the woman is without any possible reser-
vation the complete equal of the man.

Though parts of this doctrine were far enough removed from
the view of the New England Transcendentalists, there were
some interesting similarities. In 1836 Orestes Brownson had
described the Transcendentalists' mission as the reconciliation of
spirit and matter. 'We cannot ... go back either to exclusive

Spiritualism, or to exclusive Materialism Both have their

foundation in our nature, and both will exist and exert their

influence Is the bosom of Humanity to be eternally torn by

these two contending factions? No. It cannot be. The war must

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 67

end. Peace must be made. This discloses our Mission. We must
reconcile spirit and matter; that is, we must realize the atone-
ment.' This was precisely Whitman's view. The individual whose
true self combined equally body and soul was for him the root
fact of existence. The 'rapport' to use one of Whitman's
favourite words between such individuals and between each
individual and Nature provides the basis of true civilization; it
is a prerequisite of the good society. 'Produce great Persons, the
rest follows,' he declared in 'By Blue Ontario's Shores', and great
persons for him were real persons, not marionettes, not to use
another of his favourite terms 'dandified* persons, mechanical
slaves of fashion or dupes of their own narrow and unrealized
selves. Everyone is capable of self-realization if not narrowed and
corrupted by bad influences and bad habits, and that, I think, is
what Whitman means when he talks about the importance of the
'average'. He has been accused of putting the average man on a
pedestal, of being the precursor of those opinion-seekers and
pollsters who search after a statistical norm and then idolize it as
the typical American. But clearly Whitman had no such idea in
his head. No one would have been more horrified than he by
that modern advertising which suggests that because more people
are buying x or y then you will naturally want to buy it, or with
the notion of keeping up with the Joneses. What Whitman
meant was that the formal attributes of greatness believed in by
what he liked to call the feudal ages had no necessary connection
with real human greatness, which was independent of birth,
social position, formal education, or conventional 'talents'. Poli-
tical democracy provides the framework, the possibility and
only that for die full development of personality without regard
to traditional advantages of rank and so on. Any man engaged in
his chosen work amid America's teeming society could be a 'great
person' in Whitman's sense. The stereotype, the parroter of
dich6s, the man who organizes his thinking (in Matthew Arnold's
phrase) in terms of catchwords rather than of of ideas, the party
man, have nothing to do with Whitman's 'average'.
Whitman's conception of the 'average' is, of course, closely

68 LITERARY ESSAYS

related to his view of democracy and of the potentialities of
America as the home of democracy. Perhaps the most superficial
aspect of Whitman's political thought was his more or less routine
acceptance of the notion that free, progressive America could look
back with scorn on the tyrannies of the European past and equally
deride the inequalities of the present-day European class system.
This was a standard enough American doctrine by Whitman's
day, and he showed no great originality in taking it over. Nor
was he especially original in demanding a great new truly Ameri-
can literature instead of a pallid imitation of English writers.
Emerson, as we all know, had announced at the end of his address
on 'The American Scholar' that 'we have listened too long to the
courtly muses of Europe', and Whitman followed with his 'Come
Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia', his call to the American
Muse to take up her habitation in the 'better, fresher, busier
sphere', the 'wide, untried domain', that awaited her. I do not
mean that Whitman was not in earnest when he said things like
this; of course he was; but he had more original and profounder
things to say about the possibilities of American democracy.
Nothing could be farther from the truth than Sidney Lanier's
remark that 'Whitman's argument seems to be, that, because a
prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable, and because
the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God'. In the
letter to Emerson which he included in the 1856 edition of his
poems he talked of 'that new moral American continent without
which, 1 see, the physical continent remained incomplete, may be
a carcass, a bloat'. The physical grandeur of America was a
challenge to its inhabitants to achieve a comparable grandeur of
personality, while the growth of the country's population gave
unprecedented scope to the individual's capacity for imaginative
understanding and sympathy. Again, in the 1855 preface he stated
emphatically: 'The largeness of nature or the nation were mon-
strous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the
spirit of the citizen.'

It is in the light of such remarks that we must read Whitman's
rapt descriptions of the ideal American. He proclaims trium-

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 69

phantly of the ordinary men and women of America: 'Their
shadows are projected in employments, in books, in the cities, in
trade; their feet are on the flights of the steps of the Capitol; they
dilate, a larger, hrawnier, more candid, more democratic, lawless,
positive native to The States, sweet-bodied, completer, dauntless,
flowing, masterful, beard-faced, new race of men/ But of course
this is not a description of the America he sees; it is a prophetic
vision of the America he believes in, the America which, he feels,
will one day come into being. He begins the paragraph which
contains this description by declaring, 'I am a man of perfect
faith.' And he adds : 'We have not come through centuries, caste,
heroisms, fables, to halt in this land today/ His visionary gaze
is on the future, and he goes on to call on. the American people to
justify his faith and embody his vision. Further, for all his loving
play with the names and scenes of America, the country is for him
a symbol of something larger, of civilization in its ideal develop-
ment. Just as the individual must fully realize his own personality
to fulfil himself and to achieve proper 'rapport' with others, so
the country must fully realize its own personality before it can
stand as a symbol of something larger than itself. In his vision of
the Americans of the future, he announces that 'they resume
Personality, too long left out of mind'. That is the road to the
true American future. It is, moreover, a road to a goal that can
perhaps never be fully attained: 'America is not finished, perhaps
never will be/

Political democracy makes it possible for each individual to
fulfil his own personality, to realize fully his free self. But political
democracy cannot in itself guarantee that such a development will
take place. That development needs the assistance of the poet,
and to embody a vision of it was, for "Whitman, the prime task of
the American poet. 'I have allowed the stress of my poems to
bear on American individuality and assist it,' he wrote in *A
Backward Glance O'er Traveled Roads'. The visionary poet
often deliberately mixes his tenses, and Whitman does it as
visionaries from Isaiah on have done it. In describing his ideal as
though it were real, he is behaving as a poet rather than as a

70 LITERARY ESSAYS

sociologist, and to accuse Whitman of naivete because his ideal-
izing descriptions often do not correspond with fact is itself naive.
And we must remember that the prose of his prefaces often
written in the same style as his poetry and sometimes embodied
later in verse is not, merely because it is prose, to be read as
systematic philosophy or as sociological description: it, too, em-
bodies the vision.

Whitman's idealization of the 'average' is not, then, an endorse-
ment of the Gallup poll or an abandonment to statistics or an
obsession with mediocrity though some of those who profess
to follow Whitman are guilty of these errors. The average is for
him a symbol of the infinite potential of individual personality.
Political democracy provides the best nursery for personalities,
with the poet as the best nurse. America, which came into being
as a nation dedicated to political democracy, and which, by its
extent, variety and resources, constitutes the best possible arena
for the display and mutual 'rapport' of varied personalities, is the
symbolic home of 'great persons 5 . America's duty is therefore to
exploit its own potentialities as that symbolic home, rather than
imitate the behaviour of other countries. He was not blind to the
fact that America often seemed to be neglecting that duty. Demo-
cratic Vistas is full of bitter denunciations of America's failure to
be true to her destiny as he saw it:

I say we had better look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a
physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more
hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine
belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not
honestly believ'd in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic scream-
ings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not every-
where see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. . . .

He could even talk (in Specimen Days) of 'the supple, polish* d,
money-worshipping, Jesus-and-Judas-equaJ&ting, suffrage-sove-
reignty echoes of current America' incidentally, this in. defence
of Carlyle, the anti-democrat, with whose criticism of democracy
in action he found himself forced to agree, for all his profound
disagreement in principle. He was no happier than many another

WALT WHITMAN S PHILOSOPHY 7!

observer about the crudities and cruelties of the Gilded Age.
America's destiny to produce 'great persons' was being betrayed.
'But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and gran-
deur of the general superficial effect, coming down to what is of
the only real importance, Personalities, and examining minutely,
we question, we ask, Are there, indeed, men here worthy the
name?' The Emersonian overtones of this question cannot dis-
guise its heartfelt urgency. Is there', he continues, 'a great moral
and religious civilization the only justification of a great material
one?' He makes clear, in Democratic Vistas, that political demo-
cracy was to be only the first stage, the essential foundation. The
second stage, also preparatory, was the achievement of material
prosperity. The third stage, which he announced in his poetic
visions, was the stage when America, having fully realized herself,
became the home of great personalities 'these States, self-
contained, different from others, more expansive, more rich and
free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by
American personalities, plenty of them, male and female, tra-
versing the States, none excepted and by native superber tab-
leaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures,
architectures and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy
sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces,
and from its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing,
democratizing society.'

But what of the masses? "What of his favourite concept, *En-
Masse'? In a nation of 'rich, luxuriant, varied personal ism' to
which Whitman looked forward, will we not get something
rather more like John Stuart Mill's view of society as expressed in
his essay on Liberty (which Whitman, admired) than the picture
of 'the broadest average of humanity' to which Whitman looked
forward? I have already given part of the answer to this question,
in pointing out that Whitman's notion of the 'average' was
perfectly compatible with his desire to see rich and varied per-
sonalities. He was, nevertheless, aware of an apparent contra-
diction in his thought here, for he saw that unlimited and un-
regulated individualism could lead in its own way to the negation

72 LITERARY ESSAYS

of democracy something that John Stuart Mill also saw later.
'"We shall,' wrote Whitman in Democratic Vistas, 'it is true, quickly
and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness of man,
individuaHsm, asserting itself, and cropping forth, even from the
opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character, for imperative
reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh' d, borne in mind, and pro-
vided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and
potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism.
The two are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them.' He
added an illuminating footnote here:

The question hinted here is one which time only can answer. Must not the
virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, usurping all, seriously
affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like of the ancient virtue
of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country? I have no
doubt myself that the two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each
other, and that from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that
at present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in
the United States.

The relation between the individual and the masses, as Whitman
saw it, is thus comparable to the relation between the 'Me' and
the 'Not-me' which I have already discussed. The dialectic here
is almost Hegelian: out of two apparent opposites a third unity is
formed the sympathetic, all-inclusive personality out of the
reconciliation of the 'Me' and the 'Not-me', and the true demo-
cratic society out of the reconciliation between individual
and mass. If Whitman, in some of his finest poems, hails
America in terms which suggest that these reconciliations have
already been effected, that is a legitimate device of the poetic
visionary.

Whitman's vision of the fulfilled individual, the complete
personality, and his place in a democratic American civilization
is, as he himself stressed, essentially religious. As he put it in his
somewhat odd vocabulary: 'Beyond the vertebration of the
manly and womanly personalism of our western world, can only
be, and is indeed, to be, (I hope,) its all penetrating Religiousness/
It is not, of course, institutional religion that Whitman is talking

WALT WHITMAN S PHILOSOPHY 73

about he joins hands with the TranscendentaHsts firmly on this
point. 'Religion/ he wrote in the same section of Democratic
Vistas from which I have been quoting, 'although casually arrested,
and, after a fashion, preserv'd in the churches and creeds, does not
depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified soul, which,
when greatest, knows not bibles in the old way, but in new ways
the identified soul, which can really confront Religion when it
extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before.'
Whitman was suspicious of institutions and parties. 'Disengage
yourself from parties,' he cried. 'They have been useful, and to
some extent remain so; but the floating, uncommitted electors,
farmers, clerks, mechanics, the masters of parties watching aloof,
inclining victory this side or that side such are the ones most
needed, present and future.' The institutions of political demo-
cracy were necessary to provide an arena in which the individual
could work out both his personal and his social destiny, but they
were a means, not an end, and a means easily capable of abuse.
'Political democracy,' he wrote, 'as it exists and practically works
in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-
school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium, not of
good only, but of all.' Of ecclesiastical institutions, he had not
even that to say; he had learned suspicion of them from the
TranscendentaHsts, as well as from the Quaker preference for the
'inner light'.

Whitman's faith in America, his vision of a fulfilled and exem-
plary American democracy, expressed itself inevitably in a form
which involved a certain amount of disparagement of other
countries and of the whole past of the Old World, but this is
neither his characteristic nor his most eloquently expressed mood.
To the polarities in his thought which I have tried to indicate
there must be added another that between America and the
world in general. Though he is ready enough to list the weak-
nesses of older societies ruled by kings or tyrants and highly strati-
fied in their organization, he is remarkably generous in his tributes
to what the New World owes to the Old. As he put it in 'Song
of the Exposition' :

74 LITERARY ESSAYS

We do not blame thee elder World,

nor really separate ourselves from thee,
(Would the son separate himself from the father?)
Looking back on thee, seeing thee to thy duties, grandeurs, through

past ages bending, building,
We build to ours today.

Whitman's vision is essentially cosmic; its identifying gaze moves
ever outward from the self, and the observing and imagining self
moves progressively across America and across the world. 'Salut
au Monde' is rather too much of an exclamatory catalogue to be
one of his best poems, but it gives nevertheless an impressive
picture of his vision wandering through history and geography,
uniting all times and all lands, focussing the cosmos through his
own consciousness:

Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens,

Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east America is provided for in the

west,

Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator,
Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends,
Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels in slanting rings, it does

not set for months,
Stretch'd in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the

horizon and sinks again,

Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups,
Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands.

There were, of course, contradictions in Whitman's attitude to
the non-American world we all know Whitman's defence of
contradictions as there were bound to be for anyone who saw
America both as the blueprint of a new society, freed from the
dead hand of old tradition and inequalities, as the symbolic ideal
of the community where individuals link their personalities in
perfect association, and as one part of history and geography,
bound up with the whole world and the whole universe.

'Passage to India' is Whitman's most mature poetic statement
on the relation between the New World and the Old. The span-
ning of the American continent by rail and the linking of Europe
to India by the opening of the Suez Canal provided a perfect

WALT WHITMAN S PHILOSOPHY 75

symbol for the use of his visionary imagination, with its need to
explore simultaneously the poet's unique self and the world at
large. The poem is partly about contact /rapport'.

Passage to India!

Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be crossed, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

But contact is only one of the themes. The poem is also a vision
of history, starting with the dawn of civilization in the East and
coming up to the modern railway train thundering across the
American, continent. Old myths of unity now take on new
meaning, the past becomes alive in a new way:

Year at whose wide-flung door I sing!

Year of the purpose accomplished!

Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!

(No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,)

I see O year in you the vast terraqueous globe given and giving all,
Europe to Asia, Africa join'd, and they to the New World,
The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival garland,
As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.

Passage to India!

Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,

The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

Passage to India is passage to the past, to 'primal thought', and at
the same time a challenge for the future. Contemplating the
potentialities of modern transport, the poet sees life as adventure,
experience as discovery, bringing the whole self into contact with
history, geography, society. Characteristically, the great expan-
sive movement of Whitman's vision is linked to an inward
movement of self-contemplation 'We too take ship O soul*.
In the concluding image of the voyage (a favourite of Whitman's)
he sees himself, the past, India, America coming together in one
great challenge to further spiritual adventure:

76 LITERARY ESSAYS

Passage to more than India!
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
Disportest thou on waters such as those?
Soundest below the Sanskrit and the Vedas?

Then have they been unleash' d.
Passage to you, you shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!
Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
You, strew'd with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach'd
you.

Passage to more than India!

O secret of the earth and sky!

Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!

Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!

Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!

O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!

O day and night, passage to you!

O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you!

Passage, immediate passage ! the blood burns in my veins !

Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

Cut the hawsers haul out shake out every snail! . . .

And so to the final cry: 'O farther, farther sail!' A poem about
history and geography, about the past, present and future of the
world, ends as an apostrophe to his own soul: a fine example of
Whitman's counterpointing of the 'Me' and the 'Not-me'.

Whitman's view of the relationship between the individual,
society and the cosmos led him occasionally to see the whole of
life as a sort of cosmic dance in which everyone and everything
moves according to its own laws and both fulfils its own destiny
and plays its proper part in the general movement. This is an old
notion among poets and philosophers, going back to Plotinus
and beyond. When Whitman declares that

All is a procession,

The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion . . .

he is unconsciously echoing what the Elizabethan poet, Sir John
Davies, had said in his 'Orchestra*. The measured cosmic dance

WALT WHITMAN S PHILOSOPHY 77

began, says Davies, when the world first sprang from its primal
seeds :

Since then they still are carried in a round,
And changing come one in another's place ;
Yet do they neither mingle nor confound,
But every one doth keep the bounded space
Wherein the dance doth bid it turn or trace.
This wondrous miracle did Love devise,
For dancing is love's proper exercise.

Yeats, too, influenced by Plotinus, was to see the relation between
the individual and the processes of life symbolized by the dance:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In his vision of the dance of life, therefore, Whitman is perpetu-
ating an old poetic tradition, and giving it new meaning in the
light of his own preoccupation with identity and relationship.
In 'A Song of the Rolling Earth' we get a similar picture of the
dance of the days and the years and the hours, the stately proces-
sion of time in the universe, with its relation to human fate:

Embracing man, embracing all, proceed the three hundred and sixty-
five resisdessly round the sun;

Embracing all, soothing, supporting, follow close three hundred and
sixty-five offsets of the first, sure and necessary as they.

Life is a formal dance; life and death are part of the same con-
tinuous process, and immortality is guaranteed because the pro-
cess is continuous:

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its
graves . . .

78 LITERARY ESSAYS

And again, from the same poem:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions

of diseased corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous

crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from

them at last.

Life is process, and the fully realized individual's part in the
process is eternal, and thus we get to a view of immortality :

I believe of all those men and women that filTd the unnamed lands,
every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us,

In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of
what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn'd, in life.

On the purely logical level there are of course some inconsisten-
cies in Whitman's view of immortality; the important thing to
note is that in passages such as these Whitman is exploring a
symbolic language in which to suggest his vision of life as grand
process. We might compare his more conventional use of the
image of life as a voyage which never ends.

Another aspect of Whitman's thought which I think is worth
some discussion is his view of the function of the poet. By the
poet, of course, Whitman generally means Walt Whitman, for,
as we have seen, one of his characteristic techniques is to contract
everything to the self, and then make the self typical and all-
inclusive through its method of observation and of sympathetic
identification. The poet for Whitman is, in a sense, the ideal
observer both of his fellow men and of the natural world (again,
there is a similarity to Wordsworth's view here). The poet's
sympathetic identification with what he sees and what he imagines
is the source of his poetic vision. 'The known universe has one
complete lover and that is the greatest poet', he wrote in the 1855
preface, and this sentiment is echoed again and again in both his
verse and his prose. Whitman has been criticized for the indis-

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 79

criminate way in which he embraces the universe and everything
that it contains, good and bad, and it has been more than once
pointed out that this pragmatic acceptance of whatever is suggests
not only an unrealistic and facile optimism but also a supreme
lack of logic in one who at the same time denounced 'the young
men of These States' as 'a parcel of helpless dandies, who can
neidier fight, work, shoot, ride, run, command some of them
devout, some quite insane, some castrated all second-hand, or
third or fourth, or fifth hand waited upon by waiters, putting
not this land first, talking of art, doing the most ridiculous things
for fear of being thought ridiculous, smirking and skipping along,
continually taking off their hats/ How could Whitman take a
normative attitude to the civilization of his day if at the same time
he accepted everything in existence merely because it was in
existence? I think the answer to this question lies in Whitman's
view of the nature of a real person. Inanimate Nature and
animals were all to be accepted; they were what they were, part
of the process of things. But men who were alone capable of
betraying their identities by leading second-hand lives in which
their real selves were not involved could be judged in accor-
dance with the degree to which they fulfilled the true laws of
their own personalities. It is significant that after Swinburne
turned against Whitman, to write a stinging attack on the man
and his poetry, Whitman remarked of the furious English poet:
'Ain't he the damndest simulacrum?' Swinburne, in talking this
frenzied nonsense, was acting as a simulacrum, a pale image of
his real self, not in his true capacity as a person. And this is the
way in which Whitman tended to speak of those he disliked and,
indeed, of all evil in the universe. He did not hold simply that
'whatever is, is right', but rather that whatever exists in its true,
undistorted nature is good. The 'parcel of helpless dandies' that
he attacked were denounced as 'all second-hand, or third, fourth,
or fifth hand', and that was the real burden of his complaint.

Now I think that this helps to explain, too, Whitman's in-
creasing insistence on his originality as he grew older. In repu-
diating an obvious debt to Emerson and as Esther Shephard

8O LITERARY ESSAYS

has pointed out concealing a significant debt to two novels of
George Sand, Whitman cannot be acquitted of disingenuousness;
but we can see why it was important to him to keep stressing his
originality. The real poet was essentially original, true to his own
vision, transcribing nothing at second hand. If Whitman had
thought more carefully about the problem of originality, he
would have seen that it is not necessarily incompatible with
borrowing : nobody now denies the originality of Shakespeare's
genius because he took his plots from other writers. But he was
so obsessed with the importance of renouncing the second-hand,
of exploiting only his own true self, that he felt it necessary to
repudiate with increasing urgency any suspicion of borrowing.
'Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the
attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature,
talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a
production as a book, or such a being as a writer/ So Whitman
wrote of himself in an anonymous review of Leaves of Grass in
1855. The statement is not, of course, literally true, and it is
inconsistent with what Whitman later said of his early reading
and the admitted influences on him of the Bible, Ossian, Italian
opera, and other sources, including the writings of Emerson,
which, as he once said, brought him to the boil after he had been
long simmering. Whitman insisted on his originality because
originality for was him the first prerequisite of the true poet.
And, of course, essentially he was right: he was, in all that matters,
a truly original poet.

The sharpest, and in many ways the most impressive, attack on
Whitman's view of the poet as the universal lover was made by
D. H. Lawrence, a man whose vision was in some important
respects very similar to Whitman's. Lawrence admired Whitman
as a pioneer and a moral leader (for Lawrence, all great poets were
moral leaders). 'Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to
me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman,
the one pioneer.' And again : 'Now Whitman was a great moralist.
He was a great leader. He was a great changer of the blood in the
veins of men.' But Lawrence could not stomach Whitman's

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 81

gestures of universal acceptance. * "I embrace all," says Whitman.
"I weave all things into myself." Do you really! There can't be
much left of you when you've done. When you've cooked the
awful pudding of One Identity.' And Lawrence made devas-
tating fun of Whitman's statement, *I am he that aches with
amorous love.' 'Reminds one of a steam-engine,' he said. *A
locomotive. They're the only things that seem to me to ache with
amorous love. All that steam inside of them. Forty million foot-
pounds pressure.' Lawrence also passionately denounced Whit-
man's indiscriminate acceptance of all kinds of people.

I think that every one interested in Whitman ought to read
and ponder Lawrence's essay in Studies in Classic American Litera-
ture. This comment by a fellow-genius is full of perception and
has a splendid vigour. It also lays its finger on some key aspects
of Whitman's thought. Whether we agree with Lawrence or
not, we ought to know what to say to his charges, for they spring
from a vision as intense as Whitman's own and more like Whit-
man's than that of any other critic of him. The real difference
between them, it seems to me, is that for Lawrence the problem
of identity, of the fully realized individual, was related to the
equal and opposite problem of the essential and ultimate otherness
of other individuals. Lawrence and Whitman agreed on the
question of identity and self-fulfilment; they differed sharply on
what Whitman called 'rapport'. The ideal relation between two
individuals was for Lawrence an almost mystical awareness on the
part of each of the core of otherness in the other. For Whitman,
one individual could, as it were, subsume another by sympathy;
the poet could symbolically become other people without losing
bis identity indeed, in the very exercise of it. This was danger-
ous heresy to Lawrence, to whom the notion of the merging of
personalities was disgusting. In talking of these matters, both
writers used a symbolic language, and I think myself that Law-
rence read Whitman rather too literally. But the difference
between the two views remains. And probably no one will deny
that on occasion Whitman's gestures of universal acceptance are
not adequately related to his gestures of identity, and that this

82 LITERARY ESSAYS

essential polarity in Whitman's vision did not always produce
coherent poetic statement.

Another notion that is important in Whitman's view of the
poet is that of simplicity. 'Nothing is better than simplicity,' he
wrote in the 1855 preface. 'Nothing can make up for excess or
for the lack of definiteness.' By simplicity he meant the poet's
honesty to his vision, his refusal to distort it by following con-
vention or fashion. The poet must distort neither side of the
equation neither himself, the ideally sympathetic observer, nor
what he sees. 'Men and women and the earth and all upon it,'
he wrote in the same preface, 'are simply to be taken as they are,
and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be
unintermitted and shall be done with perfect candor.' The poet's
personality, though simple in the sense of honest and true to itself,
is nevertheless richly endowed. 'The most affluent man is he that
confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger
wealth of himself.' This most interesting statement (again from
the 1855 preface) shows clearly that, in spite of his insistence on
simplicity, Whitman did not regard the poet's relation to what
he observed as one of naive confronting, of the bare meeting of
eye and object. Nor did he take the view of Francis Bacon, who
had defined the poet as one who 'submits the shows of things to
the desires of the mind'. For Whitman, the poet's mind, while
retaining its simplicity in the sense that it refused to be side-tracked
by artistic conventions that bore no relation to its own vision, was
richly enough stored to contain within itself what one might
call 'objective correlatives' to all that it might see or imagine. It
was this that enabled the poet to subsume other characters, and it
was precisely on this point that Lawrence so fiercely opposed
Whitman.

It is difficult for any poet to bring the life of imagination into
contact with daily living. From what little we know of Shakes-
peare's life, there appears to have been no sign, in his daily
behaviour, of the imaginative fire that burned within him. Law-
rence, preoccupied throughout his life, as Whitman was, by
relationship and love, expressed his affection in real life by throw-

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 83

ing crockery and by other kinds of childish violence. But Whit-
man desired to carry over the symbolic life of the poet's imagi-
nation into the daily life of the poet's person. 'First be yourself
what you would show in your poem,' he wrote in one of his
anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass. This is not as unusual a
view as some critics have supposed : it was common enough in
Renaissance Europe, as the life of Sir Philip Sidney indicates,
and its most eloquent expression is found in Milton's 'Apology
for Smectymnuus', where he wrote that 'he who would not be
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,
ought himself to be a true poem'. Whitman's attempt to act out
his conception of the poet in his daily life resulted in what has
been called, with considerable justice, 'Whitman's pose'. Miss
Esther Shephard, in her book with this title, makes great play of
the fact that Whitman took this pose in large part from a novel
by George Sand, whose influence on him he carefully concealed.
This side of Whitman is rather childish, it is true, and not parti-
cularly admirable. But I cannot bring myself to feel, with Miss
Shephard, that it is wholly reprehensible and represents a stain
on Whitman's poetic character. If George Sand's novel, The
Countess of Rudolstadt, fired his imagination, there is nothing
wrong in that; if it led him to dress and behave in a certain way,
we may smile at the childishness of poets ; if Whitman scrupulously
concealed die fact that the novel was important for him well,
every writer is entitled to his reticences, and in any case it was not
essentially important to him. It released something in him; it did
not put it there. The same can be said for the influence on him of
phrenology. But the point I am concerned with here is that
Whitman was a poseur because he felt it necessary to act out in
real life his conception of the way a poet's imagination works. It
may be naive in Whitman, as in Milton, to make this simple
correlation between man as poet and man in his everyday be-
haviour; the poetic imagination, we may fed, does not spring in
such a simple way from a poet's outward life. But I cannot see
why Whitman's childishness as a poseur should affect our view of
his poetry or our assessment of his poetic vision.

84 LITERARY ESSAYS

Another aspect of Whitman's conception of the poet concerns
his view of the relation between poetry and religion. He shared
fully Matthew Arnold's view that in the modern world poetry-
was to take over the task hitherto performed by religion. e View'd
today/ he wrote in Democratic Vistas, 'from a point of view
sufficiently over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the
civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and
treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus
comes.' There were two possible implications of this view. One,
suggested by Arnold and developed by Walter Pater, was that
religion should be assimilated to poetry, and its true function is
to stimulate aesthetic awareness. The other, which represented
Whitman's view, was that poetry should be assimilated to religion,
the poet becoming the prophet. So that the view that the poet
must take over the task of the priest led in Pater to the aestheti-
cizing of religion and in Whitman to the opposite the making
of poetry into prophecy.

I have already noted that for Whitman the poet was the ideal
observer, looking at his fellow-men and at the natural world with
an all-embracing sympathetic imagination. It is also worth ob-
serving that for Whitman the poet's observation had what might
be called a supreme normality: the poet saw things as they really
were, in their right place. He expressed this thought both in the
prose of the 1855 preface and in verse. * Of all mankind the great
poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are
grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its
place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every
object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is
the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of
his age and land ... he supplies what wants supplying and what
wants checking/ The poets' vision penetrates to the inner law of
things; he sees everything as it truly is. This again is related to
Whitman's optimism and his view, which I have already dis-
cussed, that whatever exists in its proper place is good.

For all the wide-ranging panoramic expansion of Whitman's
poetry, we keep being continually impressed as we read by the

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 85

importance to him of the centre (he uses the image of the hub of
the wheel). The individual looks out, and the world falls into
shape around him. Every real person and concrete thing is the
centre of a pattern in the universe, and Whitman comes back
again and again to that centre, as in the conclusion to Democratic
Vistas 'the main thing being the average, the bodily, the con-
crete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstruc-
tures of the future are to permanently rest*. Again, this links his
view of American democracy with bis view of poetry.

For what he called 'dandified* poetry Whitman had a mixture
of admiration and contempt. The poetry of Tennyson, for ex-
ample, he admired as being 'of a very high (perhaps the highest)
order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost
always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness'.
But it was 'a verse of inside elegance and high-life'. As Whitman
saw it, poetry to Tennyson was 'a gentleman of the first degree,
boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring
the ladies, and talking to them, in company, with that elaborate
half-choked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license
of men among themselves'. This is perceptive, and true in its way.
He goes on to say that Tennyson 'does not ignore courage, but
all is to show forth through dandified forms'. 'The models are
the same both to the poet and the parlors. Both have the same
supercilious elegance, both love the reminiscences which extol
caste, both agree on the topics proper for mention and discussion,
both hold the same undertone of church and state, both have the
same languishing melancholy and irony, both indulge largely in
persiflage, both are marked by the contour of high blood and a
constitutional aversion to anything cowardly and mean, both
accept the love depicted in romances as the great business of a life
or a poem, both seem unconscious of the mighty truths of
eternity and immortality, both are silent on the presumptions of
liberty and equality, and both devour themselves in solitary
lassitude.' This is not so much an indictment of Tennyson
(though it has some shrewd hits) as a definition of his own kind
of poetry, which is the new American poetry, by contrasting it

86 LITERARY ESSAYS

with what it is not. No account of Whitman's view of poetry
would be complete without some reference to his descriptions of
poetry such as Tennyson's.

Finally, there is Whitman's interest in language, as evidenced
by his article on 'Slang in America' and his notes for An American
Primer. 'Language', he wrote in the former, 'is not an abstract
construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is some-
thing arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, tastes, of long
generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close
to the ground.' Whitman was aware that language was not
simply a medium of expression that happened to be available for
use: it was bound up with human history and psychology. The
jottings in An American Primer are fascinating, ranging with lively
curiosity over a wide area of questions concerned with language
words deriving from different trades and professions, changes
in the meaning of words as a result of social or other changes, the
varieties and significance of place names, words deriving from
national character, and so on. And always there is an exultation
in the rich expressiveness of the English language and at the same
time an insistence that Americans should develop the language in
their own way. 'American writers', the notes conclude, 'are to
show far more freedom in the use of words Ten thousand native
idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out
of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with
meaning and effect words that would be welcomed by the
nation, being of the national blood words that would taste of
identity and locality which is so dear to literature.' 'Identity and
locality' : even in his discussion of language Whitman comes back
in the end to this essential feature of his vision.

I have tried to say something about Whitman's view of the self,
society and nature, and the relation between the three; the relation
of all this to his view of American democracy; his attitude to
America and to other countries; his notion of the Dance of Life;
his concept of the poet and the poet's function; and his view of
language. I must insist again, as I did at the beginning, that to
abstract these points from the way they appear in his own writing

WALT WHITMAN'S PHILOSOPHY 87

is both misleading and unfair; yet the procedure is inevitable if
we are to discuss the philosophy of a. poet at all. I hope at least
that I have succeeded in making clear my own view that in spite
of contradictions, absurdities, pretentious and affected termin-
ology, and other obvious faults, Whitman had a vision, and a true
poetic one, and in his best poetry that vision comes through, not
as a philosophic system, but as a series of symbolic gestures,
moving, exciting, illuminating. To that, and to the lively poetic
prose of the prefaces, we return. Perhaps the best conclusion to
any account of Whitman's philosophy would be Whitman's own
words from the poem beginning 'Myself and mine* in Birds of
Passage:

I call to die world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to

my enemies, as I myself do,
I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I

cannot expound myself,

I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.

We return in the end, not to grandiose theories of mankind, but
to the concrete projection of the living individual; from this, the
true poetic vision stems:

Behold a woman!

She looks out from her quaker cap,

her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky.

She sits in an armchair under the faded porch of the farmhouse,
The sun just shines on her old white head.

Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen,

Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with
die distaff and the wheel.

The melodious character of the earth,

The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish

to go,
The justified mother of men.

SCOTT'S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 1

IN THE MINDS of too many teachers of English and in the pages
of too many histories of English literature, Scott is an ultra-
romantic figure who began his literary career under the
influence of a rather extravagant German romanticism, moved
from there to a general passion for antiquities, ballads and every-
thing that was old, quaint, 'gothic' or picturesque, and then
proceeded to embody this passion in a series of historical novels
full of scenes of heroism, chivalry and general *tushery\ In
justice to those who present this distorted picture, it must be
admitted that there is an element of truth in it: in his youth Scott
was inclined to be romantic in this sense, in his narrative poems he
does illustrate something of this attitude, and in later life, when
inspiration flagged, he fell back on 'tushery' more often than his
admirers would like to admit. But Scott's best and characteristic
novels are a very different matter. They might with justice be
called 'antiromantic' fiction. They attempt to show that heroic
action, as the typical romantic writer would like to think of it,
is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful, and that man's
destiny, at least in the modern world, is to find his testing time
not amid the sound of trumpets but in the daily struggles and
recurring crises of personal and social life. The courageous and
passionate Jacobite rebel of Redgauntlet is dismissed at the end of
the novel with a smile and a shake of the head, all his heroics
reduced to a kind of posturing that one pities rather than admires;
but humble Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, who has led
her life among simple folk and walks to London to try to get a
reprieve for a sister whose offence, after all, was both common-
place and sordid, is granted her heroic moment, her 'crowded
hour of glorious life', and she finds it when, against all the laws
of romance and chivalry, she pours out her heart in her humble

1 Erst published in Nineteenth Century Fiction, September 1951.
88

SCOTT'S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 89

Scots diction before a queen who is less a queen than a normally
sensitive woman. And when Jeanie tries to find out how she can
repay the kindness of the noble duke who had helped her to her
interview with the queen, she asks: 'Does your honour like
cheese?' That is the real Scott touch.

It is worth noting that the heroine of the novel considered by
most critics to be Scott's best is a humble Scottish working girl.
If Scott is to be classed as a romantic (though it is time we aban-
doned such indefinite and overworked terms), he must be re-
garded as at least as close to Wordsworth as to Coleridge. In the
well-known fourteenth chapter ofBiographia Literaria, Coleridge
described the different parts he and Wordsworth had agreed to
play in the production of Lyrical Ballads:

It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and charac-
ters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward
nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these
shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment
which constitutes poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to
propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every
day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the
mind's attention to the lethargy of custom. . . .

If we forget the tapestry figures of Scott's later novels and think
of those which we cannot but remember most vividly Jeanie
Deans, Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dugald Dalgetty,
Saunders Fairford, Caleb Balderstone, Baron Bradwardine, Edie
Ochiltree, and a host of others who live in the minds long after
the plots of the novels in which they appear are forgotten we
realize that he is at least as successful in 'giving the charm of
novelty to things of every day' as in the task assigned to Coleridge.
It is a well-known fact that die titular heroes of Scott's novels are
generally less real than the minor characters who abound in his
works. It is, as a rule, the unheroic characters who have the most
vitality: the pusillanimous gardener, Andrew Fairservice, is a
more real and, fundamentally, a more important character in
Rob Roy than the theatrical Helen Macgregor.

What does this mean? Are we to conclude that Scott had skill

90 LITERARY ESSAYS

in creating lively minor characters, but failed in the general plan
and structure of his novels? The answer to this and other ques-
tions lies in an examination of the kind of historical novel that
Scott wrote, of the part played by the historical element in those
novels and its relation to the other elements.

To identify Scott as a historical novelist is to place him in a
category too wide to be helpful. A historical novel can be pri-
marily an adventure story, in which the historical elements merely
add interest and a sense of importance to the actions described;
or it can be essentially an attempt to illustrate those aspects of the
life of a previous age which most sharply distinguish it from our
own; or it can be an attempt to use a historical situation to illus-
trate some aspect of man's fate which has importance and meaning
quite apart from that historical situation. Stevenson's Kidnapped
comes into the first category, and here, too, are many of the
novels of Dumas; the eighteenth-century 'gothic' romance comes
into the second; and the best of Scott's novels come into the third.
Obviously, the least important kind is the second, for it considers
the past simply as picturesque, and picturesqueness is merely a
measure of the ignorance of the beholder. Cowboys are doubt-
less picturesque to New Yorkers, but they are not so to themselves
or to their immediate associates. Mexicans may be picturesque to
North American tourists, and Scottish fishwives to English artists,
but their picturesqueness is obviously not an intrinsic quality. It
is no exaggeration to say that to treat history as picturesque is the
most superficial and least significant way of treating it. Scott did
so occasionally, when he was tired or too hard pressed, and occa-
sionally, too, he mingled the first of my two categories with the
second and produced a picturesque historical adventure story, as
in The Talisman, which is reasonably good of its kind but the kind
does not stand very high in the hierarchy of literary forms. The
work by which he must be judged for it is only fair to judge a
writer by his most characteristic achievement -avoids the pictur-
esque and seeks rather to bring the past nearer than to exploit its
remoteness.

The novels on which Scott's reputation as a novelist must stand

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST pi

or fall are his 'Scotch novels' those that deal with Scottish his-
tory and manners and not even all of those. Waverley, Guy
Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian,
Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose and
Redgauntlet all, except Redgauntlet, earlier novels constitute
Scott's list of masterpieces. There are others of the Waverley
Novels of which no novelist need be ashamed, many with ex-
cellent incidental scenes and memorable character studies, but this
group of Scottish novels all possess Scott's characteristic virtues,
and they represent his particular kind of fiction at its very best.

The fact that these novels are all concerned with Scottish history
and manners is intimately bound up with the reasons for their
being his best novels. For Scott's attitude to life was derived
from his response to the fate of his own country: it was the
complex of feelings with which he contemplated the phase of
Scottish history immediately preceding his own time that pro-
vided the point of view which gave life often a predominantly
tragic life to these novels. Underlying most of these novels is a
tragic sense of the inevitability of a drab but necessary progress, a
sense of the impotence of the traditional kind of heroism, a
passionately regretful awareness of the fact that the Good Old
Cause was lost forever and the glory of Scotland must give way
to her interest.

Scott's attitude to Scotland, as Edwin Muir pointed out some
years ago in a thoughtful and provocative study, 1 was a mixture
of regret for the old days when Scotland was an independent but
turbulent and distracted country, and of satisfaction at the peace,
prosperity and progress which he felt had been assured by the
Union with England in 1707 and the successful establishment of
the Hanoverian dynasty on die British throne. His problem, in
one form or another, was the problem of every Scottish writer
after Scotland ceased to have an independent culture of her own:
how to reconcile his country's traditions with what appeared to
be its interest. Scott was always strongly moved by everything
that reminded him of Scotland's past, of the days of the country's

1 Scott and Scotland, Roudedge, London, 1936.

92 LITERARY ESSAYS

independence and the relatively recent days when the Jacobites
were appealing to that very emotion to gain support for their
cause. He grew up as the Jacobite tradition was finally ebbing
away, amid the first generation of Scotsmen committed once and
for all to the association with England and the Hanoverian dynasty.
He felt strongly that that association was inevitable and right and
advantageous he exerted himself greatly to make George IV
popular in Scotland yet there were strong emotions on the other
side too, and it was these emotions that made him Tory in politics
and that provided the greater blessing of leading him to literature
and history.

Scott was two men: he was Edward Waverley and Baron
Bradwardine, Francis Osbaldistone and (say) Mr Justice Ingle-
wood, Darsie Latimer and, if not Redgauntlet himself, some one
more disposed to his side than Darsie was. He was both the
prudent Briton and the passionate Scot. And in many of his
novels he introduces the loyal and respectable Englishman, allows
him to be temporarily seduced by the claims of Scottish nation-
alism in one form or another, and then, reluctantly, sends him
back to his respectable way of life again. So Edward Waverley
leaves the Highlands and shakes off his associations with the
Jacobite Rebellion, and Francis Osbaldistone leaves Rob Roy
and returns to his father's London countinghouse.

This conflict within Scott gave life and passion to his Scottish
novels, for it led him to construct plots and invent characters
which, far from being devices in an adventure story or means to
make history look picturesque, illustrated what to him was the
central paradox of modern life. And that paradox admitted of
the widest application, for it was an aspect of all commercial and
industrial civilizations. Civilization must be paid for by the
cessation of the old kind of individual heroic action. Scott wel-
comed civilization, but he also sighed after the old kind of indivi-
dual heroic action. Scott's theme is a modification of that of
Cervantes, and, specifically, Redgauntlet is Scott's Don Quixote.

Many of Scott's novels take the form of a sort of pilgrim's
progress : an Englishman or a Lowland Scot goes north into the

SCOTT'S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 93

Highlands of Scotland at a time when Scottish feeling is running
high, becomes involved in the passions and activities of the Scots
partly by accident and partly by sympathy, and eventually extri-
cates himself physically altogether but emotionally not quite
wholly and returns whence he came. The character who makes
the journey is the more deliberate side of Scott's character, the
disinterested observer. His duty is to observe, to register the
proper responses, and in the end to accept, however reluctantly,
the proper solution. It is not this character but what he becomes
involved in that matters: his function is merely to observe, react,
and withdraw. To censure Scott for the woodenness of his
heroes characters like Edward Waverley, Francis Osbaldistone,
and many others is to misunderstand their function. They are
not heroes in the ordinary sense, but symbolic observers. Their
love affairs are of no significance whatsoever except to indicate
the nature of the observer's final withdrawal from the seductive
scenes of heroic, nationalist passion. Waverley does not marry
the passionate Jacobite Flora Maclvor but the douce and colour-
less Rose Bradwardine; Waverley's affair with these two girls is
not presented as a serious love interest, but as a symbolic indication
of the nature of his final withdrawal from the heroic emotions of
the past. That withdrawal is never quite one hundred per cent:
Waverley does marry the daughter of a Jacobite, but of one who
has given up the struggle, and Francis Osbaldistone does (we are
told in an epilogue, though we are not shown how it happens)
marry Di Vernon, but only after she has dissociated herself from
her violently Jacobite father and after Francis himself has, for all
his earlier rebellion against a life of commerce, returned to his
father's business. These pilgrims into Scotland carry back some-
thing of older attitudes that must be discarded, but only as a
vague and regretful sentiment. Even Rob Roy tells Francis that
the wild and heroic life may be all very well for himself, but it
won't do for his children they will have to come to terms with
the new world.

The Jacobite movement for Scott was not simply a picturesque
historical event: it was the last attempt to restore to Scotland

94 LITERARY ESSAYS

something of the old heroic way of life. This is not the place for
a discussion of the real historical meaning of Jacobitism I am
concerned at present only with how Scott saw it and how he used
it in his novels. He used it, and its aftermath, to symbolize at
once the attractiveness and the futility of the old Scotland. That
Scotland was doomed after the Union of Parliaments of 1707 and
doubly doomed after the Batde of Culloden in 1746; the after-
math of 1707 is shown in The Heart of Midlothian and of 1746 in
Redgauntlet. In both novels, explicitly in the latter and murmuring
in an undertone in the former, there is indicated the tragic theme
(for it is tragic) that the grand old causes are all lost causes, and
the old heroic action is no longer even fatal it is merely useless
and silly. One thinks of the conclusion of Bishop Kurd's Letters
on Chivalry and Romance: 'What we have gotten by this revolu-
tion, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have
lost is a world of fine fabling/ But to Scott it was more than a
world of fine fabling that was lost; it was a world of heroic
ideals, which he could not help believing should still be worth
something. He knew, however, even before it was brought
home to him by Constable's failure and his consequent own bank-
ruptcy, that in the reign of George IV it was not worth much
certainly not as much as novels about it.

Scott has often been presented as a lover of the past, but that is
a partial portrait. He was a lover of the past combined with a
believer in the present, and the mating of these incompatible
characters produced that tension which accounted for his greatest
novels. Writers on Scott have often quoted that passage in the
second volume of Lockhart's Life describing Scott's outburst to
Jeffrey on the question of legal reforms: 'He exclaimed, "No, no
'tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes
may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what
makes Scotland Scotland shall remain." And so saying, he turned
round to conceal his agitation but not until Mr Jeffrey saw tears
gushing down his cheek/ One might put beside this Scott's
description of his purpose in his introduction to the Minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border: 'By such efforts, feeble as they are, I may con-

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 95

tribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar
features of whose manners and character are daily melting and
dissolving into those of her sister and ally. And, trivial as may
appear such an offering, to the manes of a kingdom, once proud
and independent, I hang it upon her altar with a mixture of
feelings, which I shall not attempt to describe.'

But we must remember that this lover of old traditions engaged
heavily in financial speculations with publishers and printers and
spent a great deal of his life poring over balance sheets and esti-
mates of probable profit. One might contrast with the above
quotations not only many of Scott's own practical activities but
such remarks as the one he made in his Journal after dining with
George IV: 'He is, in many respects, the model of a British

monarch I am sure such a character is fitter for us than a

man who would long to head armies, or be perpetually inter-
meddling with lagrandepolitique! He did not seem much worried
there about ancient traditions.

It is this ambivalence in Scott's approach to the history of his
country combined, of course, with certain remarkable talents
which I shall discuss later that accounts for the unique quality of
his Scottish novels. He was able to take an odi et amo attitude to
some of the most exciting crises of Scottish history. If Scott's
desire to set himself up as an old-time landed gentleman in a large
country estate was romantic, the activities by which he financed
or endeavoured to finance his schemes were the reverse, and
there is nothing romantic in James Glen's account of Scott's
financial transactions prefixed to the centenary edition of his
letters. He filled Abbotsford with historical relics, but they were
relics, and they gave Abbotsford something of the appearance of
a museum. He thus tried to resolve the conflict in his way of life
by making modern finance pay for a house filled with antiquities.
This resolution could not, however, eliminate the basic ambi-
valence in his approach to recent Scottish history: that remained,
to enrich his fiction.

This double attitude on Scott's part prevented him from taking
sides in his historical fiction, and Sir Herbert Grierson has com-

96 LITERARY ESSAYS

plained, though mildly, of this refusal to commit himself. e Of the
historical events which he chooses for the setting of his story/
writes Sir Herbert, 'his judgment is always that of the good sense
and moderated feeling of his own age. He will not take sides out
and out with either Jacobite or Hanoverian, Puritan or Cavalier;
nor does he attempt to transcend either the prejudices or the con-
ventional judgment of his contemporaries, he makes no effort to
attain to a fresh and deeper reading of the events.' Sir Herbert
partly answers his own criticism later on, when he concedes that
Shakespeare likewise concealed his own views and did not stand
clearly for this or that cause. But there are two questions at issue
here. One is whether Scott's seeing both sides of an historical
situation is an advantage or a disadvantage to him as a novelist;
the other is whether, as Sir Herbert charges, he accepts the pre-
judices or the conventional judgment of his contemporaries and
"makes no effort to attain to a fresh and deeper reading of the
events'. I should maintain that his seeing both sides is a great
advantage, and, as to the second point, that, in terms of his art,
Scott does attain to a fresh and deeper reading of the events. I say
in terms of his art, because I of course agree that there is no overt
philosophizing about the meaning of history in Scott's novels.
But the stories as told by Scott not only 'attain to a fresh and
deeper reading of the events', but also, I submit, do so in such a
way as to illuminate aspects of life in general. As this is the crux
of the matter, it requires demonstration in some detail.

Let us consider first Waverley, Scott's initial essay in prose
fiction, and a much better novel, I venture to believe, than most
critics generally concede it to be. I have already pointed out that
the plot is built around an Englishman's journey into Scotland
and his becoming temporarily involved in the Jacobite Rebellion
on the Jacobite side. How does he become so involved and how
are the claims of the Jacobite cause presented? First he becomes
angry with his own side as a result of a series of accidents and
misunderstandings (undelivered letters and so on) for which
neither side is to blame. In this mood, he is willing to consider
the possibility of identifying himself with the other side the

SCOTT'S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 97

Jacobite side and does so all the more readily because he is in-
volved in friendly relations with many of its representatives. He
admires the heroism and the clan spirit of the Highlanders, and
their primitive vigour (as compared -with the more disciplined
and conventional behaviour of the Hanoverian troops with whom
he formerly served) strikes his imagination. He becomes tem-
porarily a Jacobite, then, not so much because he has been
persuaded of the justice of the cause, or because he believes that a
Jacobite victory would really improve the state of Britain, but
because his emotions have become involved. It has become a
personal, not a national, matter.

It should be noted further that Waverley goes into the High-
lands in the first place simply in order to satisfy a romantic
curiosity about the nature of the Highlanders, and it is only after
arriving there that he succumbs to the attractions of clan life.
Not that his reason ever fdly succumbs: though he comes to
realize the grievances of the Highland Jacobites, he has no illusions
about their disinterestedness or their political sagacity, and even
when he does surrender emotionally he remains critical of many
aspects of their behaviour. Thus it is emotion against reason, the
past against the present, the claims of a dying heroic world against
the colder but ultimately more convincing claims of modern
urban civilization.

The essence of the novel is the way in which these conflicting
claims impinge on Waverley. It is worth noting that Waverley,
though he began his progress as a soldier in the army of King
George, did not set out completely free of any feeling for the
other side. Though his father had deserted the traditions of his
family and gone over completely to the Government, his uncle,
who brought him up, was an old Jacobite, and his tutor, too,
though an impossible pedant who had little influence on Waver-
ley, supported the old regime in both Church and State. Waver-
ley thus belonged to the first generation of his family to begin his
career under the auspices of the new world specifically, to be-
come a soldier of King George as a young man. That new world
was not yet as firmly established in Scotland as it came to be

98 LITERARY ESSAYS

during Scott's own youth : there was still a possibility of successful
rebellion in Waverley's day, but none in Scott's. It was too late
for Scott to become a Jacobite, even temporarily, except in his
imagination, so he let Waverley do it for him. The claims of the
two sides are a little more evenly balanced for Waverley than for
Scott, yet even in the earlier period the issue is never really in
doubt, and Waverley's part in the Jacobite rebellion must be
small, and must be explained away and forgiven by the Govern-
ment in the end. Above all, it must be a part entered into by his
emotions on personal grounds rather than by his reason on grounds
of national interest.

I have said that the essence of Waverley is the way in which the
conflicting claims of the two worlds impinge on the titular hero.
The most significant action there cannot concern the hero, but
involves the world in which he finds himself. It is important, of
course, that the hero should be presented as someone sensitive to
the environment in which he finds himself; otherwise his function
as the responsive observer could not be sustained. To ensure that
his hero is seen by the reader as having the proper sensitivity,
Scott gives us at the opening of the book several chapters describing
in detail Waverley's education and the development of his state
of mind. Waverley's education, as described in Chapter Three,
is precisely that of Scott himself. By his undisciplined reading of
old chronicles, Italian and Spanish romances, Elizabethan poetry
and drama, and 'the earlier literature of the northern nations',
young Waverley was fitted to sympathize with the romantic
appeal of the Jacobite cause and its Highland supporters. This, as
we know from Lockhart and from Scott's own account, was
Scott's own literary equipment, and it qualified Waverley to act
for him in his relations with the Scottish Jacobites.

Waverley became involved in the affairs of the Highlands
through a visit to his uncle's old friend, Baron Bradwardine, the
first in Scott's magnificent gallery of eccentric pedants. The
baron remains a sort of halfway house between the two sides: a
Jacobite who takes the field in '45, he is nevertheless not as com-
pletely committed to the cause as such characters as Fergus Mac-

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 9p

Ivor and his sister. Flora, and at the end he is pardoned and restored
to his estate. Bradwardine is a Jacobite more from, his love of
ancient traditions than out of any political feeling, and it is there-
fore proper that he should survive to indulge his love of the past
harmlessly in antiquarian studies and pedantic conversation. Scott
can afford to relax with such a character, as with other minor
characters who do not serve to symbolize the extremes of one
side or the other : and that is why we find so many of Scott's minor
characters more real than some of the principals their function
is to live in the story and represent the more realistic, tolerant life
of more ordinary folk whose destinies are less affected by changes
of dynasty than those of higher rank. This is particularly true of
such minor characters as Davie Gelladey and Duncan Macwheeble.
Their function is similar to that of Justice Shallow and Master
Silence in Shakespeare's Henry W\ they illustrate a kind of life
that adapts itself easily to changes and is not really implicated in
the civil conflicts surrounding it.

The characters in Waverley are marshalled with great skill. First
we have the protagonists on either side : Fergus and Flora Maclvor
represent different aspects of the Jacobite cause, Fergus displaying
that mixture of ambition and loyalty which Scott regarded as an
important characteristic of Highland chiefs, Flora embodying a
purer and more disinterested passion for the cause; and on the
other side is Colonel Talbot, the perfect English gentleman, des-
pising the uncouth ways of the wild Highlanders and representing
civilized man as Scott thought of him. In between the two sides
stands Baron Bradwardine, the nonpolitical Jacobite, who does
not have to die for his faith but is content to be left in the end
with his antiquities and old-fashioned code of behaviour. Then
there are the minor characters on either side, who represent either
life persisting in ordinary human forms in spite of everything, or,
as in the case of Evan Dhu Maccombich, the humble follower
who does what he considers his duty out of simple loyalty to his
ideals and without any understanding of the issues at stake. And
in the centre is Edward Waverley, registering his creator's re-
actions to what goes on axound him. He admires courage, honours

IOO LITERARY ESSAYS

loyalty on either side, welcomes the victory of the Hanoverians
yet sorrows over the fate of the fallen and then returns for good
to the victorious side, taking with him a wife from among the
less fanatical of the Jacobites. His attitude to Fergus Maclvor is
not unlike that of Brutus to Caesar 'there is tears for his love;
joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his
ambition'.

If there is no new historical interpretation of the Jacobite Re-
bellion in this novel, there is certainly a profound interpretation
of what it meant in terms of human ambitions and interests and
in terms of that conflict between the old world of heroic action
and the new world of commercial progress which, as we have
seen, was so central to Scott. It is the same kind of interpretation
that we find in Shakespeare's Henry IF: while accepting the most
enlightened contemporary view of the history involved, it uses
that history as a means of commenting on certain aspects of life
which, in one form or another, exist in every age. This is surely
the highest function of the historical novel as of the history play.

The high-ranking characters in the novels are often the most
symbolical, and they cannot therefore easily step out of their
symbolic role in order to act freely and provide that sense of
abundant life which is so essential to a good novel. This is there-
fore achieved by the minor characters (and here again the com-
parison with Shakespeare suggests itself). The 'humours' of
Baron Bradwardine, the complacent professional zeal of Bailie
Macwheeble, the simple and eloquent loyalty of Evan Dhu
these give Waverley its essential vitality, though I think it is a
fault in the novel (one which Scott corrected in his subsequent
work) that they play too small a part while too large a part is
pkyed by the more rigid actions of the major figures. The tragic
seise that romantic man must compromise with his heroic ideals
if he is to survive in the modern world gives way as the book
comes to a close to the less elevated sentiments of the realistic
common man. Waverley, leaving Carlisle after the execution of
Fergus Maclvor, makes a motion as though to look back and see
his friend's head adorning the battlements, but here, significantly,

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 101

that whole episode ends he is prevented by his Lowland Scots
servant Alick Polwarth, who tells him that the heads of the exe-
cuted men are on the gate at the other side of the town: "They're
no there. . . . The heads are ower the Scotch yate, as they ca' it.
It's a great pity of Evan Dhu, who was a very well-meaning,
good-natured man, to be a Hielandman; and indeed so was the
Laird o' Glennaquoich too, for that matter, when he wasna in ane
o' his timvies.' Similarly, when Waverley, now heir to a fortune,
communicates to Bailie Duncan Macwheeble his plans to marry
Rose Bradwardine, the worthy legal man brings die level of the
action effectively down to that of ordinary professional success.

'Lady Wauverley? ten thousand a-year, the least penny! Lord preserve
my poor understanding!'

'Amen with all my heart,' said "Waverley, *but now, Mr Macwheeble, let
us proceed to business/ This word had a somewhat sedative effect, but the
Bailie's head, as he expressed himself, was still 'in the bees*. He mended his pen,
however, marked half a dozen sheets of paper with an ample marginal fold,
whipped down Dallas of St. Martin's Styles from a shelf, where that venerable
work roosted with Stair's Institutions, Direleton's Doubts, Balfour's Pratiques,
and a parcel of old account books opened the volume at the article Contract
of Marriage, and prepared to make what he called a *sma' minute, to prevent
parties frae resiling'.

Thus the marriage of the heir to the Waverley estates to the
daughter of the pardoned Jacobite is made real by a lawyer's
jotting down a 'sma' minute, to prevent parties frae resiling*.
Though we may have to abandon our dreams, the author seems
to be saying, life goes on in spite of us, with its small daily matters
for tears or laughter, of which, in spite of all alarums and excur-
sions, human existence largely consists. It was because, at bottom,
Scott had a tremendous feeling for this kind of ordinary daily life
that he was able to suppress die implicit tragic note in so many
(but not in all) of his novels and leave the reader at the end to put
heroic ideals behind him with a sigh and turn with a smile to the
foibles of ordinary humanity. And I should add that that smile
is always one of tolerant fellow-feeling, never of condescension.

The subtitle of Waverley is "Tis Sixty Years Since*, and the
phrase is repeated many times throughout the book. It deals, that

102 LITERARY ESSAYS

is to say, with a period which, while distant enough to have a
historical interest, was not altogether out of the ken of Scott's
own generation. In the preface to the first edition of The Antiquary
his third novel, Scott wrote: 'The present work completes a
series of fictitious narratives, intended to illustrate the manners of
Scotland at three different periods. Waverley embraced the age
of our fathers, Guy Mannering that of our youth, and the Antiquary
refers to the last years of the eighteenth century/ (Scott, it will
he remembered, was born in 1771.) As Scott comes closer to his
own. day, the possibilities for heroic action recede and the theme
of the lost heir is introduced as a sort of substitute. It was with
recent Scottish history that Scott was most concerned, for the
conflict within himself was the result of relatively recent history.
The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 was the watershed, as it were,
dividing once and for all the old from the new, and Scott there-
fore began his novels with a study of the relation between the two
worlds at that critical time. It was not that the old Scotland had
wholly disappeared, but that it was slowly yet inevitably dis-
appearing that upset Scott. Its disappearance is progressively
more inevitable in each of the next two novels after Waverley.
Guy Mannering is not in the obvious sense a historical novel at
all. It is a study of aspects of the Scottish situation in the days of
the author's youth, where the plot is simply an excuse for bringing
certain characters into relation with each other. Once again we
have an Englishman Colonel Mannering, who, like Edward
Waverley, shares many of his creator's characteristics coming
into Scotland and surrendering to the charm of the country. Scott
has to get him mixed up in the affairs of the Bertrams in order to
keep him where he wants him. Round Guy Mannering move
gypsies, smugglers, lairds, dominies, lawyers and fanners, and it
is to be noted that none of these characters, from Meg Merrilies
to Dandie Dinmont, belongs to the new world: they are all
essentially either relics of an earlier age, like the gypsies, or the
kind of person who does not substantially change with the times,
like that admirable farmer Dandie. These people are made "to
move around the Bertram family, or at least are brought into the

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST IO3

story through some direct or indirect association with that family,
and the family is decayed and impoverished. The lost heir is
found and restored, and, largely through the benevolent offices
of an English colonel, a Scottish landed gentleman is settled again
on his ancestral acres. That is how things happen in the days of
Scott's youth: no clash of arms or open conflict of two worlds,
but the prophecies of gypsies, the intrigues of smugglers, the
hearty activities of farmers, all set against the decay of an ancient
family and all put to right in the end with the help of a gypsy, an
English officer, and a Scottish lawyer. If the heroic element is
less than in Waverley, the element of common life is greater, and
the two virtues of honesty (in Dinmont) and urbanity (in Coun-
sellor Pleydell) eventually emerge as those most worth while.

Counsellor Pleydell is a particularly interesting character be-
cause he represents that combination of good sense and humanity
which Scott so often thought of as mediating between extremes
and enabling the new world to preserve, in a very different
context, something of the high generosity of the old. Pleydell is
a lawyer, essentially middle ckss and respectable, but he is drawn
with such sympathy that he threatens to remove most of the
interest from the rather artificial main plot and share with Daadie
Dinmont the reader's chief attention. If the gypsy Meg Merrilies
provides something of the old-world romantic note and she
does so with great vigour and effectiveness the lawyer and the
farmer between them represent the ordinary man providing com-
fort for the future. The bluff courage and honesty of the former
and the kindly intelligence of the lawyer dominate the story at
the end.

Scott knew much of rural superstitions from the ballads, and he
saw them as part of the ancient Scotland no less than Jacobitisna or
the feudal system. The gypsy prophetess Meg Merrilies is thus in
a way the counterpart in this novel of Fergus Maclvor in Waverley.
She, too, dies a violent death at the end of the book, and the stage
is left to the representatives of the less spectacular virtues. The
different strata of dialogue here are as dear as in the earlier novel.
Erst listen to die simple yet eloquent speech of the gypsy:

104 LITERARY ESSAYS

'Ride your ways,' said the gypsy, 'ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan
ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking
heardis see if the fire in your ain parlour bum the blyther for that. Ye have
riven the thack off seven cottar houses look if your ain roof-tree stand the
faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh see that the
hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan. Ride your ways,
Godfrey Bertram what do you glower after our folk for? There's thirty
hearts there, that wad hae wanted bread ere ye had wanted sunkets, and spent
their life-blood ere ye had scratched your finger. Yes there's thirty yonder,
from the auld wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last week, that ye
have turned out o* their bits o' bields, to sleep with the tod and the black-cock
in the muirs! Ride your ways, Ellangowan, Our bairns are hinging at our
weary backs look that your braw cradle at hame be the fairer spread up not
that I am wishing ill to little Harry, or to the babe that's yet to be born God
forbid and make them kind to the poor, and better folk than their father!
And now, ride e'en your ways; for these are the last words ye'll ever hear Meg
Merrilies speak, and this is the last reise that I'll ever cut in the bonny woods of
Ellangowan.'

This is the high note, popular yet passionate, the note that Scott
learned from the Border ballads. If one puts beside this the con-
versation between Counsellor Pleydell and Dandie Dinmont in
Chapter Thirty-six and compares again with that the magnificent
domestic scene at the Dinmont farm of Charlies-hope in Chapter
Twenty-four (both unfortunately too long for quotation), one
gets a view of the range of Scott's dialogue from the passionate
outburst of the gypsy to the humorous realism of the talk between
Pleydell and Dinmont and the sympathetic domestic scene at
Charlies-hope. These three passages illustrate Scott's basic equip-
ment as a realistic 'social* novelist.

Finally, one should note a brief remark of Mr PleyddTs which
illustrates perfectly his position as a sensible but sensitive man who
had made a proper adjustment between his emotions and his way
of life. Colonel Mannering has asked him what he thinks of the
points of difference between the passionate old Covenanting clergy
and the modern moderates, and this is his reply:

*Why, I hope, Colonel, a plain man, may go to heaven without thinking
about them at all besides, inter nos, I am a member of the suffering and
Episcopal Church of Scotland the shadow of a shade now, and fortunately

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 105

so but I love to pray where my fathers prayed before me, without thinking
worse of the Presbyterian forms, because they do not affect me with the same
associations.*

I cannot attempt, in the space at my disposal, to give an account
of the action of Guy Mannering or to illustrate how Scott mani-
pulates his characters in order to produce the required picture of
the Scotland of his youth. Nor can any account of the richness
and vitality of the novels be given by a few brief quotations. But
I must note that here, as so often in Scott, the formal plot is merely
a device for bringing the necessary characters and situations into
the novel : it is not a plot in the Aristotelian sense at all, but merely
a stage contrived to accommodate the appropriate actors. Yet
the action is not episodic: it all contributes to a central pattern,
which is not, however, that laid down by the external plot

One further point before I leave Guy Mannering. The nearer to
the present Scott moves the more likely he is to present men of
noble birth simply as fools. Those who think of Scott as the
passionate defender of aristocratic privilege should note that the
most highly born character in Guy Mannering is Sir Robert
Hazlewood, whom Scott represents as a pompous ass, so obsessed
by the dignity of his ancient lineage that he can talk of little else,
and in other respects a selfish and foolish nonentity. Similarly,
Sir Arthur Wardour of The Antiquary, equally obsessed by his
noble ancestry, is shown as a gullible fool, and much less sympa-
thetic than the antiquary himself, who, it should be noted, is of
humble origin and a Whig.

The scene of The Antiquary is the Scotland of Scott's own day.
The external plot, which is once again that of the lost heir, is, as
usual, not to be taken seriously: its function is to bring the faintly
drawn Englishman Lovel into Scotland and so set the appropriate
characters into motion. In three successive novels Scott begins by
bringing an Englishman into Scotland, by sending forth an ob-
server to note the state of the country at the time represeated by
the novel's action. Lovel, of course, is no more the hero of The
Antiquary than Christopher Sly is the hero of The Taming of the
Shrew, and his turning out at the end to be the lost heir of Glen-

106 LITERARY ESSAYS

allan is the merest routine drawing down of the curtain. The life
of the novel and it has abundant life centres in the Scottish
characters whom the plot enables Scott to bring together, and in
their reactions to each other. Jonathan Oldbuck, the antiquary
(and it should be noted that there are antiquaries of one kind or
another in a great many of Scott's novels) represents one kind of
compromise between the old world and the new that is possible
in the modern world. A descendant of German printers, a man
of no family in the aristocratic sense, and a Whig in politics to
boot, Oldbuck is yet fascinated by Scotland's past and spends his
life in antiquarian studies. In the modern world the past becomes
the preserve of the interested historian, whatever his birth or
politics, while those who attempt to live in the past in any other
way become, as Sir Arthur Wardour becomes, ridiculous and
insufferable. Sir Arthur, continually lording it over the antiquary
because of his superior birth, nevertheless knows less of Scottish
history and traditions than the antiquary and is so vain and stupid
that he falls a prey to the designing arts of an imposter who
swindles him out of his remaining money, so that he has to be
rescued through the influence of his friends. Sir Arthur is the
comic counterpart of the tragic hero ofRedgauntlet: both illustrate
the impossibility of seriously living in the past after 1746. In The
Antiquary the prevailing atmosphere is comic. This is unusual in
Scott, however often he may end his novels with a formal c happy
ending' so far as the superficial plot is concerned. The melo-
dramatic Glenallan episode in this novel and the drowning of the
young fisherman Steenie Mucklebaddt give a sense of depth and
implication to the action, but they do not alter its essential
atmosphere. In this novel, too, the hero is the character who pkys
the dominant part the antiquary himself, the good-humoured,
pedantic, self-opinionated, essentially kindly gentleman who is in
many respects a latter-day version of Baron Bradwardine. Round
him move Edie Odhiltree, the wandering beggar; the humble
fishing family of the Mucklebackits; Caxon, the comic barber
who deplores the passing of powdered wigs but takes comfort in
the three yet left to him; the foreign imposter Dousterswiver ; and

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST IOy

other characters illustrative of the kind of life the east coast of
Scotland (apart from the big cities) had settled down to by the
end of the eighteenth century.

The plot of The Antiquary is even less important than that of
Guy Mannering. It is essentially a static novel, in a sense a novel of
manners, and the parts that stand out in the memory are such
scenes as the gathering in the Pairport post office when the mail
comes in, the antiquary holding forth at dinner or at a visit to a
neighbouring priory, Sir Arthur and his daughter trapped by the
tide and rescued by Edie Ochiltree and Lovel, the interior of the
humble fishing cottage after Steenie's drowning, and similar
pictures, many of them admirable genre portraits in the Flemish
style. And as always in Scott, the novel lives by its dialogue,
the magnificent pedantic monologues of Oldbuck, the racy Scots
speech of Edie Ochiltree, the chattering of gossips in the post
office, the naive babbling of Caxon. No action, in these early
novels of Scott, ever comes to life until somebody talks about it,
whether in the sardonic tones of Andrew Fairservice, the ver-
nacular declamations of Meg Merrilies, or the shrewd observa-
tions of Edie Ochiltree. And it is to be noticed that the dialogue
is at its best when it is the speech of humble people: Scott could
make them live by simply opening their mouths.

The characteristic tension of Scott's novels is scarcely perceptible
in The Antiquary, though I think it can be discerned by those who
look carefuUy for it. In Old Mortality it is present continuously
and is in a sense the theme of the story. In this novel Scott goes
back to the latter part of the seventeenth century to deal with the
conflict between the desperate and embittered Covenanters and
the royal armies intent on stamping out a religious disaffection
which was bdund up with political disagreements. Though this
was an aspect of Scottish history which, in its most acute phases
at least, was settled by the Revolution of 1689, it represented a
type of conflict which is characteristic of much Scottish history
and which Scott saw as a struggle between an exaggerated royal-
ism and a fanatical religion. It should be said at the outset that as a
historical novel in the most literal sense of the word as an accu-

108 LITERARY ESSAYS

rate picture of the state of affairs at the time this is clearly Scott's
best work. Generations of subsequent research have only con-
firmed the essential justice and fairness of Scott's picture of both
sides. The only scholar ever seriously to challenge Scott on this
was the contemporary divine, Thomas McCrie, who made an
attack on the accuracy of Scott's portrait of the Covenanters, but
posterity has thoroughly vindicated Scott and shown McCrie's
attack to have been the result of plain prejudice.

But we do not read Old Mortality for its history, though we
could do worse. We read it, as Scott wrote it, as a study of the
kinds of mentality which faced each other in this conflict, a study
of how a few extremists on each side managed, as they so often
do, to split the country into warring camps with increasing
bitterness on the one side and increasing cruelty on the other.
Scott's interest, of course, would lie in the possibilities for com-
promise, in the technique of adjustment, in the kind of character
who can construct a bridge between the two factions. And just
as Edward Waverley, the loyal Englishman, became involved in
spite of himself on the Jacobite side in 1745, so Harry Morton, the
sensible, moderate, good-hearted Scot, becomes involved ,in
similar circumstances on the side of the Covenanters. The Fergus
Maclvor of the Covenanters is the magnificently drawn fanatic,
Balfour of Burley. The leader of the other side, the famous
Claverhouse, 'Bonnie Dundee', is introduced in person, and a
convincing and powerful portrait it is. Between these extremes
are all those whom varying degrees of zeal or loyalty brought
into one camp or the other. The novel contains one of Scott's
finest portrait galleries. On the Government side there is Claver-
house himself, his nephew Cornet Grahame, the proud Bothwell,
descendant of kings, that perfect gentleman Lord Evandale, Major
Bellenden, the veteran campaigner, and some minor figures. On
the Covenanting side there is a whole array of clergymen, from
the fanatical Macbriar to the more accommodating Poundtext,
each presented with an individuality and with an insight into the
motives and minds of men more profound than anything Scott
had yet shown. The realistic, commonsense Cuddie Headrigg

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST

trying, in the interests of their common safety, to put a curb on
the tongue of his enthusiastic Covenanting mother produces some
of the finest tragicomedy (if one may call it that) in English
literature: there are many passages here that would be worth
quoting if space did not forbid. The pious and kindly Bessie
Maclure shows the Covenanting side at its best, while the generous
Lord Evandale plays the same part for the other side. It is in the
gradations of the characters on either side that Scott shows his
greatest insight into the causes of civil conflict. Total conviction
is comparatively rare on either side, and when it is, it is either
bitter and passionate, as in Balfour of Burley, or nonchalantly
self-assured, as in Claverhouse.

If Scotland had not torn itself in two before the issues presented
in the eighteenth century were ever thought of, the fate of the
country might have been different, and Scott's study of the last of
the Scottish civil wars before the Jacobite Rebellions is thus faked
with his major preoccupation the destiny of modern Scotland.
If moderate men on both sides could have won, the future would
have been very different. But, though there were moderate men
on both sides and Scott delighted to draw them, their advice in
the moments of crisis was never taken. There is no more moving
passage in the novel than the description of Morton's vain attempt
to make his fanatical colleagues behave sensibly before the Batde
of Bothwell Brig. There is a passion behind die tilling of much
of this story that is very different from the predominantly sunny
mood of The Antiquary. The extremists prevail, the Covenanting
army is destroyed, and a victorious Government takes a cruel
revenge on embittered and resolute opponents. This is one novel
of Scott's where the moderate men do not remain at the end to
point the way to the future. Morton goes into exile and can
return to Scotland only after the Revolution. Lord Evandale
meets his death at the hands of a desperate man. And if the leaders
on both sides the ruthless fanatic Burley and the equally ruthless
but gay cavalier Claverhouse both go to their death before the
novel ends, there is no particular hope implied by their elimination.

Morton returns to marry his love, and the prudent Cuddie

IIO LITERARY ESSAYS

settles down to be a douce henpecked husband, but the life has
gone out of the novel by this time. The dominating figure,
Balfour of Burley, may have been an impossible fanatic, but he
represented a kind of energy possessed by none of the wiser
characters. Harry Morton, the observer, the man who sees some-
thing good on both sides and is roped into the Covenanting side
by a series of accidents, represents the humane, intelligent liberal
in a world of extremists. Old Mortality is a study of a society which
had no place for such a character: it is essentially a tragedy, and
one with a very modern ring.

If Old Mortality is, from one point of view, Scott's study of the
earlier errors which made the later cleavage between Scotland and
her past inevitable (for it is true to say that after the Covenanting
wars the English saw no way but a union of the two countries to
ensure the perpetual agreement of the Scots to the king chosen by
England and to prevent the succession question from being a
constant bugbear), Rob Roy is a return to his earlier theme, a study
of eighteenth-century Highland grievances and their relation to
Scotland's destiny. It is, in a sense, a rewriting of Waverley and
the main theme is less baldly presented. The compromise char-
acter here is the ever-delightful Bailie Nicol Jarvie, the Gksgow
merchant who is nevertheless related to Rob Roy himself and,
for all his love of peace and his commercial interests, can on
occasion cross the Highland line into his cousin's country and
become involved in scenes of violence in which, for a douce
citizen of Glasgow, he acquits himself very honourably.

Rob Roy represents the old heroic Scotland, while the worthy
Bailie represents the new. The Union of 1707 may have been a
sad thing for those who prized Scotland's independence, but to
the Bailie and his like it opened up new fields for foreign trade,
and brought increased wealth. * Whisht, sir! whisht!' he cried
to Andrew Fairservice when the latter complained of the Union.
It's ill-scraped tongues like yours that make mischief between
neighbourhoods and nations. There's naething sae gude on this
side o' time but it might have been better, and that may be said o'
the Union. Nane were keener against it than the Glasgow folk,

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST III

wi' their rabblings and their risings, and their mobs, as they ca*
them nowadays. But it's an ill wind that blaws naebody gude
let ilka ane roose the ford as they find it. I say, let Glasgow
flourish! whilk is judiciously and elegantly putten round the
town's arms by way of by word. Now, since St. Mungo catched
herrings in the Clyde, what was ever like to gar us flourish like
the sugar and tobacco trade? Will anybody tell me that, and
grumble at a treaty that opened us a road west-awa' yonder?*
Rob Roy is courageous and sympathetic, and Helen Macgregor,
his wife, is noble to the verge of melodrama, but they represent a
confused and divided Highlands and are, after all, nothing but
glorified freebooters. Scott, in the person of Francis Osbaldistone,
pities their wrongs and feels for their present state, but he knows
that they and what they stand for are doomed indeed, they
admit it themselves and throws in his lot with the prudent
Bailie.

It is, of course, grossly to simplify a novel of this kind to present
its main theme in such terms. For Scott's sympathy with both
sides leads him to produce scene after scene in which one group
of characters after another moves to the front of the stage and
presents itself in the most lively fashion. And the dialogue is some
of the best Scott ever wrote. The Bailie is a perpetual delight,
with his garrulity, prudence and essential generosity. The scene in
the Glasgow prison, where he encounters his Highland relative; the
episode at the clachan at Aberfoyle where he defends himself in
a fierce tavern brawl with a red-hot poker; and his dialogue with
the proud Helen Macgregor when she threatens him with instant
death no reader of Rob Roy can fail to feel the vitality and, what
is more, the essential preoccupation with those aspects of human
character which make men interesting and diverse enough to be
worth contemplating at all which are manifest in these chapters.
And the humour for the book abounds in humour is the rich
humour of character, not mere superadded wit or cleverness.
When the Bailie stands before the mdodramatic Helen in immi-
nent danger of being bundled into the lake on her hysterical
orders, his conversation is absolutely central to his character:

112 LITERARY ESSAYS

'Kinswoman,' said the Bailie, 'nae man willingly wad cut short his thread
of life before the end o' his pirn was fairly measured off on the yard-winles
And I hae muckle to do, an I be spared, in this warld public and private
business, as well that belanging to the magistracy as to my ain particular
and nae doubt I hae some to depend on me, as puir Mattie, wha is an orphan
She's a farawa* cousin o' the Laird o' Limmerfield Sae that, laying a' this
thegither skin for skin, yea all that a man hath will he give for his life.'

That is the Bailie in danger; and here he is in the comfort of his
own home, explaining the virtues of his brandy punch:

'The limes/ he assured us, 'were from his own little farm yonder-awa
(indicating the West Indies with a knowing shrug of his shoulders), 'and he had
learned the art of composing the liquor from auld Captain CofEnkey, who
acquired it,' he added in a whisper, 'as maist folks thought, amang the Buc-
caniers. But it's excellent liquor/ said he, helping us round; 'and good ware
has often come frae a wicket market. And as for Captain Coffinkey, he was a
decent man when I kent him, only he used to swear awfully but he's dead,
and gaen to his account, and I trust he's accepted I trust he's accepted/

The Bailie dominates the book, and Andrew Fairservice, the
dour Lowland gardener, comes a close second. One of Scott's
most unattractive characters (he is the degenerate scion of the
Covenanting tradition, while the Bailie is its more attractive heir:
Calvinism and commerce often went together), Andrew has a
flow of insolent, complaining and generally irritating conver-
sation which is nevertheless irresistible. As Lord Tweedsmuir has
said, 'he never opens his mouth but there flows from it a beautiful
rhythmic Scots'. He is a constant irritant to the nominal hero,
whose servant he is, and a constant joy to the reader. That ability
to make an offensive character attractive through the sheer
literary quality of his offensiveness, as it were, is surely the mark
of the skilful artist. And such, I would maintain, Scott at his best,
and in spite of certain obvious faults, always is.

There are two pivots to this novel; one is the relations between
Francis Osbaldistone and his friends with Rob Roy and his
friends, and the other is Francis's relations with his unde and
cousins. It is, I believe, a mistake to regard the family compli-
cations in Rob Roy as mere machinery designed to provide a
reason for young Osbaldistone's journey into Scotland: they

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 113

loom much too largely in the novel for that. They represent, in
fact, a statement of the theme on which the Rob Roy scenes are
a variation the impossibility of the old life in the new world.
Francis's uncle is an old-fashioned Tory Jacobite squire, com-
pletely gone to seed, and his sons are either fools or villains. This
is what has become of the knights of old they are either free-
booters like Rob Roy, shabby remnants of landed gentry like Sir
Hildebrand, or complete villains like Rashleigh. Francis's father
had escaped from this environment to embrace the new world
wholeheartedly and become a prosperous London merchant. He
is at one extreme, Bailie Nicol Jarvie is the middle figure, and
Rob Roy is at the other extreme. But die pattern is more com-
plicated than this, for the novel contains many variations on each
type of character, so much so, in fact, that it is an illuminating and
accurate picture of Scottish types in the early eighteenth century.
And through it all runs the sense of the necessity of sacrificing
heroism to prudence, even though heroism is so much more
attractive.

It is interesting to observe that Scott tends to lavish most of his
affection on the middle figures, those who manage to make them-
selves at home in the new world without altogether repudiating
the old. Such characters Jonathan Oldbuck, Counsellor Pley-
dell, Bailie Nicol Jarvie are always the most lively and the most
attractive in the novels in which they occur. They represent, in
one way or another, the kind of compromise which most satisfied
Scott.

Of The Heart of Midlothian, which most critics consider the best
of Scott's works, I shall say nothing, since I have analysed it in
accordance with the view of Scott here developed in the intro-
duction to my edition of the novel. 1

The Bride of Lammermoor, which followed The Heart of Mid-
lothian, presents the conflict between the old and the new in naked,
almost melodramatic terms: the decayed representative of aa
ancient family comes face to face with the modern purchaser of
his estates. The book is stark tragedy, for the attempted com-
1 Rinehart, New York, 1948.

114 LITERARY ESSAYS

promise the marriage between the old family and the new is
too much for circumstances, and the final death of hero and
heroine emphasizes that no such direct solution of the problem is
possible. Too few critics have observed the note of grim irony
in this novel, which goes far to neutralize the melodrama. The
portrait of the Master of Ravenswood is bitterly ironical, and
there is irony too in the character of his taithful servant, Caleb
Balderstone. The pride of both master and servant, which has no
justification in their present circumstances or achievements, is a
grim mockery of that heroic pride which motivated the knights
of old. Ravenswood is a tragic counterpart of Sir Arthur War-
dour of The Antiquary: both retain nothing of value from the past
except an unjustified pride.

A Legend of Montrose the companion piece of The Bride of
Lammermoor in the third series of 'Tales of My Landlord* is a
slighter novel than those I have been discussing : it lives through
one character only, Captain Dugald Dalgetty, the only military
figure in English literature beside whom Fluellen looks rather
thin. But this one character is sufficient to illuminate the whole
story, since, in a tale concerning the Civil War of the 16405, he
represents the most complete compromise figure the mercenary
soldier, trained in the religious wars of the Continent, willing to
fight on and be loyal to any side which pays him adequately and
regularly. This is another novel of a divided Scotland divided
on an issue foreshadowing that which divides the two camps in
Old Mortality. Here again we have Highland heroism presented
as something magnificent but impossible, and the main burden of
the novel falls on Dugald Dalgetty, mercenary and pedant (a
most instructive combination to those interested in Scott's mind),
the man of the future who, ridiculous and vulgar though he may
be, has a firm code of honour of his own and performs his hired
service scrupulously and courageously.

After The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose Scott
turned to other fields than relatively recent Scottish history, and
in Ivanhoe he wrote a straight novel of the age of chivalry without
any attempt to relate it to what had hitherto been the principal

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST Ilf

theme of his prose fiction the relations between the old heroic
Scotland and the new Anglicized, commercial Britain. A novel
like Ivanhoe, though it has qualities of its own, is much more
superficial than any of the Scottish novels, and is written thrbugt-
out on a much lower plane. Scott did not, in fact, know the
Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or
religious life. But he returned later to the theme which was always
in his mind, and in Redgauntlet produced if not certainly the best,
then the most illuminating of his novels.

Redgauntlet is the story of a young Edinburgh man who be-
comes involved against his will in a belated Jacobite conspiracy
some twenty years after the defeat of Prince Charlie at Culloden.
The moving spirit of the conspiracy turns out to be the young
man's own uncle (for, like so many of Scott's heroes, young
Darsie Larimer is brought up in ignorance of his true parentage),
who kidnaps him in order that, as the long-lost heir to the house
of Redgauntlet, he may return to the ways of his ancestors and
fight for the Pretender as his father had done before him. Darsie,
of course, has no liking for this role so suddenly thrust upon him,
and is saved from having to undertake it by the complete collapse
of the conspiracy. That is the barest oudine of the plot, which is
enriched, as so often in Scott, with a galaxy of characters each of
whom takes his place in the complex pattern of late eigbteenth-
century Scottish life which the novel creates.

As with most of the Scottish novels, the story moves between
two extremes. On the one hand, there is the conscientious lawyer
Saunders Fairford, his son Alan, who is Darsie's bosom friend
and with whom Darsie has been living for some time before the
story opens, and other characters representing respectable and
professional Edinburgh. Saunders Fairford is Scott's portrait of
his own father, and the figure is typical of all that is conventional,
hard-working, middle-class, unromantic. At the other extreme
is Darsie's uncle, a stern fmatical figure reminiscent of Balfour of
Burley. Between the two worlds that of respectable citizens
wtc are completely reconciled to the new Scotland and that of
fanatical Jacobites engaged in the vain, task of trying to recreate

Il6 LITERARY ESSAYS

the old Scott places his usual assortment of mediating figures,
from the blind fiddler, Wandering Willie, to that typical com-
promise character, the half-Jacobite Provost Crosbie. This is the
Scotland in which Scott himself grew up and in which he recog-
nized all the signs of the final death of the old order. For most of
the characters Jacobitism is now possible only as a sentiment, not
as a plan of action. But to Redgaundet, who has dedicated his
life to the restoration of the Stuarts, it is a plan of action, and the
tragedy for the novel is essentially a tragedy lies in the manner
of Ms disillusion.

The story opens with the usual pilgrim's progress. Darsie, tired
of his law studies and happily possessed of an independent income,
decides to leave the Fairfords', where he has been staying, and take
a trip to south-west Scodand for diversion. We are presented first
with a series of letters between Darsie and his friend Alan Fairford,
the former on his travels, the latter at home in his law studies pre-
paring himself to be called to the Bar. These letters are written
with a speed and deftness and with a lively fidelity to character
that carry the reader easily into the story. Darsie becomes in-
volved in a series of adventures which bring him into contact with
a number of characters whom Scott needs to present in order to
round out his picture, then is kidnapped by his uncle, and finally
discovers his real birth and the destiny his uncle intends for him.
The story, opened by letters, is continued in Scott's own person,
with the help of the journal Darsie keeps while held in confine-
ment by his uncle. This technique is not in the least clumsy, but
keeps the emphasis at each point just where Scott needs it. Alan
goes off to rescue his friend, but not before Scott has given us a
brilliant picture of Scottish legal life, a perfect epitome of the
professional activity which then was and to a certain extent still
is the basis of Edinburgh's existence. Edinburgh and its worthy
citizens are in no danger of losing their heads over an impossible
and reactionary ideal. We move from there to Darsie and his
uncle, and gradually the two sets of characters get nearer each
other, until the climax, which is the end of the novel. Nowhere
else (as Mr Edwin Muir has pointed out) did Scott express so

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST

explicitly and so vigorously his sense of the doom of the old
heroic life. In the modern world such ideals were not even
dangerous, they were only silly, and though Scott accepted this,
it was with the deepest reluctance and with all his instincts out-
raged. Consider the climax of Redgauntlet, after the pathetic little
conspiracy has been discovered and the Government representa-
tive enters the room where the conspirators are arguing among
themselves. As General Campbell, the Government emissary,
enters, Redgauntlet challenges him in the old style:

'In one word, General Campbell,* said Redgaundet, 'is it to be peace or
war? You are a man of honour and we can trust you/

'I thank you, sir/ said the General; 'and I reply that the answer to your
question rests with yourself. Come, do not be fools, gentlemen; there was
perhaps no great harm meant or intended by your gathering together in this
obscure corner, for a bear-bait or a cock-fight, or whatever other amusement
you may have intended, but it was a litde imprudent, considering how you
stand with government, and it has occasioned some anxiety. Exaggerated
reports of your purpose have been laid before government by the information
of a traitor in your councils; and I was sent down to take command of a
sufficient number of troops, in case these calumnies should be found to have
any real foundation. I have come here, of course, sufficiently supported both
with cavalry and infantry, to do whatever may be necessary; but my commands
are and I am sure they agree with my inclination to make no arrests, nay, to
make no further inquiries of any kind, if this good assembly will consider their
own interests so far as to give up their immediate purpose, and return quietly
home to their own houses.'

'What! all?' exclaimed Sir Richard Glendale 'all, without exception?'

"ALL, without one single exception/ said the General; 'such are my orders.
If you accept my terms, say so, and make haste; for things may happen to
interfere with his Majesty's kind purposes towards you all'

'His Majesty's kind purposes!' said the Wanderer [i.e., Charles Edward, the
Pretender, himself], 'Do I hear you aright, sir?'

*I speak the Thing's very words, from his very lips,' replied the General. * "I
will," said his Majesty, "deserve the confidence of my subjects by reposing my
security in the fidelity of the millions who acknowledge my title in the good,
sense and prudence of the few who continue, from the errors of education, to
disown it." His Majesty will not even believe that the most zealous Jacobites
who yet remain can nourish a thought of exciting a civil war, which must be
fetal to their families and themselves, besides spreading bloodshed and ruin
through, a peaceful land. He cannot even believe of his Iringman^ that he would

Il8 LITERARY ESSAYS

engage brave and generous, though mistaken men, in an attempt which must
ruin all who have escaped former calamities; and he is convinced, that, did
curiosity or any other motive lead that person to visit this country, he would
soon see it was his wisest course to return to the continent; and his Majesty
compassionates his situation too much to offer any obstacle to his doing so.'
'Is this real?' said Redgaundet. *Can you mean this? Am I are all, are
any of these gentlemen at liberty, without interference, to embark in yonder
brig . . . ?'

*You, sir all any of the gentlemen present,' said the General

*Then, gentlemen/ said Redgauntlet, clasping his hands together as the
words burst from him, 'the cause is lost for ever.'

It is important for a proper understanding of Redgaundet's
character to note that his zeal is not only for the restoration of the
Stuarts; it is, in some vague way, for the restoration of an inde-
pendent Scotland, and his dominant emotion is Scottish national-
ism rather than royalism. Scott made him a symbol of all that the
old, independent Scotland stood for, and that is why his fate was
of so much concern to his creator. No reader can mistake the
passion of the scene from which I have just quoted: Scott, who
burst into tears when he heard of old Scottish customs being
abolished and who protested in horror when, at the -uncovering of
the long-hidden crown jewels of Scotland, one of the commission-
ers made as though to place the old Scottish crown on the head
of one of the girls who were present the Scott who, in his heart,
had never really reconciled himself to the Union of 1707 (though
he never dared say so, not even in his novels), was portraying
in the character of Redgaundet something of himself, something,
perhaps, of what in spite of everything he wished to be. But as
Darsie Latimer who is clearly a self-portrait, though a partial
one he only touched the fringe of that tragedy, without be-
coming involved in it.

There are other characters and episodes in Redgauntlet worth
dwelling on the character of the Quaker, the episode of the
attack on the fishing nets in the Solway, and that admirable short
story, 'Wandering "Willie's Tale'. One might, too, ekborate
on the structure of the novel, which is perfecdy tied to-
gether, and there is the recurring dialogue, which, as always in

SCOTT'S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST lip

Scott's Scottish novels, keeps abundant life continually buttling.

Basing Scott's claim on these Scottish novels, what then was
his achievement and what is his place among British novelists? It
might be said, in the first place, that Scott put his knowledge of
history at the service of his understanding of certain basic para-
doxes in human society and produced a series of novels which
both illuminates a particular period and throws light on human
character in general. His imagination, his abundant sense of life,
his ear for vivid dialogue, his feeling for the striking incident, and
that central, healthy sense of the humour of character, added, of
course, essential qualities to his fiction. But it was his tendency
to look at history through character and at character through the
history that had worked on it that provided the foundation of his
art. Scott's might be called a 'normal' sensibility, if such a thing
exists. He has no interest in aberrations, exceptions or perversions,
or in the minutiae of self-analysis not unless they have pkyed a
substantial part in human history. Fanaticism, superstition, pe-
dantry these and qualities such as these are always with us, and
Scott handles them again and again. But he handles them always
from the point of view of the ordinary sensitive man looking on,
not from their own point of view. We see Balfour of Burley
through Morton's eyes, and Redgaundet through Darsie Lati-
mer's. We feel for them, understand them even, but never live
with them. That is what I mean when I talk of Scott's central
vision: his characters and situations are always observed by some
one standing in a middle-of-the-road position. That position is
the position of the humane, tolerant, informed and essentially
happy man. It is fundamentally the position of a sane man. Scott
was never the obsessed artist, but the happy writer.

Scott's abundant experience of law courts, both in Edinburgh
and in his own sheriffdom, gave him a fund of knowledge of
ordinary human psychology, and he had besides both historical
knowledge and imagination. His eccentrics are never as funda-
mentally odd as Dicken's eccentrics: they are essentially ordinary
people, people he had known in one form or anotfrer. Most
important of all, Scott enjoyed people, in the way that Shakespeare

I2O LITERARY ESSAYS

must have done. They live and move in his novels with a Fal-
staffian gusto. There is indeed something of Shakespeare in Scott
not the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Othello, but the Shakespeare of
Henry IK or Ttvelfth Night, and perhaps also of Macbeth. His gift
for dialogue was tremendous, and his use of Scottish dialect to
give it authenticity and conviction is unequalled by any other
Scottish novelist except very occasionally John Gait, Stevenson
in Weir ofHernriston, and perhaps Lewis Grassic Gibbon in. our
own century. In spite of all the tragic undertones in so many of
his novels, most of them are redeemed into affirmations of life
through the sheer vitality of the characters as they talk to each
other. Scott's gallery of memorable characters characters who
live in the mind with their own individual idiom cannot be
beaten by any other British novelist, even if we restrict the
selection to some eight of Scott's novels and ignore all the rest.
But they are not merely characters in a pageant: they play their
parts in an interpretation of modem life. I say of 'modern life' to
emphasize the paradox: Scott, the historical novelist, was at his
best when he wrote either about his own time or about the recent
past which had produced those aspects of his own time about
which he was chiefly concerned.

Of course Scott was often careless. He wrote fast, and employed
broad brush strokes. Sometimes we feel that he wholly lacked
an artistic conscience, for he could do the most preposterous
things to fill up space or tie up a plot. His method of drawing
up the curtain is often clumsy, but once the curtain is up, the
life that is revealed is (in his best novels) abundant and true.
Scott can be pompous in his own way when his inspiration
flags, but he never fools himself into mistaking his pomposity
for anything else. Above all, though he is concerned about life
he is never worried about it. We read his best novels, therefore,
with a feeling of immense ease and satisfaction. We may be
moved or amused or excited, but we are never worried by them.
His best novels are always anchored in earth, and when we think
of Helen Macgregor standing dramatically on the top of a cliff we
cannot help thinking at the same time of the worthy Bailie,

SCOTT S ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST 121

garrulous and kindly and self-important; Counsellor Pleydell is
die perfect antidote to Meg Merrilies, and even Redgaundet must
give way before Wandering Willie and Provost Crosbie. The
ordinary folk win in the end, and paradox again the Wizard
of the North finally emerges as a novelist of manners.

CHRISTOPHER NORTH 1

IN THE SUMMER OF 1802 a seventeen-year-old student at the
University of Glasgow read with enthusiasm the new edition
of Lyrical Ballads and then sat down and wrote Wordsworth
a long letter. 'To you, sir, 5 he told the poet, 'mankind are in-
debted for a species of poetry which will continue to afford
pleasure while respect is paid to virtuous feelings, and while
sensibility continues to pour forth tears of rapture.' The writer
of the letter was John Wilson, a tall, handsome young man from
Paisley who was entering on a phase of orgiastic cultivation of
sensibility from which he never fully recovered. The following
year he left Glasgow for Oxford, where he divided his time
between the writing of sentimental verses, fierce but brief bouts
of reading, and the more robust activities of wrestling and cock-
fighting. For Wilson was a man of great physical strength and
immense energy, a tremendous walker and a keen fighter, and
he strode about Oxford like a giant.

This combination of gush and energy is the clue to his character
and career. The moral earnestness of the early Romantic Move-
ment worked on his native tendency to emotional self-indulgence
to develop a taste for lachrymose sentimentalities of the most
embarrassing kind; but at the same time his enormous vitality,
his relish of sensation and of physical exertion, gave him a gusto
that often enabled him to carry off his emotional debauches with
dash and even splendour. In another age he might have written
Rabelaisian stories or been a revivalist or run a one-man radio
show. As it was, he became a journalist and a professor of moral
philosophy. The journalist was Christopher North, the fluent,
lively, unpredictable, reckless, self-contradictory, flamboyant,
mischievous and wholly preposterous contributor to Blackwood's
Magazine i the professor held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at
1 A talk broadcast in the Third Programme on 8th August 1954.
122

CHRISTOPHER NORTH 123

Edinburgh from 1820 until 1851, an absolute impostor, dependent
for his lectures on material supplied to him regularly by a friend,
a fraud, a windbag, who declaimed high sounding platitudes in
a magnificent voice to cheering students.

On leaving Oxford, Wilson decided that he wanted to be a
Lake Poet, like Wordsworth; having a respectable private for-
tune, he settled at Elleray on. Windermere, where he led a
strenuous outdoor life, climbing, riding, walking, fishing, swim-
ming and sailing, and also writing poetry which showed a certain
emotional and verbal facility and a taste for a melodramatic plot.
Wilson is now very properly forgotten as a poet, though he wrote
poetry sporadically all his life.

At Elleray Wilson got to know Wordsworth and De Quincey,
and began to fancy himself as a literary man. He married in 18 n,
and this seems to have inspired him to read for the Scottish Bar.
The next three years found him often in Edinburgh, but his
centre was still Elleray and his ambitions combined those of
country gentleman, and man of letters when in 1815 his fortune
disappeared through the dishonesty of an uncle and he was forced
to change his way of life. He moved with his family to Edinburgh
to live with his mother, with the aim of making his literary
reputation in the Athens of the North.

The Scottish Bar in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth
century was often the road to a literary life, as the careers of Sir
Walter Scott and his son-in-law J. G. Lockhart clearly show.
Wilson never practised law, but, much more important for his
career, he got to know Lockhart and the circle of lively young
advocates in which Lockhart moved. This led eventually to his
joining Lockhart in writing for Blackwood's Magazine, which was
founded as a Tory rival to Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review in 1817 by
William Blackwood, a shrewd, energetic and ambitious pub-
lisher with a flair for publicity and a total lack of scruple. Wilson's
vigour and his ability to write about anything in a tone of
exalted conviction made him just the man for the new magazine.
Blackwood } s made Wilson and Wilson made Blackwood* s. Or
perhaps it would be truer to say that Blackwood's made Christo-

124 LITERARY ESSAYS

pher North, for that was the name by which he became familiar
to the readers of 'Maga*, as everyone in Edinburgh called it.

With Wilson, Lockhart and James Hogg, 'the Ettrick Shep-
herd', behind him, Blackwood was convinced that he could
challenge the Whigs with a formidable rival periodical, and he
was right. 'Maga' opened with a bang in October 1817, with
three highly controversial articles, all of course anonymous. The
first was a violent and unscrupulous attack on Coleridge, in the
guise of a review of Biographia Liter aria\ the second (first of the
notorious series on 'The Cockney School of Poetry') blasted the
morals of Leigh Hunt; and the third, which excited the good
citizens of Edinburgh to frenzy, was a mock biblical story entitled
'The Chaldee Manuscript', purporting to be a translation of a
recently recovered ancient manuscript but in fact telling with
thin disguise the story of the conflict between Whig and Tory
literary characters in Edinburgh with a juicy revelling in per-
sonalities. In the words of Professor Ferrier, Wilson's son-in-law,
who later edited his father-in-law's works: 'The Chaldee Manu-
script was the first trumpet-note which dissolved the trance of
Edinburgh, and broke the spell of Whig domination. ... It fell
on Edinburgh like a thunderbolt. . . . The satellites of the [Whig]
party were scandalized. They protested lustily against the out-
rageous personalities and profanities of the Chaldee. . . . Friends
and foes were alike confounded: the Tories were perplexed; the
Whigs were furious.'

'The Chaldee Manuscript' was a joint composition by Wilson,
Lockhart and Hogg. Hogg's was the original idea, but Wilson
and Lockhart did most of the writing, sitting up to do it one night
until eight the next morning, with a bowl of punch, and Black-
wood beside them egging them on. The story begins with an
account of Edinburgh and of Blackwood and goes on to tell of
the founding of 'Maga* :

And I saw in my dream, and behold one like the messenger of a King came
toward me from the east, and he took me up and carried me into the midst of
the great city that looketh toward the north and toward the east, and ruleth
over every people, and kindred, and tongue, that handle the pen of the writer.

CHRISTOPHER NORTH 125

And he said unto me, Take heed what thou seest, for great things shall come
of it; the moving of a straw shall be as the whirlwind, and the shaking of a
reed as the great tempest.

And I looked, and behold a man clothed in plain apparel stood in the door
of his house: and I saw his name, and the number of his name; and his name
was as it had been the colour of ebony, and his number was the number of a
maiden, when the days of the years of her virginity have expired.

The ebony name is of course Blackwood, and the number
refers to his shop at 17 Princes Street.

Quite apart from the personalities involved, the element of
biblical parody in the story gave strong offence to the orthodox.
Scott disapproved, as he continued to disapprove of 'MagaY
personal violence. 'I trust you have had enough of certain pranks
with your friend Ebony/ he said to Wilson and Lockhart at
Abbotsford the following autumn. But they hadn't: there was
much more scandal to come. Blackwood' s, in fact, soon established
a reputation for outrageous anonymous personal attacks on all
sorts of people, and Wilson was responsible for some of the most
violent.

Whether the attack on Coleridge was by Wilson is not certain.
His friendship for Coleridge need not have stopped him, for he
regarded these attacks as enormous jokes which could be per-
petrated on friend and foe alike. But they were always anonymous
and though he wrote them with immense gusto he would sweat
with fear and anguish if it looked as though his authorship was
going to be revealed. In 1825, in the character of Christopher
North, he wrote that * Wordsworth often writes like an idiot. . . .
He is, in all things, the reverse of Milton, a good man, and a bad
poet , . . Not one single character has he created not one
incident not one tragical catastrophe. He has thrown light on
no man's estate here below; and Crabbe, with all his defects,
stands immeasurably above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor.
... I confess that the "Excursion" is the worst poem, of any
character, in the English language.' This was written just after
Wilson had returned from being entertained by Wordsworth at
Rydal Mount, where he had protested his friendship and admira-

126 LITERARY ESSAYS

tion for the poet. In the same essay he attacked Scott, who had
always "befriended him, as 'a tame and feeble writer'. Then, when
a threat of litigation by an Irishman named Martin, whom he had
fiercely attacked in the same piece, made it look as though Black-
wood might be forced to reveal that Wilson was the author,
Wilson took to his bed in despair and wrote to Blackwood that,
on learning of the matter, 1 was seized with a trembling and
shivering fit, and was deadly sick for some hours. ... To own
that article is for a thousand reasons impossible. It would involve
me in lies abhorrent to my nature. I would rather die this evening.'
Others on 'Maga' were motivated by political bias, but Wilson
was an utterly irresponsible critic, liable to be carried away by his
own verve and gusto and precipitated into saying the most
outrageous things. Yet by the same token his critical essays for
*Maga' had a splendid energy, especially after he had assumed the
character of Christopher North. That pseudonym was not at
first reserved for any individual contributor, and was liable to be
used by any of the regulars, but by degrees it became established
as Wilson's property, and it was certainly his invention. To write
as Christopher North seemed to precipitate the extrovert side of
his nature and to eliminate, at least for long periods, the moralizing
sentimentalist. This is particularly true of the series called Nodes
Ambrosianae, which again were not at first all written by Wilson
but which eventually became his sole property. These are dia-
logues, himself as Christopher North and James Hogg as the
Ettrick Shepherd being the most regular participants. The Ettrick
Shepherd represents a happy idealization of Hogg, who is pre-
sented in the Nodes as a true pastoral poet, simple, active, generous
and master of a fine Scots prose. The Nodes might be anecdotal,
jocular, convivial, critical, or any or all of these together. Inci-
dental songs and poems might be included, sometimes a genuine
poem of Hogg's. Here is an example of the dialogue. The charac-
ters are North, the Ettrick Shepherd and a friend called Tickler.
As always, the Shepherd gets the best speeches:

North: I wish you would review these four volumes, James, for next
Number.

CHRISTOPHER NORTH 127

Shepherd: Tuts what's the use o' reviewin? Naething like a skreed o*
extracts into a magazeen taken in the kintra. When I fa' on, tooth and nail, on
an article about some new wark, oh, Mr North, but I'm wud when I see the
cretur that undertaken to review' t, setting himsel wi' clenched teeth to compose
a philosophic creecticism, about the genius of an owther that every man kens
as weel as his ain face in the glass and then comparing him wi' this, and
contrastin him wi' that and informin you which o J his warks are best, and
which warst, and which middlin balancin a genius against himsel, and settin
his verra merits against his character and achievements instead o* telling you
at aince what the plot is about, and how it begins, and gangs on, and is wunded
up; in short, pithy hints o' the characters that feegur throughout the story, and
a maisterly abridgement o* facts and incidents, wi' noo and then an elucidatory
observation, and a glowing panegyric; but, aboon a' things else, lang, lang,
lang extracts, judiciously seleckit, and lettin you ken at ance if the owther has
equalled or excelled himsel, or if he has struck out a new path, or followed the
auld ane into some unsuspeckit scenery o' bonny underwood, or lofty standards
or whether but I'm out of breath, and maun hae a drink. Thank you, Mr
North that's the best bowl you've made yet.

Tickler: I never had any professed feeling of the super- or prefer- natural in a
printed book. Very early in life I discovered that a ghost, who had kept me
in a cold sweat during a whole winter's midnight, was a tailor who haunted
the house, partly through love, and partly through hunger, being enamoured
of my nurse, and of the fat of ham which she gave him with mustard, between
two thick shaves of a quartern loaf, and afterwards a bottle of small-beer to
wash it down, before she yielded him the parting kiss. After that I slept
soundly, and had a contempt for ghosts, which I retain to this day.

Shepherd: Weel, it's verra different wi' me. I should be feared yet even for
the ninth pairt o' a ghost, and I fancy a tailor has nae mair ; but I'm no muckle
afieckit by reading about them an oral tradition out o' the mouth o' an auld
grey-headed man or woman is far best, for then you canna dout the truth o"
the tale, unless ye dout a' history thegither, and then, to be sure, you'll end in
universal skepticism.

North: Don't you admire the romances of the Enchantress of Udolpho?

Shepherd: I hae nae doubt, sir, that had I read Udolpho and her ither romances
in my boyish days, that my hair would hae stood on end like that o' ither folk,
for, by nature and education baith, ye ken, I'm just excessive superstitious. But
afore her volumes fell into may haunds, my soul had been frichtened by a*
kinds of traditionary terrors, and mony hunder times hae I maist swarfed wi'
fear in lonesome spats in muirs and woods, at midnicht, when no a leevin thing
was movin but mysel and the great moon. Indeed, I canna say that I ever fan*
mysel alane in the hush o* darkened nature, without a beatin at my heart; for
a sort o' spiritual presence aye hovered about me a presence o' something like

128 LITERARY ESSAYS

and unlike my ain being at times felt to be solemn and nae mair at times sae
awfii' that I wushed mysel nearer ingle-licht and ance or twice in my life-
time, sae terrible that I could have prayed to sink down into the moss, sae that
I micht be saved frae the quaking o' that ghostly wilderness o' a world that
wasna for flesh and bluid!

North: Look James look what a sky!

Shepherd: There'll be thunder the morn

The greatest joke in Wilson's life was his appointment to the
Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1820. It was an
unashamedly political appointment. By far and away the best
available candidate for the position was Sir William Hamilton,
but Hamilton was a Whig, and the Town Council, which made
the appointment, had a large Tory majority. The Whigs did not
give up without a fight. 'The Chaldee Manuscript' and other
indiscretions of Blackwood* s were cast up against him and his
moral character impugned, much to Wilson's anguish, for, fierce
though his own critical attacks could be, he could not bear the
slightest touch of adverse criticism himself. Scott and other
influential Tories bestirred themselves on his behalf. In the end,
Wilson won easily, by twenty-one votes to nine. Christopher
North became Professor Wilson, or, rather, the split in Wilson's
personality became permanent, and Christopher North and John
Wilson went different ways. The contributions to 'Maga' con-
tinued, and Christopher North's journalistic career went on its
spirited way undeterred by the moral obligations of the professor.

When Wilson learned that he had got the Chair, jubilation
soon gave way to panic. He had now to give regular lectures on
moral philosophy, and what did he know of moral philosophy?
He sat down and wrote an impassioned plea to his old college
friend Alexander Blair, a critic and philosopher who kter became
Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at University College,
London, but who was now working at his father's soap factory
near Birmingham. After telling Blair of his appointment, and
describing the anguish he had suffered during the campaign of
defamation against him, he went on: 'God only knows what is
to be the ultimate issue. One thing is certain, that if I can get

CHRISTOPHER NORTH T2p

through the first course of Lectures with reputation, my future life
may glide on usefully and respectably. I therefore, my best friend,
conjure you by all that is holy beneath the heavens to listen, now,
to my words and, if you can do what I now implore, you will
confer upon me the greatest blessing one human being ever con-
ferred upon another, and, ultimately, be no sufferer in anything
yourself/

Wilson went on to implore Blair to come to Edinburgh for
three months and help him prepare his lectures. When Blair
delayed, the appeals became more and more frenzied. 'Till I hear
that you are coming, I cannot rest nor begin to do anything.
Though when I hear a detailed account from you of the first part
of the course, and of what things in it you wish me to try I will
make the attempt before you come. Whatever subjects you
propose to me, let them be tolerably easy. ... I am terrified to
lie down each night and know that another day has gone by
uselessly/

Blair could not come to stay with Wilson in Edinburgh, but he
helped his friend by writing a series of long impersonal letters
which contained the substance of a course in moral philosophy.
This set the pattern that was to continue for years. Wilson de-
pended absolutely on Blair's letters, and could not lecture at all
without them. Sometimes the expected letter did not arrive until
the morning of the lecture, and he read it on his way to the
university. Wilson's appeals to Blair make the most extraordinary
reading. When a student asks a question or proposes an objection,
Wilson has him put it in writing and forwards it to Blair for his
answer. Here is a typical extract from a letter to Blair: 1 enclose
a letter from one of my students. If the objections in it appear
good and worthy of answer I wish you to state them as general
objections to our Theory, and to refute them.' Or this: 'Could
you send me a good letter-full on the effects of passion on asso-
ciation? Any thing you chuse bold and eloquent.'

On 24th March 1826 he appealed for a suitable concluding
lecture: 'Last day it would greatly injure me not to have a good
lecture. . . . The subject 1 propose is "General Education". . . .

I3O LITERARY ESSAYS

It is for the I2th of April. Think for a day or two before you
begin treat the subject according to your own views send it
off to me in letters, writing off-hand and vigorously, but not
disturbing me for God's sake/

What sort of professor did this second-hand philosopher make?
He was a roaring success from first to last. His impressive bearing,
his tremendous voice, his gift for impromptu rhetoric of the most
luscious kind, enabled him to take off from Blair's material and
soar into vague, impassioned eloquence. Few remembered what
he said, but all agreed that he was wonderful. Trembling with
anxiety and apprehension a few moments before, he would brace
himself, stride into the lecture hall, prop a number of Blair's
letters up in front of him the students thought he was impro-
vising from random notes jotted on the backs of old envelopes
and thunder away. David Masson, who later became Professor
of English at Edinburgh, attended Wilson's lectures as a young
man, and gave this account of them:

As far as ever I could ascertain, it was nothing that could in any conventional
sense be called a systematic course of Moral Philosophy that Wilson adminis-
tered to his students, but a rich poetico-philosophic medley in all the styles of
Christopher North, with the speculative made to predominate as much as
possible. His way was to come in from his ante-room with a large bundle of
ragged papers of all sorts and sizes . . . and, throwing these down on the desk
before him, either to begin reading from them, or sometimes, having apparendy
failed to find what he wanted uppermost, and having also felt in vain in his
waistcoat pockets for something likely to answer the purpose, to gaze wildly
for a moment or two at a side-window, and then, having caught some thread
or hint from the Tron Church steeple, to begin evolving what seemed an
extempore discourse.

The first time that I heard him, the effect of these preliminaries, and of his
generally wild and yellow-haired appearance, so much stranger than anything
I had been prepared for, almost overcame my gravity, and I had to conceal my
face for some time behind a hat to recover sufficient composure to look at him
steadily. The voice and mode of delivery were also singular. It was not so
much reading or speaking as a kind of continuous musical chaunt, beginning
in a low hollow tone, and swelling out wonderfully in passages of eloquence,
but still always with a certain sepulchral quality in it a moaning sough as of
a wind from the timbs, partly blowing along and partly muffling the purely
intellectual meaning. From my recollections of him, ... I should say that the

CHRISTOPHER NORTH 131

chief peculiarities of his elocution, in addition to this main one, were, in the
first place, a predominance of u among his vowel-sounds, or a tendency of
most of his other vowels, and especially the 0, to pass more or less into one of
the sounds of ; and, in the second place, the breaking up of his sentences in the
act of uttering them by short pants or breathings, like ugh! interjected at
intervals. ... In speaking in one of his lectures of the endurance of remorse,
and in illustrating this by the fancy of the state of mind of a criminal between
his condemnation and his execution, he wound up, I remember distinctly,
with a phrase uttered, as regards the longer interjected breathings, exactly thus :
'Ay! and there may be a throb of remorse (ugh!) even at that last moment
when the head tumbles into the basket of the executioner (ngh!)\ the last
ugh! being much the most emphatic.

Habitually eloquent, after a manner which these and other peculiarities
rendered unlike the eloquence of any one else, Wilson was sometimes so deeply
and suddenly moved by the feeling of what he was saying or describing that he
rose to unusual heights of impassioned and poetical oratory. In particular,
there were certain lectures, the time of the coming round of which was always
duly known, when his class-room was crowded by professors and strangers in
addition to his students, in expectation of one of his great outbursts. . . .

But though his students cheered him, we do not remember
John Wilson as a moral philosopher today. Nor do any of us
look into the twelve-volume collected edition of his works as
critic, essayist, short-story writer and poet His ultra-sentimental
tales of Scottish village life anticipate the worst of the Kailyard
school; his poetry is facile and derivative; his criticism is unprin-
cipled and erratic. But at his best Christopher North had the kind
of brilliance that comes from sheer energy. The Nodes Ambrosia-
nae, self-consciously picturesque, exaggerated, preposterous, as
they often are, nevertheless are above all living: they project
the man's own image of himself with brilliant clarity, as well as
with a boisterous kind of wit that is like nothing else in English
or Scottish literature. He played up to his own notion of
romanticism, and produced a unique brand of it.

THE WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 1

WLIVE IN AN AGE of handbooks and digests, and textbooks
f literary history, as of almost everything else, have for
u ome time been commonplaces of the schoolroom. Yet
Scottish literature has, even in Scotland, escaped this treatment.
Neither T. F. Henderson's informative and methodical Scottish
Vernacular Literature, A History, published at the end of the last
century, nor J. H. Millar's discursive and opinionated Literary
History of Scotland, which appeared at the beginning of this one,
nor Agnes Mure Mackenzie's breathless and idiosyncratic His-
torical Survey of Scottish Literature to 1714, now some twenty years
old, nor John Speirs' scrappy and intermittendy perceptive little
book on The Scots Literary Tradition which came out in 1940, has
either established itself as a textbook or succeeded in imposing an
accepted pattern on the Scottish literary scene. In the minds of
most people who think at all about Scottish literature, there lies
a picture in four sections: the first shows the so-called Scottish
Chaucerians, mediaeval, vigorous, and at once Scottish and
European; the second is of the eighteenth-century revival, with
only the figures of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns discernible,
and the first two not very clearly; the third presents Whistle Binkie
and the Kailyard and is generally agreed to be something that one
shakes one's head over; and the fourth shows Hugh MacDiarmid,
perhaps Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sydney Goodsir Smith, and the
whole controversy about the Scottish Renaissance and Lallans.
A few may discern the figure of George Douglas Brown, flourish-
ing his House with the Green Shutters, between the Kailyard and
the Renaissance. The ballads are there somewhere, too, but
nobody knows precisely where. Scott, Gait and the nineteenth
century Scottish novel do not seem to be part of many people's

1 Delivered before the Edinburgh Branch of the Saltire Society on nth
December 1954.

132

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 133

picture of Scottish literary history these days. And as for what
happened between the Middle Scots poets and Allan Ramsay
well, there was the Reformation, and civil war, and between
them Scottish literature somehow got lost until the stability of
the eighteenth century made its rediscovery possible.

I do not think that this is an unfair picture of how even informed
people think of Scottish literary history. Nor is this view alto-
gether absurd; it is in many respects just, although, I would
suggest, woefully inadequate and in parts somewhat distorted.
That we need a new perspective on the history of Scottish litera-
ture, a patterning of its material at once richer and subder, is surely
beyond dispute. The question to which I wish to address myself
is this: How are we to look at Scottish literature in order to dis-
cover that pattern, and what sort of pattern will it turn out to be?
Which is tantamount to asking: How should Scottish literary
history now be written?

I am not rash enough, or arrogant enough, to try to give a
complete answer to this question. What I want to do rather is to
present some of the material for an answer and show some of the
preliminary questions that must be faced before that answer can
be given. The first of such preliminary questions is the simple and
fundamental one : What is literary history? History, we all know,
is more than a list of names, events and dates; and literary history
is more than a chronological list of authors with descriptions and
summaries of their works. The literary historian must, of course,
have the texts of previous literature available to him : literary history
cannot be written before there are libraries and catalogues. But
if his own work is to be more than a chronological catalogue he
must have some ideas of causation and continuity, some sense of
the cultural context, some insight into the way in which the arts
are related to the civilization of which they are a part. His
apparatus must be flexible: rigid theories of psychological or
sociological causation only result in the torturing of the material
until it fits the Procrustean bed of pre-conceived notions of cause
and effect. On the other hand, it must not be so flexible as to
provide a totally different kind of explanation for every new

134 LITERARY ESSAYS

phenomenon, explaining one writer by the tradition within which
he worked, another by personal frustrations, a third by the region
in which he was born and a fourth by the Zeitgeist. The true
historian the historian, that is, who wishes to provide new
illumination and understanding by presenting his material in a
historical way must be able to manipulate a great number of
different factors with tact and wisdom. There is the life of art
itself, with its own traditions and its own laws of development;
there are social, economic, political, religious, and psychological
factors; there are accidents of time and place, and actions and
reactions of every kind which help to condition the texture both
of a culture in general and of the work of any given writer.

The literary historian must have a rich enough dialectic if I
may use that ugly term to enable him to manipulate these various
causal factors with reference to each movement and to each
author that he takes up, emphasizing now one kind of cause, now
another, but always remembering the complexity of causation
which lies behind even the simplest cultural phenomenon. He
should not, for example, employ a rigid opposition between a
pair of mutually exclusive concepts such as faith and reason, or
romantic and classical, explaining literary movements in terms
of simple alternation between one and the other, for that is to do
violence to the richness and variety of the life of the imagination
out of which literature arises. We shall never understand, for
example, the complex figure of Allan Ramsay, who is at the
same time an Augustan character trying to introduce the idiom
of London's Age of Elegance into Edinburgh and the exponent
and practitioner of a colloquial Scots vernacular, if we try to fit
him into a naive classic-romantic antithesis. Nor can we pro-
perly see or explain Burns if we see him through the spectacles of
the English literary historiographers as a pre-Romantic looking
forward to Wordsworth and the English Romantic Movement.
And the fatuousness of seeing Burns as a pre-Romantic and Scott
as a Romantic thus making 'Holy Willie's Prayer' a precursor
of Rob Roy is sufficiently evident. In the context of European
literature Scott has appeared to some as the founder of a new

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 135

romantic interest in the feudal glories of the mediaeval past; but
if we accept this, what becomes of The Heart of Midlothian, The
Antiquary, Old Mortality and Redgauntlet, among Scott's greatest
and most characteristic novels, which record the transition from
the heroic to the modern world and explore the relation between
heroism and prudence, with the triumph always accorded in the
end to the latter? It is not Rob Roy but Bailie Nicol Jarvie, not
the knight at arms but the antiquary who researches into his
exploits, not Balfour of Burley but the representative of mo-
deration and compromise, not the spectacular prison-breaker but
the humble Jeanie Deans, who evoke Scott's deepest sympathetic
understanding; and Redgauntlet's hysterical and anachronistic
knight-errantry is dismissed with a smile and a shake of the head.
We must beware of importing into Scottish literary history the
categories of the English literary historiographer.

The Scottish literary historian can, however, learn a great deal
from his English colleague, if he knows when to see him as an
example and when as a warning. The historical patterning of
English literature began in the eighteenth century, and it is in-
structive to see what preparation was necessary before it was able
to emerge. Bibliographical and biographical material came first.
John Leland and John Bale in the sixteenth century first collected
the names, and the tides of the works of all the English-born
writers they could discover. In the seventeenth century a critical
tradition began to emerge, enabling writers to discriminate be-
tween the good and the less good. In the same century began the
tradition of writing 'Lives of the Poets' that culminated a century
later with Dr Johnson. Libraries, too, were being built up and
organized, so that older texts were available. The Bodleian was
founded about 1600 and its first catalogue published in 1605. The
manuscript riches of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges were
catalogued by Edward Bernard in 1697. The great collection
founded by Sir Robert Cotton (now part of the British Museum
collection) remained in private hands throughout the seventeenth
century but passed to the nation in 1700. The catalogue of the
Harleian Collection was published by order of the Trustees of the

136 LITERARY ESSAYS

British Museum in 1759. Three years later we learn that Thomas
Warton was thinking 'in earnest' about his history of English
poetry, whose first volume appeared in 1774. By this time also
theories about the nature of primitive poetry and the relation
between poetry and civilization had been put forward by in-
numerable critics and philosophers. There was also a sufficient
body of linguistic knowledge available, largely as a result of the
Herculean labour of the great George Hickes at the end of the
seventeenth century.

Libraries, catalogues, bibliographies, biographies, notions of
causation and development, linguistic knowledge these are some
of the prerequisites for literary history, and their necessarily slow
development explains why literary history is such a late kind of
writing to appear in any culture. I have mentioned library
catalogues more than once, and though this may seem a very
minor tool for the literary historian, it is crucial nevertheless.
Uncatalogued libraries, where the reader stumbles on older works
without knowing what he is to expect in advance, produce anti-
quaries, not historians. It is no accident that it was only after the
Harleian Collection, so rich in earlier English literature, had been
catalogued, that Thomas Warton decided to write the first His-
tory of English Poetry. Scotland has tended to run to antiquaries
rather than historians partly at least because so much material of
prime importance for the writing of Scottish cultural history has
lain so long uncatalogued in the basements and attics of both
libraries and private houses. The history of the Scottish song-lyric
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, a matter
of the first importance for our understanding of what really
happened to Scottish poetry in the so-called 'gap* between the
end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century has remained
so long unwritten because there were no public indications of
where the relevant material might be found. The material exists;
it is being patiently ferreted out by individual researchers; but
history has been held up, and in some cases distorted, for lack of
proper signposts to the material.

We in Scotland have the libraries, though they are not cata-

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 137

logued as well as they might be ; we have the linguistic and textual
scholarship; we have now, I think, the interest and perhaps even
the zeal. Have we the critical tradition which is necessary to
define the scope and perspective of a literary history? In spite of
the many individual essays devoted to a revaluation of the Scottish
literary tradition that have appeared during the last twenty years
or so, I am not sure that we can say that we have the critical
tradition. The spate of creative activity associated with the Scot-
tish Renaissance has, it is true, been moved in some degree by a
replacement of Burns by Dunbar as the Scottish poet who ought
to be looked back to, as well as by a fierce repudiation of the
Kailyard tradition, but this represents an emotional need rather
than a clear critical perception. I do not think that we have had
in Scotland a really lively critical tradition since the rhetorical
school of Hugh Blair and Lord Kames in the eighteenth century.
Careful critical studies of individual authors are now the great
necessity. Perhaps I may be allowed to say that my own studies
of Robert Burns and of Robert Louis Stevenson were intended
as humble contributions to that kind of critical revaluation on
which the new historian of Scottish literature must depend. I
should like to see full-dress critical studies of all the major and
many of the minor Scottish poets. We talk so much of Dunbar
and his importance for the history of Scottish poetry. Where is
the great new critical book on Dunbar, or on any of the Middle
Scots poets? We are producing editions, yes, and biographies,
but the full-dress book-length critical revaluations have still to
come. And the significant new history of Scottish literature waits
for them.

As for general theories of causation and continuity: there has
been a considerable amount of controversy on such matters in
Scotland during the last two decades, but far too much of it has
been facile sloganizing. Dr Agnes Mure Mackenzie's lively re-
writing of Scottish political history has many virtues, thoughnotall
will agree with her point of view, but her work is largely written
in what I must pedantically call a two-term dialectic Scotland
versus England, the Presbyterian versus the Episcopalian, and so

138 LITERARY ESSAYS

on which, it seems to me, is neither rich nor flexible enough to
enable a full and fair picture to be presented. We still need a great
deal more exploration of the nature and the various metamor-
phoses of Scottish culture, and its relation not only to European
culture and to English culture but to what might be called its own
anti-self.

I said earlier that the English literary historiographers could
present us with warnings as well as with examples. The chief of
those warnings is provided by their tendency to slip into a simple-
minded teleological kind of interpretation, what I call the hills-
and-valleys method of writing literary history. We know that
Shakespeare was the greatest Elizabethan dramatist, so we look
for anticipations of his qualities in earlier dramatists and call them
pre-Shakespearean. We know that Chaucer was the greatest
mediaeval English poet, so we set him likewise on a peak and
visualize earlier poets struggling up to the Chaucerian heights and
later poets Lydgate, Occleve, and so on slipping down on the
other side into the bog of late mediaeval dullness. Similarly, early
Tudor lyrics are presented as movements towards the Elizabethan
lyrical efflorescence, as though Wyatt and Surrey said to each
other: 'The Golden Age of the Elizabethan lyric will be along
soon; we'd better start practising for it/ There is, of course, some
truth in this view (though it is a fact that the Tudor lyric is most
successful when it is most mediaeval), but when such a method
is used to discuss literary movements it can become intolerable.
Certain early nineteenth century poets show a new kind of
interest in Nature, a preference for introspective, personal, poetry,
a love of the Middle Ages, and a kind of poetic idiom which
differs sharply from that of Thomson and Gray. Very well then:
we call these qualities not all found in the same poets the
Romantic Movement and look for traces of them in earlier
writers. When we find them, we call the writers who display
them pre-Romantic. So we have Thomson in diction poles
apart from Wordsworth showing an interest in Nature, and he
is promptly labelled pre-Romantic because of it. 'Wordsworth
will be along in a couple of generations; I'd better get this Nature

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 139

thing prepared for', he mutters to himself as he writes 'The Sea-
sons*. So Gray, because he could be wild and extravagant, is for
very different reasons called a pre-Romantic. The fact that
Johnson and Wordsworth both disliked Gray for the same reasons
does not seem to have caused the literary historians to hesitate in
applying this classification. And if, as so many of these historians
did, you consider the Romantic Movement a Good Thing, a
blessed return to freedom and spontaneity after neo-classic rigidity
the one far-off divine event towards which all eighteenth century
poetry steadily moves, you go down the waiting list of eighteenth
century poets and give them marks according as they anticipate
this glorious revolution. That this is a method calculated to
distort beyond all recognition the true nature and achievement of
the eighteenth century poets and for that matter of the nine-
teenth century poets too hardly needs demonstration. We see
the great Elizabethans waving across the arid gulf of the later
seventeenth and the eighteenth century to the Romantics on
their peak. And then a revolution in taste occurs. The Romantics
are decried, the metaphysicals elevated as the height of English
poetry; Pope is reinstated, Tennyson replaced by Hopkins; Mr
Cleanth Brooks writes his Modern Poetry and the Tradition and
lo ! every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill laid
low; the valleys become hills and the hills valleys; the garment of
the earlier literary historians is simply turned inside out.

Of course there are peaks in any literature; there are dull
periods and new flowerings; but to see any period simply in the
light of its falling away from an earlier kind of excellence or its
anticipation of a future one is not to see it in itself as it really is.
We must never allow the historical pattern to distort our vision
of the individual literary figure. So, in Scottish literature, we
must not undervalue Stevenson because he comes between Whistle
Binkie and the final extremes of the Kailyard. Our task is, on the
contrary, to understand how the virtues and the limitations of
Stevenson's art are related to the texture of the Scottish culture of
his day. Nor, to take another example, must we despise The Gude
and Godlie Ballatis which possess many real beauties, as well as

I4O LITERARY ESSAYS

some absurdities because they represent a Puritan impulse which
in other respects has done some harm to Scottish culture. Do not
misunderstand me : I am not pleading for critical relativism. I am
not saying that everything must be praised as good of its kind.
Not at all : the ideal literary historian must never confuse explana-
tion with evaluation and allow himself to praise something as
literature merely because it is interesting as a symptom or an
effect. What I do insist on is that he should not allow his historical
pattern to distort his view of the individual work. And that
meaiis that the pattern should be rich and flexible enough to be
really helpful, to illuminate rather than to smother. Simplifi-
cation is of course inevitable in any kind of historical writing;
one simplifies in order to see the total picture more clearly. Naive
over-simplification, on the other hand, only obscures the total
picture.

So much for the pitfalls. Let me now turn to my original
question: How should we look at Scottish literature in order to
discover its historical pattern? There is, of course, no simple or
single answer, certainly none that I should be prepared to give in
a preliminary discussion of this kind. All I wish to do here is to
present some considerations which are important to anyone con-
cerned with this question. We need not expend overmuch in-
genuity in distinguishing the origins of Scottish literature from
other elements in Northumbrian writing : all nations have a be-
ginning somewhere and at some time, and there is nothing
unusual or upsetting to national pride about the fact that the Scots
literary language was, at cue stage of its development, identical
with the Anglian speech of northern England or that Northumbria
as a linguistic region straddled what were to become the national
boundaries of England and Scotland. As Dr Agnes Mure Mac-
kenzie has pointed out, Scotland has a long past but she is a new
nation. The Scottish literary language developed as the nation
developed, and to deny Scots its independent status as a national
tongue on the grounds that at an early stage in its career it was
part of a wider linguistic unity makes as much sense as to deny
English its status as an independent language on the grounds that

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 14!

the Saxons brought their speech with them from the district later
called Schleswig Holstein. If Scots, in the modern sense of the
term, is the Scottish language which developed from the northern
form of Anglian speech, the important question for the Scottish
literary historian is not so much the implications of its origin it
is what it developed into, not what it arose from, that concerns
him as its relation to the two other literary languages of Scotland,
Gaelic and Latin.

The Latin question is common to all European literatures
in the Middle Ages, and it is a nice point whether historical
treatment of a national literature should take equal account of the
important material produced in Latin, or whether the national
tradition should be defined strictly in terms of language. Is the
history of English literature the history of literature written in
English, or the history of all literature produced in England which,
in any way at all, reflects English thought or sensibility? Most
literary historians have taken it to be the former, and have omitted
works written in Latin as they have omitted those in Anglo-
Norman. One can argue for either procedure. I myself would be
inclined to say that, while the historian of English literature should
not give equal attention to Latin literature produced in England,
he should take sufficient note of it to make clear that the country
was employing an international literary medium at the same time
as it was employing a national one, and some discussion of the
relation between national and international elements in a literary
culture would follow from this. In Scotland, always in many
senses a more European country than England, the Latin literature
is of considerable importance in defining the relation of Scottish
to European culture, and should be given at least some considera-
tion from that point of view: George Buchanan, for example,
represented Scotland in Europe in a very special way.

The Scottish Gaelic tradition presents, in many ways, more
formidable claims. It links Scottish culture, not with the Latin
culture of mediaeval Europe, but with the Celtic culture of
Ireland, always somewhat apart from what might be called the
Mediterranean centre of mediaeval European influence. The

142 LITERARY ESSAYS

Mediterranean centre produced the great Rose tradition which is
so important in European poetry; the garden of the love alle-
gories is the standard setting for a whole literary genre. Dunbar is
in touch with this tradition when he writes, at the beginning of
'The Golden Targe':

Ryght as the stern of day begouth to schyne,
Quhen gone to bed war Vesper and Lucyne,

I raise and by a rosere did me rest;
Up sprang the goldyn candill matutyne,
With clere depurit bemes cristallyne,

Glading the mery foulis in thair nest;

Or Phebus was in purpur cape revest
Up raise the lark, the hevyns menstrale fyne

In May, in till a morrow myrthfullest.

We know this rose garden and this May morning. It comes from
the secular Mediterranean centre of mediaeval European poetry,
just as the powerful poem 'Done is a battell on the dragon black'
or 'Ane ballat of our Lady' represents the religious Latin tradition,
deriving from the mediaeval Latin hymn. But when Henryson,
towards the beginning of 'The Testament of Cresseid', writes:

I mend the fyre and beikit me about,
Then tuik ane drink my spreitis to comfort,
And armit me weill fra the cauld thairout:
To cut the winter nicht and mak it schort,
I tuik ane Quair, . . .

or Dunbar writes his 'Tydings fra the Session', each has his eye
on the local Scottish scene and derives his imagery and his attitude
from a particular Scottish situation. That is one polarity between
the European (either secular or religious or both) and the purely
Scottish. It is not difficult for the literary historian to come to
terms with that. But turn from these poems to, say, this song by
Mary MacLeod:

Ged a theid mi do m leabaidh
Chan e cadal as miannach learn
Aig ro mheud na tuik
Is mo mhuileann gun iarann air; . . .

Though I go to my bed
It is not sleep that I wish,
For the flood is so great
And my mill is unshod. . .

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 143

This is the opening of a poem addressed to Iain MacLeod on his
presenting the poetess with a snuff-mull. In subject, in tone, in
literary convention, it is worlds away from the Mediterranean
centre, and in its mixture of formality and spontaneity equally
far from the 'realistic' elements in Dunbar and Henryson. The
difference is not to be explained by the fact that Mary MacLeod
lived some two hundred years after the Middle Scots poets I have
quoted, for the poem is equally different from anything produced
in England or Lowland Scotland at this time. It represents a
different poetic tradition and a different tradition of sensibility.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Mary MacLeod's
poetry stands between the older Gaelic poetry of the formal bardic
schools and the more popular, less rhetorical verse of eighteenth
century Scottish Gaelic poets: this is a polarity within Gaelic
literature itself, and to consider it adequately would take us into
the relation between the older Scottish Gaelic literature and the
Gaelic literary language that was evolved chiefly in Munster. It
was only in die seventeenth century that a Scottish Gaelic tradi-
tion, independent of the formal, rhetorical training of the Irish
schools, began to develop, to produce in the eighteenth century,
with the poetry of Alexander Macdonald, Duncan Ban Macintyre,
Dugald Buchanan and Rob Donn Mackay, a minor Scottish
Gaelic literary Renaissance. The first printed work by a Scottish
writer written in what could be called Scottish Gaelic as distinct
from Irish Gaelic was the small collection of poems published for
Alexander Macdonald in Edinburgh in 1751 with the significant
tide Ais-eiridh na Sean Chanain Albannaich, or Revival of the Old
Scottish Tongue.

What is the historian of Scottish literature to make of all this?
How is he to handle the Gaelic tradition, how present it in relation
to the Scots tradition? Does the turning away from the Irish
bardic schools to produce a more purely Scottish poetry fit in to
any total picture of the Scottish literary tradition? Does the
outburst of Jacobite Gaelic poetry in eighteenth century Scotland
arise from the same impulse which produced so much Jacobite
Scots song and which, by providing a new folk emotion for the

144 LITERARY ESSAYS

Scottish people at a period in civilization when folk emotion was
dying out, delayed so remarkably the sophistication of Scottish
song? Scottish literary historiography must surely consider these
matters, as it must consider the odd fact that Lowland Scotsmen
fussed and flurried over Macpherson's Ossian while totally ignor-
ing the contemporary Gaelic poetry being produced on their very
doorstep. The pattern here is extraordinarily complex, and the
historian's duty is to make sense of it without naive over-simplifi-
cation. There is a chronological line, with a tradition mutating
according to its own laws; there are intersecting circles of cultural
influence, Lowland, Highland, Irish, English, European; there are
shifting relations between the writer and his audience; there are
social, political and economic developments which produce
special problems for the Scottish writer.

Coming to terms, then, with Scotland's three literary languages
presents a challenging problem of organization and interpretation
for the historian of Scottish literature. The problem is relatively
simple as far as mediaeval literature is concerned, but when
English develops as a fourth language (or rather replaces Latin as
the third) the situation becomes much more complex, not to say
confused. We all know about the political, religious and social
reasons which sent Scottish writers more and more to English as
their medium of expression, and we know something of the
divided sensibility that resulted. But the transition has never been
either fully explained or fully documented. We know that the
prestige of Elizabethan English literature, the removal of the
Scottish King to London to ascend the English throne, the natural
turning of a Protestant Scotland towards a Protestant England,
the growing English political influence, all tended to encourage
Scotsmen to write in English, and that Puritan suspicion of secular
love poetry sent much folk poetry underground, whence it
partially re-emerged in unexpected ways in the eighteenth cen-
tury. But how much really went underground? And how much
of it was really folk poetry? What was the position of Scottish
court poetry at the end of the sixteenth century, and how far are
the popular songs that later came to the surface derived from

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 145

these court poems? Has the migration of Scottish court poets,
and musicians, in 1603 really been documented and examined?
Have the enclaves of older Scots poetry and music which survived
the Reformation at Aberdeen and elsewhere been properly in-
vestigated? Most historians of Scottish literature are content to
jump across what they conceive to be the gap between the end
of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth-century revival. But it is
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that provide the clue to
what really happened to Scottish culture and to the Scottish
sense of nationality, and the literary historian must look at the
relatively scanty data provided by this period very carefully
indeed.

One of the most important phenomena demanding the in-
vestigation of the historian of Scottish literature is the mutation
of the Scots literary language into a vernacular. Montgomerie,
writing in the latter part of the sixteenth century, could produce
a stanza like this:

Like as the dumb solsequium, with care ourcome

Dois sorrow, when the sun goes out of sicht,
Hings doun his head, and droops as dead, nor will not spread
But locks his leavis through langour all the nicht,
Till foolish Phaeton rise

With whip in hand,
To purge the crystal skyis

And licht the land.
Birds in their hour waitis for that hour

And to their prince ane glaid good-morrow givis;
Fra then, that flour list not till lour,
Bot laughs on Phoebus loosing out his leavis.

This shows art, gravity and a sensibility thoroughly at home in
the convention it uses. Only some twenty years later, Sir Robert
Aytoun was writing thus:

Why did I wrong my judgement so
As to affect where I did know

There was no hold for to be taken?
That which her heart thirsts after most,
If once of it her hope can boast,

Straight by her folly is forsaken.

146 LITERARY ESSAYS

There are three obvious ways in which this stanza (which, how-
ever, it must be remembered, was meant to be sung) differs from
Montgomerie's. First, it is written in English, not in Scots;
secondly it is derivative rather than traditional; thirdly, it belongs
to an exercise, an etude, rather than to a fully realized poem. At
this stage, at least, there is a loss involved in a Scottish poet's
moving from Scots to English.

Another comparison will take us a stage further. Going back
to Alexander Scott, we find a stanza like this :

For nobillis hes not ay renown
Nor genrillis ay the gayest goun,
Thay cary victuallis to the toun

That werst dois dyne:
Sa blissely to the busk I boun,
Ane uthir eitis the berry doun

That suld be myne.

The opening of Sempiirs 'Habbie Simson' is in the same stanza
form:

Kilbarchan now may say alas!

For she hath lost both game and grace,

Both Trixie and The Maiden Trace;

But what remead?
For no man can supply his place:

Hab Simson's dead.

There is a difference in weight here; though both Scott and
Sempill use images and expressions drawn from popular speech,
Scott's language is more highly charged, it has more gravity and
greater reverberation. 'Habbie Simson' is sprightly popular verse
written for amusement by a member of the landed gentry, and
written in a language which by this time few educated people
felt to be suitable for the highest kind of art. True, it draws on a
tradition of poetry of popular revelry which earlier had produced
such poems as 'Christ's Kirk on the Green' and 'Peblis to the Play',
but it is frivolous rather than truly humorous because it does not
grow out of that tradition but uses it in what might almost be
called a patronizing way. This is not to say that the 'Epitaph on

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 147

Habbie Simson' is not an important poem; it is indeed important
historically, both for drawing attention to the possibilities of folk
humour as a way of bringing the vernacular into current poetry
and for reviving a stanza form which was to play such an impor-
tant part in eighteenth century Scottish poetry, but it lacks a
dimension. Between Sempill of Beltrees and Burns Scottish
vernacular poetry had to learn how to be the product of the whole
man, how to achieve scope and density in short, how to recover
that lost dimension. Where it did so, it was by transmuting anti-
quarian, patriotic and patronizing gestures towards the vernacular
into something deeper, something with an organic connection
with contemporary sensibility; and that transmutation was itself
made possible by re-establishing living contact with certain im-
portant currents in Scottish literature and Scottish folk poetry.

The difference between a vernacular and a language is that in
the latter case there is aliterary tradition, arising out of the different
forms of the spoken language and transcending them, which
reflects back on the spoken language and gives it a steady re-
lationship to the national culture. Once the literary tradition is
broken, once there is no literary language growing out of the
spoken language (however different from it it may be, and how-
ever many artificial elements may have been added), the spoken
language is bound to disintegrate into a series of regional dialects.
So, after the Norman Conquest of England, the central literary
position of West Saxon was lost, since French replaced Anglo-
Saxon as the literary language, and Middle English fell into a
series of regional dialects. Only after the re-establishment of
English as the literary language of England did a linguistic norm
emerge and, while differences between spoken dialects persisted,
the language was pulled together by the integrating force of a
literary tradition. Similarly, in Scotland, Middle Scots (whatever
its original relationship with Northumbrian English) had, in
virtue of its literary tradition, been a language and not a verna-
cular; Scots became a vernacular only after the literary language
of its serious writers had ceased to be Scots. How to use the
vernacular as a language in serious literature (that is, in literature

148 LITERARY ESSAYS

that was more than an antiquarian exercise, a jest, or a tour de
force) was the problem faced by Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns.
The problem was never permanently solved, for English re-
mained the main language of serious expression; it was solved
occasionally and temporarily, partly by happy accident, partly
by the intervention of genius.

'Habbie Simson' is a vernacular squib; 'Holy Willie's Prayer'
is a Scots poem, written in a literary language in which English
and Scots reinforce each other. Yet the latter is not quite the
same kind of thing that Alexander Scott or Montgomerie wrote.
Burns only re-established contact with the Scots literary tradition
by looking at it through the spectacles provided by folk song and
other kinds of popular art, and as a result the tradition as he uses
it is a composite one, in which the satiric boisterousness of Lynd-
say's Satire of the Three Estaitis, the happy artifice of Montgomerie,
the stark clarity of the ballads, the richness and warmth and
earthiness of folk song, the pious beat of Scottish psalmody,
combine to produce a precarious but while it lasted a brilliant
unity. It was Burns' predecessors who made that synthesis pos-
sible; it was his own genius that made it brilliant; it was the
cultural context of his time that made it precarious.

That cultural context requires the most careful examination.
The nature of the Scottish poetic tradition which James Watson
revived in 1706 the year before the incorporating union between
England and Scotland was finally voted with the publication of
the first volume of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots
Poems both Ancient and Modern, is of prime importance for an
understanding of what happened to Scottish poetry in the eight-
eenth century. With its mixture of poems of popular revelry,
laboured exercises in courtly English, macaronics, mock elegies,
serious sixteenth century Scots poems, trivial epigrams and epi-
taphs, poems by Drummond and Montrose, flytings, laments, and
miscellaneous patriotic pieces, it appears at first to represent the
casual putting together of whatever Watson found to his hand.
Yet (except for ballads, which it lacks, and songs, which are few,
and the perhaps surprising lack of anything by Lyndsay) the

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 149

collection represents -with a fair degree of accuracy the different
kinds of material available for the development or reconstruction
of the Scottish poetic tradition in the eighteenth century. The
tradition of the makars was represented by Montgomerie (we
must wait until Ramsay to find the so-called Scottish Chaucerians
made available) ; the courtly tradition in English by Dnimmond
and Aytoun; the older popular tradition by 'Christ's Kirk on the
Green' and the newer by 'Habbie Simson' and other pieces;
various kinds of popular and semi-popular Scottish song were
represented, some in Scots and some in English, though the col-
lection was not strong here; the characteristic Scottish humour
and Scottish violence are represented in several ways, as is the
goliardic tradition as it developed in Scotland and the tradition
of macaronic humour associated with it. What Watson printed
represented things that were still going on in Scotland, though
often not on the surface. In bringing them to the surface he
prevented them from being obscured completely by the new face
of Scottish culture and at the same time helped to divert patriotic
attention from politics to literature. It is true that that attention
was mixed up in many quarters with confused ideas about the
vernacular and primitive poetry and the natural man, and this
confusion made serious difficulties for Burns. But it also provided
an environment which encouraged the production of an enriched
vernacular poetry under certain circumstances and at certain levels,
and that was decisive for the course of eighteenth century Scottish
poetry.

Much has been written on the eighteenth century movement,
but, it seems to me, its full complexity and significance for the
literary historian has not yet been fully appreciated. Allan Ram-
say's extraordinary mixture of vanity, coyness, genteel pretension,
urban swagger, rustic colloquialism and Scottish patriotism, his
split personality and basic uncertainty of taste, reflect the con-
fusions and difficulties of the Scottish cultural scene of his day as
well as his own psychology. Robert Fergusson's independence of
the literati, resulting in part from the self-confidence that a formal
education gave him he had not the inferiority complex about

ISO LITERARY ESSAYS

his small knowledge of the classics which both Ramsay and
Burns had and the quiet assurance which he manifested in the
writing of his Scots poems, must also be considered as an illumi-
nating product of the reaction of personal circumstance with the
historical situation. That the Cape Club provided a better
atmosphere for a poet than the self-conscious young would-be
gentlemen of the Easy Club provided for Ramsay or the Tar-
bolton Bachelor's Club for Burns is an important fact for the
historian of Scottish literature. While Ramsay declared with
nervous defensiveness that he understood Horace but faintly in
the original and Burns found it expedient to present himself to
the genteel world as a remarkable example of the natural man,
Fergusson wrote as he pleased and cheerfully thumbed his nose at
Dr Johnson and his Scottish admirers. Fergusson's student days at
St. Andrews had put him in touch with the old goliardic tradition ;
his language combined elements from his parents' Aberdeenshire,
from the Fife of his university days, from the Edinburgh he was
born and worked in, and from the older literary Scots of his
reading. All this means that he was in a better position to face
the problem of writing in the vernacular, and of raising the ver-
nacular to the level of a literary language, than either Ramsay
had been or Burns was to be; but his sadly early death ruined that
prospect. If Fergusson had lived to meet Burns and discuss Scot-
tish poetry with him, the story to be told by the Scottish literary
historian today might be a very different one.

And what of the galaxy of eighteenth century Scottish philo-
sophers, historians and scientists who wrote in English? How is
the pattern of their activity to be woven together with that of the
Ramsay-Fergusson-Burns movement? We must remember that
David Hume was an ardently patriotic Scot as well as a good
European, but his Scottish loyalties led him to acclaim as magni-
ficent much worthless English poetry written by Scotsmen. This
paradox deserves more exploration and explanation than it has so
far received. Or again, what of the rhetorical critical tradition
of the eighteenth century Scottish critics? The role which Burns
played before the Edinburgh gentry (but fortunately played less

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 151

and less in his own poetry) and the critical reception of the Kil-
marnock volume in Edinburgh were alike determined by the
notions of primitive poetry which were being put forward by the
Edinburgh critics and which are related to the general excitement
about primitive poetry to be found in such various scholars and
poets as Bishop Lowth, Thomas Gray and Bishop Percy. This
concept of primitive poetry, which was taken to include every-
thing from the Old Testament to Scottish folk song and from
the supposed oral literature of the American Indians to Ossian,
provided a back door, as it were, through which Scottish ver-
nacular poetry could be smuggled into the drawing rooms of the
literati Unless we understand this, we not only misunderstand
the relation of the vernacular to the genteel tradition in late
eighteenth century Scotland, but are also liable to underrate the
dangers and the temptations which threatened Burns. The degree
to which Burns escaped those dangers and resisted those tempta-
tions is astonishing.

These considerations far from exhaust the aspects of eighteenth
century Scottish literature demanding further investigation by
the potential historian of Scottish literature. The various forms
in which a frustrated Scottish national feeling expressed itself
culturally in the eighteenth century have never been fully exa-
mined, nor has the cultural significance of what Burns called
'sentimental Jacobitism' been properly explored. The relation
between national tradition and commercial progress as reflected
in the activities of Glasgow merchant princes and Edinburgh
lawyers is relevant here, and helps to explain Scott, whose greatest
novels, as I have suggested, record with reluctant approval the
modulation of a heroic into a commercial civilization. Scott, like
Cervantes, saw that in the modern world knight-errantry is at
best a splendid folly and at worst a brutal brigandage (Rob Roy
combined both), and Redgauntlet is Scott's Don Quixote. He
sighed for the Stuarts, and worked himself to exhaustion in order
to make George IV popular in Scotland. His best novels, like his
life, record the price of progress.

The nineteenth century has its own problems. The cultural

152 LITERARY ESSAYS

significance of the Edinburgh periodicals of the earlier part of the
century; the fate of the Scottish novel; the significance of Whistle
Binkie, which is not simply a sentimentalizing of Scottish life but
the deliberate introduction of the Scot as what might be called a
music hall figure, thus pointing the way to Harry Lauder and the
twentieth-century Scotch comics (it has never been noted how
many Irish comic poems there are in Whistle Binkie the Irishman
had already become a stock figure of comedy, the fate of oppressed
groups everywhere); the enormous effects of industrialization on
urban Scottish life and imagination; the strangling of Highland
society and culture after the '45 Rebellion with all the sad results
in Highland depopulation, urban overcrowding, and the des-
truction of communal life ; the growth of the Kailyard ; the various
nineteenth century attempts at a Scottish literary renaissance; the
significance of such figures as James Hogg (whose Memoirs of a
Justified Sinner is one of the greatest pieces of imaginative prose
produced in Scotland in modern times) and Robert Louis Steven-
son; such phenomena as the popularity of Professor Wilson's
(Christopher North's) flamboyant and sentimental lectures on
moral philosophy at Edinburgh University .or the character and
pretensions of Professor John Stuart Blackie; the ideal of the lad
of pairts and the part played in the formation of taste and character
by the Scottish educational system these are only a few of the
many themes and problems which the future historian of Scottish
literature must weave convincingly into his pattern.

And then the reaction; the anti-Kailyarders, the modern re-
naissance, the controversy about Lallans, the attempt to discover
or create a new inclusive Scottish literary language; the re-
emergence of Gaelic poetry. When he conies to modern Scotland
the historian will, I think, do well to regard English as a medium
for Scots writers comparable to Latin in the Middle Ages a
widely understood medium always available to the educated man
and one means of linking the national with the universal, but
never at the expense of a more purely indigenous Scots literary
language. The attempts of those who have been striving to
recreate such a Scots literary language must surely be seen against

WRITING OF SCOTTISH LITERARY HISTORY 153

the relevant historical background. No literary language has ever
been merely the spoken language; the language of Dunbar, like
that of Chaucer and. that of Shakespeare, goes down into the
spoken language at the same time as it reaches far beyond it into
a richer, and, if you like, an 'artificial', vocabulary. The modern
Lallans movement, revolting against the conception of Scots as
a number of regional dialects to be used in comic or sentimental
verse, and going back to the golden age of Scottish poetry in the
fifteenth century when Scots was used more richly and variously
than it has ever been used since, must be seen as an attempt to
bring together elements from Middle Scots, from modern Scot-
tish dialects and from English in order to form again a rich and
subtle literary language. Such a language is bound to be synthetic,
but 'synthetic' is not a term of abuse: it is a term applicable to any
literary language in the making. The historian will seek for the
proper analogies to illuminate what has been going on; he may
think of the language of Wyatt and Surrey and the English
'courtly makers' of the sixteenth century when the modern
English poetic language was in the making. There is always a
certain amount of wastage in such experimentation think of all
the ink-horn terms that went into and then out again from the
English language in the sixteenth century; but at the end came
Shakespeare.

My task is not, however, to defend the modern movement,
still less to write any section of the new history of Scottish litera-
ture I am trying to point to. I have tried simply to suggest some
lines of approach and indicate some important questions which
remain to be answered before such a work can be profitably
undertaken.

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 1

SCENE: Over port in the Combination Room of College

CHARACTERS

The Master Professor Nuclear

Mr. Brightly Mr. Penumbra

Dr Mutation Dr Price

Professor Elmer Dreibelbis (a Fulbright Fellow from America)

The dialogue opens in medias res :

Dr Price: . . . And what, Penumbra, was the price of bread in
Lou don in 1340?

The Master: Dear me, what an odd question.

Mr Penumbra: The price of bread was what it always was in
every healthy community labour and faith.

Dr Price: That, my dear Penumbra, is sheer obfuscation. How
the devil can you hope to understand the past if you ride rough-
shod over facts in that way? What do you know about wool in
Leicester in the thirteenth century? What was the effect on the
ordinary citizens' lives of the practices of 'regrating' and Tore-
stalling'? What sort of underwear do you think Richard II wore,
and where did he get it?

Mr Brightly: That were indeed to consider too curiously. I see
no reason why we should extend the limits of our curiosity with
respect to persons in the past beyond the limits we observe in
considering those of the present. I neither know nor care what
kind of underwear Sir Winston Churchill wears nor how many
times a week or a day the Duke of Edinburgh changes his
shirt. It has always seemed to me that the idlest of all speculations
has been the perennial concern, among those dwelling outside
Caledonia, as to what a Highlander wears under his kilt.

1 First published in the Cambridge number of The Twentieth Century,
February, 1955.

154

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 155

Dr Price: Ah, but did you know, Brightly, that Robert die
Bruce' s father fled from Yorkshire to Scotland because he was in
debt to the Jews and was unable to pay? And that this Anglo-
Norman gentleman, fleeing north out of the most strictly eco-
nomic motives, founded the modern Scottish nation? No no,
you can't dismiss the real facts of history so airily. Whisky was
first invented by the Irish as an embrocation for sick mules, and
came over from Ireland to Scotland in the baggage of a group of
Scottish poets returning to their native land from one of the
bardic schools of Munster. Having no mules, they used it on
themselves, internally, with very agreeable effect. And now
Scotch whisky is the greatest single dollar-earning export of the
United Kingdom. Doesn't that make you think?

The Master (muttering to himself): Ah, but where will you
find such men, and such mules?

Mr Penumbra: No one will deny that these facts are interesting,
Price. But they are not important. Of course, they may be of
temporary importance to a certain number of people at a certain
time, but it would argue a grossly distorted scale of values to
consider that they are of any ultimate importance. The most
important thing to human beings is whether they are to be saved
or damned. Yes, I know you think this sounds old-fashioned,
and it is old-fashioned. The notion that because something is
old-fashioned it is wrong is a very odd one indeed. I don't know
what Chaucer paid for a loaf of bread or what Richard II wore
next to his skin. But I do know that Chaucer and Richard and I
all agree about Heaven and Hell, and I know, too, that Saint
Thomas a Becket wore a hair shirt next to his skin.

The Master: Uncomfortable, my dear boy, damnably uncom-
fortable. I should hate to think that any of our young men went
in for such an er unhygienic practice. The Greeks knew
better than that. It was said of the Getan god Zalmoxis that he
was born clad in a bear's skin (from which, indeed, he derives
his name), and the Greeks believed that at one period of his
life he was a skve to Pythagoras of Samos before beiag manu-
mitted and returning to his own people. Thus even a god, if he

156 LITERARY ESSAYS

wears hair next to his skin, becomes a slave of die philosopher.
There are no hair shirts on Greek statues, Penumbra.

Mr Penumbra: No, Master: but there are often fig leaves. What
more vivid testimony to the truth of the story in Genesis and the
awful reality of the Fall of Man?

The Master: I can't say that I altogether approve of the fig leaf
used for the purpose of concealment. I find the male anatomy
attractive in all its features. Fig leaves in cooking, now, are
another matter: I know a little Greek restaurant in Soho which
does the most admirable things with them.

Mr Penumbra: 1 should be the last man to despise modern Greek
cooking, or indeed any of the delights of the flesh. I don't want
you to think that, because I believe that the only really important
thing about a man is whether he is going to be saved or damned
and I mean by that quite literally whether he will go to Heaven
or to Hell I don't think that other things are worth attending
to also. All I maintain is that these other things belong to a lower
sphere, as it were. Sub specie aeternitatis, it doesn't matter a hoot
what port I am drinking this evening. But in this world we do
not pass our life sub specie aeternitatis; the world and the flesh must
have their due. Chaucer had great fun with the Canterbury Tales,
and then wrote his 'Retraction saying in effect that all his lively
satirical writing was but childish nonsense in the sight of Heaven.
Price, the decanter stays with you.

Professor Dreibelbis: If I may break into this fascinating conver-
sation, I should like to say, Professor, if you'll pardon me, that
you seem to be having it both ways. You want your hair shirt
and your bottle of wine.

Mr Penumbra: My dear Professor Dreibelbis (but you must not
call me professor: I am but a humble lecturer), of course I want
to have it both ways. And why not? Man is both body and
spirit, has something of the animal and something of the divine
in him. Animals and angels can have it one way: man, being
fatally dualistic, must be content to indulge both sides of his
nature. Doubtless if the Fall had not occurred, man would have
become more and more spiritual and, as Milton suggested in

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 157

Paradise Lost, eventually reached a state evenhigher than the angels.

Professor Dreibelbis: So the Fall enables you to enjoy your
liquor, eh, Dr Penumbra?

[Mr Penumbra (muttering): I do not hold a doctor's degree.]

Professor Dreibelbis: I'm afraid I find it hard to see why you
consider it a bad thing.

Mr Penumbra: It was Noah who discovered the uses of the
grape. He sinned in so doing, but glory to him nevertheless.
That is a paradox, Dreibelbis: we must be content to accept it
as such.

Professor Dreibelbis: All I can say, Dr Penumbra, is that I don't
fancy going to Heaven if they don't serve dry Martinis there.

Mr Penumbra: If you ever get to Heaven, Professor Dreibelbis,
you won't want dry Martinis. Having once tasted the celestial
liquor, you will wonder how you ever could have abided the
earthly variety.

The Master: and cocktails most of all. Ugh! Now my idea
of nectar is of something light and dry, like a Montilla, an
unfortified sherry. Or perhaps a hock. There are those who
think of it as port, but surely nectar is not a dessert wine? The
late Dr Variorum once confessed to me that he always thought
of it as a white Montrachet; Professor Scholiast of Aberdeen once
told me he thought of it as one of the lighter Highland malt
whiskies an Ihchgower, say, or a Glen Grant, though he himself
preferred the heavier Campbeltowns and Islays. On the other
hand, old Textual of Magdalen has always insisted that it must be
a Beaujolais not a Burgundy, because he was certain that the
pinot noir grape could not possibly be grown in the Islands of the
Blessed (I forget his reason for this) ; but the Camay, a grape which
changes its quality marvellously according to the latitude in
which it grows, he held to be the most probable source of
the heavenly liquor. An odd view, I must confess, because,
while I have drunk some excellent Beaujolais, it can hardly be
compared to its Burgundian cousins in respect of nobility.
Softness, yes; fruitiness, yes but then if you want softness and
fruitiness, what is wrong with a good Chateauneuf-du-Pape?

158 LITERARY ESSAYS

Rhone wines in Heaven! A strange thought! But I digress.

Mr Penumbra: None of these parallels really holds, Master. I
admit it seems strange to us I myself am very partial to a good
claret, and would consider life the poorer without my daily
bottle of Pontet Canet but the fact is that in our fallen natures
we cannot have the remotest conception of the food and drink
consumed by the angels (and I agree with Milton and certain of
the Fathers that angels both partake of nourishment and excrete).
Allegory and symbol are our only resource. That is where the
Middle Ages, superior to us here as in so many other respects,
evoke our admiration and wonder: they knew that the only way
to shadow forth the ultimate truths was to avoid the documentary
and concentrate on the allegorical. But it is a habit of mind we
have lost. We are the poorer for it.

Mr Brightly: Come come, Penumbra, do you really think we
should be better off if all the poets of the last few hundred years
had kept on writing things like The Romance of the Rose and The
Faerie Queene? Surely the greatest thing that ever happened to
literature was the liberation of the spirit of humane curiosity into
the complexities of the human animal. That spirit the spirit of
Montaigne and of Shakespeare is the source of the greatness of
King Lear as well as of Emma and Great Expectations and Middle-
march and Portrait of a Lady, and of all that is best in English
poetry from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. You talk with a curious
complacency about Chaucer's 'Retraction'. That, if you will
forgive my saying so, Penumbra, is a typical piece of modern
cant. Chaucer's humane, ironic gaze on the human scene owed
nothing significant to his religious views, and all that the 'Re-
traction* meant was that he realized that great literature and
mediaeval Christianity were incompatible, and as an act of pru-
dence plumped for the latter in the end. It seems to me downright
dishonest to glory in the brilliant humanist irony of, say, 'The
Nun's Priest's Tale' and at the same time to hold that the mediae-
val concentration on the next world and concern with saving
one's grubby little soul was something wonderful, to be held up
for our imitation.

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 159

Mr Penumbra: No soul is grubby or little in the eyes of its
Maker, Brightly. But I am familiar with your argument. Indeed,
I once thought that way myself, I can assure you that you labour
in a wilderness of confusions. It would take too long to demon-
strate all of them, and this is not, perhaps, the proper place to do
so. All that I will say now is that you can't have truly great
literature without a sense of man's place in the w T hole divine
scheme of things and of the radical imperfection of human nature.
The true 'modern cant' if I may borrow your expressive term
is that man is self-sufficient and perfectible and human progress
automatic and inevitable.

Mr Brightly: Such a view is hardly modern, Penumbra. Rous-
seau and Godwin and Shelley perhaps held it; I don't know
anyone who holds it today. The great modern orthodoxy is that
unless you revel in the total depravity of human nature and in the
fact of human guilt, you cannot do anything decent at all. All
this chat about literature and original sin, which started with
T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. Talk of confusion of thought! It's
one thing to say that human nature is limited and imperfect
that is true enough in all conscience. But that has nothing to do
with the theological dogma of original sin, which states that
every person born in the world is morally culpable because Adam
ate die apple in the garden. Even if one inherits imperfection,
one cannot inherit guilt surely a most diabolical doctrine. The
fact is, of course, that man is capable both of appalling horrors
and of incredible nobility and self-sacrifice, and history shows no
correlation whatever between religious faith and the latter. Take
a look at Runciman on the Crusades. The only consistent force
for good in human conduct has been the humane, liberal imagi-
nation. It flashes forth rarely enough in human affairs, but when
it does it works the only real miracles in both life and letters.

Mr Penumbra: I can understand someone believing that in 1913 ;
it seems ina edible to me that any thoughtful person can believe
it today, having seen what the humane, liberal imagination, as
you call it, has done to civilization two world wars and number-
less other horrors, including the hydrogen bomb.

160 LITERARY ESSAYS

Mr Brightly: That's an argument one hears so often today, but
how wrong it is ! Was Hitler a humane liberal? Was Stalin? It
seems to me monstrous to blame modern wars and other horrors
on the very people who alone protested against them. The hu-
mane, liberal imagination was not strong enough to stop these
things, I grant you. It still operates in only a minority of men.
And it was that minority that Hitler persecuted and all modern
dictators have set out to destroy. You may not have had an ideal
world if, say, Bertrand Russell had been guiding world affairs for
the last fifty years, but you would have had a better world than
the one we have had, and a lot better world than that of your
precious Middle Ages.

The Master: We must not become heated, my dear boy. And
it is a mistake to preach to one's colleagues. If you have anything
to say, say it to the young men. They alone will never betray you.

Mr Brightly: The young men are all so busy genuflecting and
contemplating the total depravity of their souls these days that
there is no getting at them.

The Master: Fashions change, my dear boy, fashions change.
And genuflection, if done with proper grace, can be a charming
gesture.

Mr Penumbra: Never mind, Brightly. Though we disagree
fundamentally, we can still talk to each other; so there is hope
for us both.

Mr Brightly: Yes, we can still talk to each other, and neither of
us need fear the Inquisition or the concentration camp. That's
one victory, at least, for the agnostic liberal tradition you
dislike so.

Professor Nuclear: These arguments fall strangely on the ears of
a mere scientist. But I confess I was relieved not to hear the
familiar charge that the modern scientist is to blame for all the
troubles of the modern world.

The Master: I don't think anyone would blame you personally,
Nuclear. You play a good hand at bridge and take an intelligent
interest in the life of the College. la fact, my dear fellow, I don't
know what we'd do without you. All the same, I do wish you

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE l6l

chaps would stick to things like Archimedes' principle and per-
haps a little dabbling in electric light and even wireless. I under-
stand that it is quite likely that you will blow up the whole world
by accident one of these days. I think that would be deplorable.

Professor Nuclear: Look, Master. What we physicists are doing
is trying to find out things about the structure of the physical
world. We didn't set out to make H-bombs. Our object has
always been to find things out. What use is made of our know-
ledge what we ourselves are asked to do with it is society's
responsibility, not ours.

Professor Dreibelbis: But isn't the scientist a member of society
too?

Professor Nuclear: Of course he is. And he reads his newspaper
and votes and does all the other things that a responsible citizen
does. All this nonsense about scientists living in ivory towers!
The scientist does his professional job like everybody else. His
job is to find out as much as possible about the physical structure
of the universe.

Professor Dreibelbis: And let the chips fall where they may?

Professor Nuclear: I don't know about chips: my point is
simply that scientists are not responsible for what society decides
to do with their knowledge.

Mr Brightly: But only scientists can make atom bombs, and
if they refused to make them, they couldn't be made.

Professor Nuclear: True enough, Brighdy. And I may tell you
that such a thought has often crossed the minds of many of us
who are working in this field. But who are we to set ourselves up
against the rest of society? We are not expert politicians or
strategists. We are scientists.

Mr Brightly: Yes, but you said a moment ago that you were
also citizens. And in a democratic state, citizens make policy.

Dr Price: Don't you believe it, Brighdy. In the kind of poli-
tical democracy that we enjoy, citizens have the right to
help to decide which among several self-chosen politicians
should make policy for them. That is all. That is as far as demo-
cracy can go in a large modern industrial state. Had you

162 LITERARY ESSAYS

or I any vote in deciding whether Germany should re-arm?

Mr Brightly: No; I see your point of course, Price. It's a matter
of delegation. Our elected delegates decide for us, even on issues
which are not discussed at the time of election. I suppose the only
alternative would be a referendum whenever any issue of major
policy arose, or a General Election every few months.

The Master: The Greek city state was the only democracy, my
dear boy. The idea, like the word, is Greek. But how tawdry
the word has now become! The true democracy, as I see it, is
a state where everyone takes his wine like a gentleman. Have you
noticed the way the young men wolf their food in hall these days?
I deplore such lycanthropic dining.

Dr Mutation: If I may butt in with an irrelevant question: I
have been pondering the etymology of your name, Dreibelbis.
I thought at first it must be Pennsylvania Dutch, so-called, but
reflection has failed to yield any satisfactory etymology. 'DreibeT
is, I believe, Low Dutch for 'trigger of a rifle', but I cannot
connect that with the element 'bis'.

Professor Dreibelbis: I don't blame you, Dr Mutation. As a
matter of fact, we all thought in our family that the name was
Pennsylvania Dutch we've lived a long time in Pennsylvania
until my elder brother was offered a partnership in a big Phila-
delphia law firm.

Dr Mutation: Offered a partnership ? I'm afraid I don't see
the connection.

Professor Dreibelbis: Well, it was like this, doctor. My brother
was offered a partnership in the big kw firm one of the biggest
in the country of Antonelli, Murphy and Rabbinowitz. You
know how it is one partner gets the Italian clientele, another
the Irish, another the Jewish, and so on. Well, my brother was
offered a partnership, but they felt that Antonelli, Murphy,
Rabbinowitz and Dreibelbis was too heavy a mouthful, so to
speak. So he got in touch with an English professor at Penn
State that's where he'd gone to school, though he had a scholar-
ship at the University of Pennsylvania too and asked him what
Dreibelbis meant in English. He was going to change his name

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 163

to the English equivalent. But the English professor couldn't
figure out what Dreibelbis meant. So he told my brother to
search among his family papers and try and find out where the
family originally came from. Well, it sure was a crazy story. It
turned out, from some papers a cousin of ours was able to turn
up, that the family had originated in France, in a little village
somewhere on the lower slopes of the Alps, and that the name
was originally e de ville basse' ; that means 'of the low town'.
Then they moved to the Rhine, where the name became Ger-
manized into Dreibelbis. So the English professor suggested that
my brother change his name to Lowton. And that's what he did.
Antonelli, Murphy, Rabbinowitz and Lowton the law firm is
now sounds just right.

Dr Mutation: 1 see. Most interesting. But you didn't follow
your brother's example?

Professor Dreibelbis: And change my name? No. I figured that
what was good enough for my father and grandfather was good
enough for me.

Mr Penumbra: I'm glad to see someone who doesn't believe in
automatic progress and has some feeling for tradition.

Mr Brightly: What about the progress from De Ville Basse to
Dreibelbis? Just the kind of textual corruption which enabled
the Church to read irrelevant prophecies into the Hebrew pro-
phets. That's tradition for you.

Professor Dreibelbis: But I do believe in progress, Dr Penumbra.
I think you people are too easily put off by the horrors of the
recent war. If you looked at civilization from further west, you'd,
get a different view, I think. Take a typical small town in the
American Middle West, for example, the kind that produces the
average American analysed by the sociologists. Healthy, well-fed
children, all of them getting a decent education; comfortable
homes, everyone in touch with the world through radio and TV;
clean hygienic stores, with all perishable food kept under re-
frigeration; a high standard of living all round; workers in
factories enjoying better working conditions and higher wages
than ever before in history; farms run by the latest kinds of

164 LITERARY ESSAYS

machinery, and the farm worker no longer the illiterate clod he
was in European countries not so long ago; and everyone with a
chance, real freedom of opportunity oh, I know it's the fashion
for intellectuals to sneer at America's material progress, but
believe me, Dr Penumbra, these are things to be proud of. I know
that American TV isn't the great cultural force that it might be
and that we've no third programme on our radio, and I know
about horror comics and the Kinsey report and McCarthyism.
We're far from perfect, Dr Penumbra, but we've got one hell of
a lot that no other country has had before, and I guess that's
progress sure enough.

Mr Penumbra: It's a question of the price you pay for such
material progress, Professor.

Dr Price: The economy of a modern industrial state forces its
own cultural pattern. There is, of course, a certain levelling
down. Education is free and universal, but watered. Commercial
wireless and television are forced to play down to the most certain
(that is, the lowest) responses of the largest number of people,
because the broadcasting companies are selling guaranteed audi-
ences as well as time. Differences in native endowment between
people are denied or minimized. Advertising exploits people's
fear of being different. In America we see the culture of the
modern industrial state more clearly than here, but it is essentially
the same picture as here. We are on the same road. It is silly to
attack these features of modern civilization as American wicked-
ness. We should welcome America as the mirror in which we
can see ourselves krger than life-size.

Mr Penumbra: You enjoy the spectacle?

Dr Price: As an economic historian, I appreciate it. I ask myself
how it is related to die price of a Ford car in 1920. The answer
satisfies my sense of the fitness of things.

Mr Brightly: The modern economist is the last survivor of the
species of disinterested scholar; the man who loves knowledge
for it's own sake like Browning's Grammarian. I salute you, Price.

Dr Price: My dear Brightly, if the prevision of a former bursar
of this college had not resulted in the laying down of some

A CAMBRIDGE DIALOGUE 165

extraordinarily good port, purchased at a very reasonable price
shortly before the war, you would not now feel like saluting me.

The Master: Ah, you mean that that was Dionysus speaking
not Clio? It has always struck me as odd that the libations offered
to the Muses consisted of water or milk, and honey. Now, honey
I understand, is used in the preparation of Drambuie, a Scottish
liqueur derived from whisky, and perhaps the Muses were partial
to some kind of Drambuie. I can't understand the milk though
perhaps Calliope, being the Muse of epic poetry, required a
sustaining diet of milk stout; you need stamina to complete an
epic. But what a vulgar drink! Water of course, has its uses.
*'Apiorov ^v uSwp, as Pindar sang, 'water is best'; and I like to
think that by some proleptic feat of the imagination, not un-
common in poets, he was telling us that, in the words of my old
friend Professor Scholiast, an authority on Scotch whisky, soda
should be avoided like the plague in drinking a true Highland
malt whisky, and a few drops of pure spring water five drops
of water per half gill of whisky, to be exact should be added to
release the natural oils. The natural oils of genius are, however,
seldom released by water.

Professor Nuclear (rising): Well, Master, I must be off My
genius, such as it is, is oiled enough, and I must get back to the lab.

The Master: Back to the ! At this time of night! My dear
boy, surely this is carrying your zeal for scientific discovery rather
far? I know that the great Euclides (he of Alexandria, I mean;
Euclides of Megara, though a dialectician of no mean order, had
lesser claims to fame) the great Euclides did say that there was
no royal road to geometry; but Archimedes, who was a physicist
like yourself, made his greatest discovery in his bath. Is there not
a moral there?

Professor Nuclear: I have no doubt that you could extract
several, Master. But the college bathrooms are hardly fitted for
scientific research. And I have an experiment set up at the lab.
which I must take a look at.

The Master: Well well, goodnight, my boy. I commend your
zeal. But don't go and blow us all up.

166 LITERARY ESSAYS

Professor Dreibelbis (rising) : And I must go too, Master. I have
to finish writing my report for the Fulbright people tonight.

The Master: You mean, you are required to report on us?

Professor Dreibelbis: Not on you, Master, on myself and what
I've been doing. I suppose they want to know whether I've
made good use of my year here.

The Master: And have you?

Professor Dreibelbis: It's been a wonderful year, Master. Cam-
bridge has something which no other university has got, I know
there are plenty of crazy people here, but you'll find them in
any academic community. What I like best about it is the variety
of people's interests. Why, I've heard physicists discussing T. S.
Eliot and linguists talking about the philosophy of history. The
other day I met a man who was writing a book on Rudyard
Kipling, and 1 discovered that he was in history, not in English
at all! Now that's a very remarkable thing, Master, and it's
something we don't have in America. When I see the Master of
one of your colleges writing to the London Times about the
weather or the migration of birds, I know that I'm in the presence
of a very precious feature of English civilization.

The Master: Greek, Dreibelbis, Greek. When Sophocles wrote
the Antigone, the Athenians were so impressed that they appointed
him a general in the war against Samos. Cambridge still preserves
something of the Greek view of the whole man; there is, I think,
a freer meeting of different disciplines here than at most other
places. Of course, you Americans elect your generals as Presi-
dents, but then you have a constitution that keeps them from
carrying out their policies.

Mr Penumbra: Was it not here at Cambridge that psychology
was first joined with literary criticism and anthropology with the
study of religion? I fear these mis-matings, Master.

The Master: Fear of where the intellect leads is improper in
Cambridge, my dear Penumbra, a city where, like Socrates, we
are taught to follow whithersoever the argument leads us. Good
night, Dreibelbis: speak kindly of us in your report.

THE 'NEW CRITICISM': SOME QUALIFICATIONS 1

MR WILLIAM O'CONNOR'S article on the 'new criticism' pro-
vides an interesting conspectus of some of the main trends
in modern critical thought, written by one who is in
substantial agreement with the whole modern movement. It
seems to me, however, that it shows an insufficient awareness of
possible alternatives to that 'new' approach which regards the
primary problem in the critical examination of a work as the
demonstration of its 'internal consistency'. The only alternatives
he actually mentions are 'scholarship' (he points out early in his
essay 'the chief differences between die new criticism and scholar-
ship') and the method which employs 'the old dichotomy of
content and form'. Now, in the first place, 'the chief difference
between the new criticism and scholarship' as explained by Mr
O'Connor is the difference between any criticism and scholarship.
Scholarship throws light on the social and biographical origins of
a work, on the cultural environment out of which it sprang, and
on the transmission of the text, and thus often enables the critic
to understand in some degree how the work came to be written
and to see more clearly the meanings of certain parts of the text;
but his job as a critic, whether his brand of criticism be old or
new, remains the assessment of the literary worth of the work in
question. The new criticism has no monopoly in this perception.
As for the escape from the dichotomy of content and form, this
has been sought by generations of critics and has been achieved in
one fashion or another by many who take wholly different posi-
tions from those taken by any representative of the new move-
ment by R. L. Stevenson and John Middleton Murry, to men-
tion only two, who are as different from each other as from any of

1 This essay was written in 1950 in reply to an article explaining and defending
the new movement in literary criticism (especially American literary criticism)
which appeared in the American periodical, College English.

167

168 LITERARY ESSAYS

those mentioned by Mr O'Connor. I think it is not unfair to say
that many who appreciate and have profited from the achieve-
ments of the new critics (and I consider myself one of those)
nevertheless resent the assumption of some of their spokesmen
that they alone are really critics, all others being mere scholars,
historians, Em/Z55-hunters, 'positivists', or unprincipled im-
pressionists.

One can see, of course, what it is that leads them to such a view.
The new critics have taken criticism more seriously grimly, even
than representatives of other schools of thought, and, at least
from Dr Leavis on, have seen the function of the critic as central
to a civilization. Not only have they taken every opportunity to
differentiate between criticism and other kinds of literary investi-
gation, but they have also, unlike the more traditional critic,
refused to start by a consideration of the impact of the work on
the ordinary cultivated reader and then proceed to explain that
impact in terms of the work's qualities. Instead, they have made
critical analysis a tool for the total reassessment of the impact.
They have striven by every possible means to widen the breach
between amateur and professional criticism: even their vocabulary
helps to serve this purpose, so that when Mr John Crowe Ransom
writes an essay on the nature of poetry, he does not call it, as
critics of other schools would, 'The Nature of Poetry', but
'Poetry: A Note in Ontology'.

There is both good and bad in this, just as there is both good
and bad in the criticism of criticism which the new critics en-
courage (and of which the present discussion is an example).
Criticism of criticism is, after all, an intellectual luxury and may
lead to an inability to enjoy more nourishing fare. It is the chief
penalty of becoming a professional literary man,' Mr T. S. Eliot
once remarked to Mr William Empson, 'that one can no longer
read anything with pleasure/ The phrase 'curl up with a good
book' has been cheerfully abandoned to the Philistines, and people
who take literature seriously are supposed to have more rigorous
methods of dealing with the work of poets and novelists.

Of course, there is much gain in this rigour. The scrutinizing

THE 'NEW CRITICISM': SOME QUALIFICATIONS 169

of literary theories is not only a valuable philosophical activity
calculated to throw light on the differentiating characteristics of
the literary work of art but it also sometimes helps us to approach
individual works with a clearer understanding of what they are
and so of how to read them with greater understanding and satis-
faction. These are two separate, though related, functions of
criticism one might call them roughly the 'philosophical' and
the 'appreciative' and when their separate nature is not realized
much confusion may result. It would be absurd to maintain that
no Greek appreciated Sophocles until Aristotle had written the
Poetics, or that English playgoers had to wait for A.C. Bradley or
Professor Heilman before they could understand and enjoy King
Lear. Appreciation can be independent of critical theory a
proposition which the new critics do not explicidy deny but a
denial of which seems to be implicit in much of their writing.
But if we do not concede that it is possible to enjoy art without
formal training in criticism and without possessing general ideas
about aesthetics, we are flying in the face of experience, setting
up a priestly critical profession to mediate between artists and their
public, and encouraging the growth of the most barren kind of
academicism in matters artistic and literary.

We all agree that criticism is valuable, but we must be clear
about its kind of value. Eliot has defined criticism in the sense in
which we are using the term as 'the commentation and exposition
of works of art by means of written words* a reasonable, if
inelegant, definition; but it should be noted that the definition
itself says nothing of what this 'commentation and exposition* is
supposed to achieve. In the same essay, as Mr O'Connor has
reminded us, Eliot denies that criticism is 'autotelic' (it should be
said that this essay was written in 1923, before Eliot had rid him-
self of that pontifical pretentiousness in manner and vocabulary
which mars some of his early prose) and specifically asserts that it
must always profess an end in view, which he roughly defines as
'the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste'. But
we must go further than this. 'Elucidation' is an ambiguous word,
and 'the correction of taste' an even more ambiguous phrase.

170 LITERARY ESSAYS

Elucidation itself will vary according to the purpose of the eluci-
dator. Miss Lily Campbell's elucidation of Shakespeare's historical
plays is very different in nature and purpose from the elucidation
supplied by, say, John Palmer in his Political Characters of Shakes-
peare, a fact which Mr O'Connor sees but which he might have
explored further. A poem or a play or a novel can be very many
things at the same time a reflection of the cultural climate of its
age, a document in the mental history of its author, a carefully
patterned arrangement of words, ideas, images and situations, a
fable, a piece of rhetoric, and the communication of a unique
insight into an aspect of human experience through one or several
of these means. We may choose to elucidate the work as any one
of these things, or as any two, or as so many as we think we can
handle.

But our new critic, with his awareness of the difference between
criticism and scholarship, has his answer at once: 'There is no real
difficulty here,' he will reply. 'What the literary critic should
concern himself with is the work qua work of art. He should
ignore it as a document in the history of ideas, as an expression of
the writer's personality, or as anything but a poem or a play or a
novel, and the problem is to find out what a poem or a play or a
novel really is, what it is uniquely, what it is that no other form of
written expression is. Having done this, he can proceed to de-
monstrate its special formal qualities and exhibit it as a literary
work of art/ He then proceeds to find a formula which will
define the quiddity of a literary form and goes on to the analysis
of individual texts which demonstrates that any given example
conforms to this definition.

This is all very appealing. The human mind has a fondness for
definitions and categories, for contrasts and exclusions, for analytic
demonstrations. Nevertheless, a sense that the true quality of a
poem somehow escapes this sort of defining and categorizing and
demonstrating has persisted throughout the history of criticism
and has given rise to every kind of evasive impressionism in order
to avoid coming to grips with the basic question of whether and
why a given poem is good. It were as wise to cast a violet into

THE NEW CRITICISM : SOME QUALIFICATIONS IJI

a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its
colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into
another the creations of a poet,' wrote Shelley; but the modern
critic, in spite of his awareness of the uniqueness of a given work of
art, is made uncomfortable by such statements because they open
the door to autobiographical chatter masquerading as criticism.
And there again we can understand and sympathize with this
insistence that without a stem formal discipline real criticism is
impossible.

But in a sense 'real criticism' is impossible. This is not by any
means to say that there are no standards of value, that we must
fall back on personal taste, or vague impressionism, or on mere
gush. We do, however, mean that no critical statement about a
work of literary art least of all, about a poem can be a com-
plete statement of what it is and why it is good. On the level of
aesthetic theory, it may be possible to construct a set of valid
general principles, but practical criticism, criticism designed to
demonstrate the nature and quality of a work and so to increase
understanding and appreciation, must always be fragmentary,
indirect, approximate, and can never be a complete and wholly
satisfactory description of what in fact takes place in the work
of art.

It is not difficult to see why this should be so. A poem is an
immense complex of meaning which is nevertheless simple and
immediate in its impact, and it is impossible to describe that com-
plex and simultaneously to account for its impact. To resolve the
poem into mere complexity by analytic discussion is often useful
and helpful, but it hardly begins to explain, the reasons for its
total impact on the experienced and sensitive reader, nor does it
necessarily increase appreciation for the inexperienced. The rich-
ness and uniqueness of poetic statement, so rightly insisted on by
the new critics, is far too often underestimated in their practice,
for in their desire to concern themselves only with literary criteria
they are liable to narrow their analysis so as to exclude all elements
that are not exclusively related to those criteria. But the fact is
that there is no such thing as a purely literary work of literature.

172 LITERARY ESSAYS

A work of literary art is necessarily a mixed form. It produces its
effect by being several things at once not by mere complexity
but by operating simultaneously on several different levels not
only of meaning but of existence.

Our search for 'criteria that make possible judgments about
literary worth', in Mr O'Connor's phrase, if pursued with a dis-
interested desire to find out what a work of literary art really is
rather than with a desire to find merely a consistent method, will
eventually turn up the fact that literary discourse is by its very
nature several kinds of discourse at once. A poem is a structure
with 'internal consistency', but it is also often a fascinating record
of the poet's mind, a period-piece reflecting with moving bril-
liance die climate of an age, and a story. We may differentiate
uses of language in a poem which are not to be found in other
ways of writing, but this does not mean that the full impact of a
poem can be determined by examining only its differentiating
qualities. Who can hear Mozart played on the harpsichord with-
out enjoying, as part of his reaction to the actual music, the
poignant feeling of listening to the gaiety of a lost civilization?
Is this reaction 'impure', sentimental, irrelevant? If, in seeing
Hamlet, we appreciate its dramatic structure and its poetic magni-
ficence while, at the same time, seeing it as the work of Shake-
speare the Elizabethan, are we being aesthetically wicked? A
work of literary art, which, because of its richness, its use of so
many elements of expression, can be so many things at once, is
often, also, a work of history and of autobiography and of moral
philosophy; and its impact on us is the more profound because it
is all these things. In appreciating a work of art, we have only
one ear cocked for 'internal consistency', for the purely 'formal'
aspect. And often when such consistency has been demonstrated
we do not read the work with any richer enjoyment.

The new critics, of course, have their answer here. Messrs
Wimsatt and Beardsley, in a widely discussed article (duly cited
by Mr O'Connor), have in their very title boldly stigmatized as a
'fallacy' the consideration by the critic of the impact of a work on
the reader. Their concern with what a literary work is, uniquely

THE NEW CRITICISM : SOME QUALIFICATIONS 173

and formally, rather than with the reasons for which it is enjoyed,
logically leads them to dismiss the testimony of those who enjoy
literature as irrelevant. The new criticism tends, in fact, to be
impatient with the testimony of readers. A poem, the argument
seems to run, should be enjoyed for those of its aspects which
differentiate it from other forms of discourse; whether it is ever so
enjoyed is considered an irrelevant question. This is a seductively
tidy way of looking at things as though we were to enjoy people
only for such of their attributes as distinguished them from all
other kinds of living creatures and not for their total selves but
it leads, in criticism as in morality, to a puritanism which does
violence to the values found in experience.

Why, it might be asked, is the 'affective fallacy' in any sense a
fallacy? The value of literature surely lies in its actual or potential
effect on readers admittedly, on experienced and sensitive read-
ers, on readers who have had sufficient exposure to this kind of
thing to have developed a proper responsiveness and discrimina-
tion. To deny this is to fall into the 'ontological fallacy' of believ-
ing that a work of art fulfils its purpose and achieves its value
simply by being, so that the critic becomes concerned only to
demonstrate the mode of its being by descriptive analysis. This
is comparable to saying that a body of moral laws exists in order
to have an internal logical structure and that to consider the effect
of obeying any given law would be to move from questions of
moral philosophy to questions of social or individual behaviour.
Literature is a phenomenon produced by men in order to com-
municate in a certain way with their fellows. In the last analysis,
the test of its value can be judged only by the receiver, and judged
by him on some kind of 'affective* theory. Of course the critic
must consider the means by which this special kind of communi-
cation in virtue of which literary discourse differs from other
kinds of discourse is achieved, and this in turn leads him to an
examination of internal consistency as one among many charac-
teristics of a work of art. (The new critics generally talk as
though it were the only essential characteristic.) But we must
distinguish between means and ends. Poetry, in the largest sense

174 LITERARY ESSAYS

of the word, is a unique method of making a unique kind of
communication, and it is the real or potential effectiveness of the
communication which justifies the method, not vice versa.

There is, of course, the question of communication to whom.
Who is the ideal reader whose reactions are to be taken as the
norm? We must not take a purely pragmatic view and send out
pollsters to find out who are most affected by which works to
that extent Messrs Wimsatt and Beardsley are right. The ability
to discriminate between more and less effective uses of the
medium of poetry is achieved by deep and wide experience in
reading. The most brilliant literary mind, if faced only by the
poems of Eddie Guest, might believe that they represented the
height of poetic expression; but, given the opportunity to read
widely and richly, he will change his views. Deep and wide
reading provides a better training in critical appreciation than a
thousand ingenious analyses of poems. If critical analysis be
provided as well, the process can be speeded up, and the reader
may be made aware of how the effects which he appreciates are
achieved and that in itself increases appreciation.

The best 'appreciative' criticism is that which enables the reader
to get a glimpse of the real life in a work: having glimpsed it, he
can proceed to enter into all its rich vitality. No critical method is
absolute, foolproof, or 'true'. I have known students who have
been more effectively brought to see the essential life in a poem
by hearing it read aloud slowly than by the most careful analysis
of its structure. Art is meant to be experienced, and the function
of criticism is to assist that experience. 1 After reading some of the
new criticism, one might imagine that an effective stage perfor-
mance would achieve less towards an understanding of Hamlet
than an analysis of its internal consistency made in the study.
Criticism of any work of art is a kind of performance, a sort of
substitute for performance. Part of the true glory of a scene in
Hamlet may be brought out for students by having them act it out.
There are, of course, other ways, and the careful discussion of

1 'Be minute,' wrote Coleridge to Sotheby, 'and assign your reasons often,
and your first impressions always* (my italics).

THE NEW CRITICISM ! SOME QUALIFICATIONS 175

structure, imagery and similar points can be of immense help. But
to say that what matters about a work of art is not its communi-
cative potential but its internal consistency is to put the cart before
the horse completely.

One must not forget the pedagogical aspect of criticism. As far
as its classroom use is concerned, the function of criticism is to
increase awareness of what a work of literary art really is and by
so doing to increase appreciation of it. To teach a student that
criticism always and necessarily involves demonstration of internal
consistency, or of paradox, or of ambivalent meanings, or what
have you, may be useful but is often fatal. If the student does not
learn that such devices are means to achieve a communicative
effect and that the reader remains dead to the work so long as that
communicative effect remains unachieved, then he has learned
only to be a pedant. How often have I seen a student who has
got it into his head that ingenuity of analysis is the mark of the
good critic proceed to make a pretentious fool of himself by
demonstrating with misguided ingenuity the existence of mani-
festly absurd meanings in some poem or story. There is such a
thing as a 'feeling' for a work and its period which can save one
from such barren stupidities. Our new critics generally have this
feeling, because they are men of wide reading and historical
knowledge. They have assimilated a whole historical tradition,
and they know, before they approach Hamlet as professional
critics, to what area of human sensibility and significance it be-
longs. In their demand that all works should be treated as though
they were contemporary and anonymous they are in effect re-
quiring the student of today to do without tools which they
themselves are continually using, though often not consciously.
There is, in fact, no limit to what ingenious analysis can achieve
by way of demonstrating complexity and consistency of structure
in any work at all, good or bad : how far you can go is taught you
by your 'taste' and taste is the sum of what you have learned
about art by willing and interested exposure to it. It necessarily
includes an element of historical discrimination, since wide read-
ing experience is bound to produce in a reader of any native

176 LITERARY ESSAYS

sensitivity at all some awareness of the difference between the
cultural points of reference of, say, Milton and Matthew Prior.
This does not mean that there may not be even greater differences
between two contemporary writers.

It is not wise to give the student the impression that the end-
product of literary activity is the critical analysis of the work and
not the work itself. I do not suggest for a moment that the new
criticism would maintain such a preposterous position, but its
practitioners often implicitly suggest this attitude. Literature
exists to be read and enjoyed, and criticism, at least in its peda-
gogical aspect, exists in order to increase awareness and so increase
enjoyment. The purely philosophical critic may entertain himself
by trying to isolate the quiddity of poetry (but I should maintain
that the quiddity of poetry is that, unlike all other forms of
communication, it has no single quiddity), but the 'appreciative'
critic will use any means at his disposal analytic, descriptive,
histrionic, yes, even historical to arouse alert interest, to produce
that communicative impact without which all further critical
discussion is useless.

Another objection might be brought against much (but not all)
of the new criticism. Even if we agree that it is possible to isolate
and define the differentiating qualities of a work of literary art,
we may not agree that those qualities are to be discussed in terms
of structure. To many of the new critics all criticism is analysis
of structure, and demonstration of value is demonstration of
structural complexity and coherence. There are, however, many
valuable kinds of literature whose value does not reside in their
structural effectiveness. There is not even a single poetic use of
language. Good verse can consist of prepositional statements
neatly phrased, with an agreeable rhythm and pleasantly chiming
rhymes serving more or less as pleasing decoration (as in John
Pomfret's 'The Choice', for example), or, at the other end of the
scale of poetic expression, it may be like a poem of Donne's or of
the later Yeats, a flaming organic unity in which every element
in the expression contributes equally to the total communication.
To place a poem in this scale is not necessarily to pass any value-

THE 'NEW CRITICISM': SOME QUALIFICATIONS 177

judgment on it, for there can be good poems at any place in the
scale. We may with some justice hold, however, that the poten-
tialities for really impressive poetic expression are less likely to
exist at the lower end of the scale and that the most effective
poems are those which come in the middle or higher parts of the
range. Such questions can only be resolved by reading poems and
considering what each achieves. One might say that at the lower
end of the scale of poetic expression the handling of language is
nearer to that of prose or perhaps to that of non-artistic literary
expression and that it makes less use of the characteristically poetic
ways of handling language. But is this necessarily a value-
judgment? Is the best poetry the most poetical poetry, poetry
which uses most of those aspects of language which differentiate
the poet's use of it from other kinds of use? And, anyway, is this
difference to be explained in terms of structure? The point is, to
say the least, arguable.

By concentrating on what they deem to be the differentiating
qualities of poetic expression (in the widest sense of 'poetic') and
by seeing these qualities in terms of complexity and coherence of
structure, many of the new critics often find themselves unable to
cope with such simpler forms of literature as the verse-essay or
the song-lyric. The new criticism is incapable, for example, of
demonstrating the magnificence of Burns's songs (which I have
recently seen dismissed with something very like contempt by a
young critic). The devices by which Burns, in 'Auld Lang Syne',
sublimates nostalgia for the past in present good fellowship to
close with a formal social gesture which holds past and present
together for one tenuous moment by ritual, man's way of marking
permanently the fleeting meanings of things this sort of thing
cannot be handled or even discussed by the new criticism without
embarrassment. And what of the devices by which lyrics are
fitted to music? These are some of the areas in which modern
criticism, largely because of its persistence in considering every
'affective' theory as a 'fallacy' and thus clinging to what I have
called the 'ontological fallacy', is seriously inadequate.

This has an effect on the vocabulary of the new criticism and,

178 LITERARY ESSAYS

indeed, on its prose style, which as a rule is ugly and clotted.
There seems to be a tendency to equate grace and clarity with
superficiality and a preference for a technical jargon which is not,
in fact, necessary in order to communicate adequately. Some of
the results of this for example, the comical 'Glossary of the New
Criticism' which appeared in Poetry some time ago are likely to
encourage the worst kind of verbal exhibitionism and, among the
hangers-on of the movement, have often done so.

But it would be unjust to judge the new criticism by its more
ragged camp followers. All I am concerned to do here is to point
to some limitations and inadequacies of its characteristic method.
I certainly recognize its great achievement in helping to abolish
from our colleges the mumbling survey course consisting of
biographical facts combined with lists of adjectives appropriate to
each writer and in insisting on the close reading of individual
texts. But the alternative is not necessarily to throw out all that
Mr Ransom, for example, or Mr Wimsatt would like to throw
out, to remove from our critical vocabulary all adjectives de-
signed to point to the nature of the work's impact on die qualified
reader, to manipulate a few pretentious technical terms. We can
learn from the new critics without using their jargon, adopting
their puritanism, or employing their Procrustean method of
forcing every literary work into a pattern of complex coherence
or ambivalence or paradox or some such criterion. We can learn
to read carefully, sensitively, critically, without losing sight of the
richness and essential 'impurity' of all effective literary art and
without forgetting that, as the rejected Saintsbury once remarked,
'in the house of poetry are many mansions'. What we want is a
richer, not a narrower, aesthetic than the traditional combination
of autobiographical impressionism and description. Catholicity
of taste does not mean the abandonment of standards, nor does
the recognition that different kinds of value may legitimately be
called 'literary' imply the loss of critical principles. In the last
analysis, the characteristic method of the new criticism im-
mensely helpful though it has been, and brilliantly as it is often
employed is inadequate because it is too easy. Its tendency

THE NEW CRITICISM : SOME QUALIFICATIONS 179

towards what Professor Crane has called 'critical monism' leads
to a drastic oversimplification of what in fact a work of literary
art is, what kind of pleasure it gives, and why it is valuable. It is
the invention of ardent but simple minds and, too often, of minds
that are really happier talking about literature than reading and
enjoying it.

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION:
SOME SECOND THOUGHTS 1

FICTION is TODAY, as it has been for some time, the dominant
literary form, and one might suppose, therefore, that modern
criticism would have devoted itself particularly to the novel
and the short story. The modern critic, however, has preferred
to concentrate on poetry, for reasons which are not difficult to
see. The abundance and variety of fiction makes the establishment
of critical norms for that art a very difficult business; ideals of
complexity and consistency of structure can be applied to lyrical
poetry without too much strain, but the novel is often a more
discursive form and rarely one in which the readers' main interest
lies in the appreciation of structural artfulness. Not that structural
artfulness is lacking in a good novel, but it is not often what the
reader is primarily interested in seeing.

One can, of course, develop an ideal definition of a good novel
which would recognize that, in the artistic handling of prose
narrative, the total significance flowers cumulatively out of the
handling of each unit of meaning at each point. If I may be
allowed to quote from one of my own earlier attempts to grapple
with this problem, I might give the following ideal definition:
'Fiction as an art form is the narration of a series of situations that
are so related to each other that a significant unity of meaning is
achieved; the situations are presented in language such that at
each point in the progress of the narrative the kind of relation
between retrospect and anticipation is set up that continually and
cumulatively reinforces the desired implications of the plot, so
that plot becomes symbolic as well as literal in its meaning/ And
I added: 'One definition of a "bad novel" would therefore be a
novel in which no adequate complex of meaning has been
achieved, where the devices of style, structure, etc., which the

1 A lecture delivered at the University of Rochester, N.Y., in 1950.

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION l8l

author has employed have not been adequate to shape the work
into an illuminating unity.' 1 Symbolization, the development of
new meanings out of situations by the way in which they are
arranged, ordered and presented, would thus depend equally on
style and structure style being the handling of the presentation
at each particular point, and plot the larger aspects of the same
thing. On this definition, style would become a function of plot,
and expression and structure would be part of a single complex of
effective artistic communication.

The fact is, however, that such a definition, though useful as
indicating an ideal towards which the art of fiction tends, is rarely
if ever an accurate account of what goes on in a novel. Even in
lyric poetry, where intensity of expression is at its maximum and
the fusion of the different elements that make up the poem can
almost achieve a unity which gets beyond chronological sequence
to lie in the mind as a single instantaneous pattern, this kind of
unity is never wholly achieved, and the fact that the expression
takes place in units that are deployed in a chronological sequence
makes it impossible for the whole poem to burst into total meaning
outside time, as it were. Indeed, it might be maintained that if a
poem could achieve this kind of simultaneity it would cease to
be a poem; for, after all, its medium is language and language
depends on time, on the arrangement of a sequence, in order to
communicate at all. One might say that lyrical poetry tends
towards the escape from the time dimension, approaching ever
nearer to this ideal as the poem becomes more finely wrought,
but that if it were ever fully to achieve this ideal it would cease
to exist.

With fiction, the unreality of the ideal definition is more clearly
demonstrable. It can be applied with profit, though never wholly
literally, to Flaubert, to some of James, to some of Stevenson; but
what of Scott and Dickens and Trollope? A great deal of English
fiction is much more muddied with life, much more crowded
with boisterous irrelevanties, than any Flaubertian or Jamesian or

1 A Study of Literature, Cornell University Press and Oxford University Press,
1948, p. 55-

182 LITERARY ESSAYS

Stevensonian definition of the art of fiction would allow. 'Most
people suppose,' wrote Stevenson to James in 1884, ' . . . that
striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life;
they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deli-
berate artifice and set off by painful suppressions/ By what is the
relation between 'deliberate artifice' and the knowledge of life
in a novel of Dickens? Where did Scott get the vernacular
dialogue which is what provides the true vitality in all his Scottish
novels? The English tradition is rich in novels whose whole glory
is their wealth of shouting and jostling characters who are brought
vividly to the reader's eye by means of a superficial and not very
craftsmanlike plot, and who are dismissed only when their creator
has become exhausted. Dryden's famous remark on the Canter-
bury Tales 'Here is God's plenty' has nothing to do with struc-
ture or pattern, yet it is a remark peculiarly applicable to the
work of English novelists from Defoe to Joyce Carey.

Let us put the question another way. Few critics would deny
that Willa Gather's Alexander's Bridge, a finely constructed but
lifeless novel written under the influence of James, is much inferior
to the same writer's The Song of the Lark, which is crowded with
details that have no proper place in the plot, is structurally
defective, and comes to an end only when the author has nothing
more to say. In spite of its formal defects, The Song of the Lark is
a rich and satisfying novel, pulsing with life, creating its own
universe as it moves, picking out and presenting vividly freshly
remembered incidents from the author's childhood. Language
here has been made to hold life, and though there are moments in
the novel which irritate or offend, the work as a whole has force
and vitality and can be read with satisfaction by the most sophis-
ticated reader.

Are there, then, two criteria, one drawn from art and one
drawn from life? Must we distinguish between the kind of novel-
ist who achieves an artful disposition of the pattern, and the kind
who, disregarding the more purely aesthetic aspects of his work,
creates a convincing and lively world of action? To do so would
represent a complete abdication of the critic's function. The

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION 183

distinction here is surely not between die artful and die lively, but
between different kinds of artfulness. James himself talked about
the necessity of 'the sense of felt life' in a novel, and it would
never have occurred to him to sacrifice this to superficial neatness
of form. To achieve the illusion of a living and pulsing world is
not the work of the man who merely knows life and feels strongly
about it; it is the work of the writer who can handle language in
such a way that what he knows and feels can be carried alive into
the reader's imagination. We most adequately face our problem
by realizing that form manifests itself in a variety of ways, that an
episodic novel may have an adequate form of its own even though
its structure is neither complex nor consistent, that, in fact, the
novel fulfils itself in many and various ways and no single defini-
tion of a good novel will do.

The richness of a Dickens novel has its own means of com-
municating itself, and it is not ardess. The fact that Dickens wrote
many of his novels for serial publication, that he did not always
know what he was going to do with his characters once he had
created them, that he sometimes had no notion of how he was
going to end a novel until he had written a substantial part of it,
would all mean eventual failure if he were writing The Portrait
of a Lady or even Treasure Island. There are, of course, some
Dickens novels Great Expectations, for example where struc-
tural unity does exist and is of the greatest importance in achieving
the total effect; but The Pickwick Papers in one way and Nicholas
Nickleby in anodier illustrate how a novel can move along in no
particular direction once it has set up a world for it to move in,
and what we enjoy here is not the movement but what it brings
us to.

The universe of each of these two Dickens novels is both rich
and consistent, even diough the structure may not be consistent.
The universe is created by character, not by plot, the only function
of plot being to deploy the characters. (Character itself is created
by art, working with the raw materials supplied by observation
and imagination.) The death of litde Nell in The Old Curiosity
Shop is preposterously sentimental; it is a bad scene, and offends

184 LITERARY ESSAYS

most of us, but it does not kill the novel, as it would kill another
kind of novel, for as an ending it is not necessary to complete the
novel's meaning, and as an episode it exists by itself, to be taken
or left.

We turn to Trollope, not a great novelist but an agreeable one,
and ask ourselves what is the 'peculiar pleasure' we derive from
his works. He, too, creates a fictional world, but it exists not so
much in virtue of the fascinating and lively characters who inhabit
it as in virtue of its concreteness and inclusiveness. Trollope's
world is a 'probable' world, and we enjoy living in it in a relaxed
and even escapist way because it is easy to enter, pleasant to walk
about in, and adequately credible. It is, of course, dangerous to
generalise about Trollope, who wrote so many different kinds of
novels : but at least it might be said that he is read today (and he
is read surprisingly widely) because his world of muted crises, of
human situations presented and worked out against a stable
background, is both valid and self-contained. There are no
passionate glimpses into the well-springs of human nature, nor
do the plots build up cumulatively a unique insight which depends
for its adequate presentation on the continuous relation between
style and structure; there is little 'symbolization' and clearly no
searching for le mot juste. Trollope makes language carry con-
viction; the pressure is low and the craftsmanship is only adequate,
but the fictional world does emerge, convincing, logical, argee-
able and interesting to contemplate. This is doubtless a minor
kind of art, but it is civilized and pleasant.

A very different kind of self-contained world is that created by
Joyce's Ulysses. Here the structure is important, but not in the
way that the structure of, say, Madame Bovary is important.
More accurately, one might say that the structure of Ulysses is
important the way it is in Flaubert, but it has a still more impor-
tant function to emphasize the completeness and logicality of
the world which the novel creates as it moves. The more I read
Ulysses, the less interested I am in the working out of the Homeric
theme or in the organization of the plot as organization. I find
myself more and more fascinated by the completeness of the

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION 185

world presented, by the fact that an incident on page 25 is ex-
plained and illuminated by another incident on page 300, that an
unexplained gesture of Leopold Bloom in the fourth episode is
given logic and meaning with reference to something that happens
or is explained twenty episodes further on. This is a novel which
cannot possibly be appreciated on first reading, not because we
lack the Homeric clues (which are quite unimportant and can in
fact be totally ignored by the reader without much loss) but
because a great deal of the pleasure we get out of the book derives
from our recognition when reading a passage on, say, page 20
that what is said here has richer meaning with reference to a
fragment of conversation on page 200, an incident on page 250,
or a character's recollection on page 300. This is not what we
normally mean by adequacy of structure, for that kind of struc-
ture is cumulative, and builds up its meanings in chronological
sequence, taking account of the fact that our memory of early
incidents fades as we get further into the book. But Ulysses makes
no concessions to memory; its effects are not achieved cumula-
tively but simultaneously; to enjoy the book fully we must have
it all lying in our mind at once and see as we read any given part
all the other parts which support and explain it and which in turn
are supported and explained by this part. The simultaneity
(which, as I have noted in discussing lyric poetry, can never be
really achieved) is not, of course, present in the actual process of
reading, which takes place in time, but if we know the book well
and remember it in detail we can compensate for chronology by
memory.

The richness of Ulysses is thus very different from that of The
Pickwick Papers. It is not the gusto and vitality of Joyce's novel
which impress us (as they so often do in Dickens) so much as the
sheer completeness and self-consistency of the world in which
the characters move. It all fits together; everything has a satisfy-
ing meaning if we are familiar enough with the novel to keep in
mind all the relevant passages simultaneously. This is a kind of
effect difficult to parallel elsewhere in fiction. The enjoyment to
be derived from this savouring of the interrelationships between

l86 LITERARY ESSAYS

the different parts of the world created by the novel does not
come from the appreciation of form as such, but from the pleasure
of inhabiting a fictional universe so much more totally known to
us in its interrelated parts than anything can be in real life. As far
as I know, this kind of effect and value in fiction has not been
recognized by critics.

The very completeness of Joyce's world prevents us from being
overcome by a sense of its abundance, for a sense of abundance
arises when we get glimpses of more characters than we can
properly account for. Quaint or lively characters who emerge
out of a dim background to reveal themselves as comic or pic-
turesque and then return to the unknown from whence they came
can add immensely to the sense of life in a work; one might
consider the function of minor characters in Scott, for example.
Scott's handling of minor characters, particularly of the dialogue
he puts into their mouths, does have real relevance to the over-all
structure of the novel, but we appreciate this aspect of his work
not because we appreciate this relevance but because these charac-
ters help to make the world in which they dwell both more
interesting and more human. Interestingness is a criterion no
serious critic has dared to apply to art, but I can see no reason why
it should not be applied. We must, of course, distinguish it from
suspense and other ways of holding attention, which may be
quite meretricious. By interestingness I mean the ability to in-
trigue and fascinate the reader the more he reads not simply the
ability to make him read on in order to find out what happens
next, but the power to keep him absorbed in the individual
incident. Mere truth is no more valid a criterion for art than for
philosophy. What is obviously true is liable to be trite: what
might be true and is at the same time suggestive, intriguing,
attention-compelling, is a better criterion to apply to both
philosophy and art. Devices for increasing the interestingness of
a work of fiction may be quite independent of the conventionally
accepted formal properties and may be successfully practised
independently of diem.

Aristotle, we all know, said that plot was the c souT of drama,

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION 187

and in a sense this is certainly true for Greek drama and for much
subsequent drama and fiction. But is plot the 'soul 5 of Shake-
speare's Henry IV, Part I? The story of that play is important; the
patterning of events, with their causal connections, helps to give
the play its meaning, to make the whole thing pleasingly com-
prehensive as a unit. But does the 'peculiar pleasure' we derive
from the play really derive from the manner in which the various
incidents are arranged with respect to each other? There could
be no play without the plot, true enough, but the richness of
dialogue and incident, the bubbling vitality which is conveyed
not by the order in which things happen but by the way in which
they happen, by the life which springs from the characters in
operation this is what we most enjoy the play for, and this is
achieved not by structural artfulness but by artfulness in the use
of language to present the given incident. What Levin Schiicking
called, in a somewhat different connection., Shakespeare's 'epi-
sodic intensification' can be usefully applied to any play or novel
in which the life emerges through the energy and colour of the
individual incident, and where the work as a whole is a series of
such incidents linked by relatively flat passages whose function, is
to ensure that the nominal structure does not fall apart.

I am not trying to restore the old distinction between the novel
of character and the novel of incident, though this has its uses, but
I am maintaining that there are kinds of interest in fiction which
do not depend on those qualities of organization which we like
to think of as of basic significance in a work of art. Professor R. S.
Crane, in a brilliant article in the American Journal of General Edu-
cation for January 1950, has analysed the structure of Tom Jones
in astonishing detail. He does not, however, raise the question
of the part played by structure in the total impact of the novel.
In what degree do the kinds of interest which we find in Tom
Jones depend on this structure a structure, it might be added,
whose complexity nobody can see until Professor Crane has
pointed it out? This is not a rhetorical question but one which
deserves a careful and an honest answer.

I suppose that Professor Wimsatt of Yale would say that this

188 LITERARY ESSAYS

line of argument is an example of the 'affective fallacy', and that
the whole notion of interestingness as a criterion is based on the
erroneous assumption that the way in which the work affects the
reader (albeit the experienced and sensitive reader) is critically
relevant. But the ontological fallacy, which is the name I give to
what he and others profess, is even more misleading, for it
assumes that the essence of a work of art is something different
from its capacity for being properly perceived. If Berkeley's
theory of knowledge had been applied to art, Dr Johnson could
never have refuted him by kicking a stone: for the esse of a work
of art is its pertipi. That being so, what we perceive is of the first
importance, and the quality of the perception depends directly
on the original creator who arranged things in terms of their
perceptive potentialities. The artist, like God, works in a com-
municative medium, and the test of his success is the reactions of
the qualified receiver. In examining the reactions of the qualified
receiver (reader, in the case of novels) the critic can determine the
kinds of appeal different kinds of work possess, and he can then
proceed to find out what it is in them which accounts for the
appeal. The most fruitful criticism always operates in this way:
it clarifies and explains effects with reference to their causes in the
work.

There are more types of artfulness at work in fiction than are
dreamed of in our philosophy. How does Jane Austen, for
example, achieve that sublime clarity of presentation which is a
source of perpetual wonder to the reader, and what is the relation
of that clarity to her characteristic irony? The analysis of the
relation of style to plot in her novels will go only a little way in.
answering these questions, and the mere analysis of structure will
not begin to answer them. The wit of Huxley's Antic Hay is part
of the texture of the dialogue, and that texture cannot be dis-
cussed with the same critical tools which can demonstrate the
cunning of James's The Turn of the Screw. Fiction is, in fact, a
blanket term which covers many different kinds of skills, many
different ways of handling narrative in language, for many
different purposes.

THE CRITICISM OF FICTION 189

There are even important differences in what might be called
the unit of artifice. In some novelists it is possible to examine
each phrase, noting the effectiveness of the smallest unit of ex-
pression and its contribution to the sum of significance. We all
know we have the author's word for it that this can be done
for Flaubert, where the slightest alteration in the form of ex-
pression can be disastrous to the shape of the whole paragraph
and so to the rhythm of the total work. But in, say, Hardy's
The Return of the Native the unit of artifice is large: it is not die
individual word or phrase, but the swell of the whole paragraph,
and as long as that swell is maintained one could change phrases
and even whole sentences without impairing the work in the
least. Thi$is equally true of Scott, thoughnotwhereheis working
with vernacular dialogue, and indeed it is true of most nineteenth
century English novelists except (odd juxtaposition !) Emily Bronte
and Stevenson. It is quite unrealistic to suggest that in Hardy's
novels the expression at each point is so perfectly subdued to die
total intention that the smallest alteration would be fatal. One
could alter or omit large passages without the most perceptive
critic being aware that anything was wrong. Hardy's massive,
flinty style is based on a large unit of artifice, not, as with Flaubert,
on a small one, and differences of this kind must be noted by the
critic if he is not to make a fool of himself by applying analytic
techniques indiscriminately whether or not diey are appropriate
to the kind of craftsmanship the artist employed.

We are inclined to be hypnotized by the word 'artist'. If the
writer is an artist, we maintain, then he must be aware all die time
of the precise relation of each individual stroke to the total effect
he is aiming at. But two things should be remembered: one is
that artists are men, and therefore fallible, and their works are
thus no more perfect than the highest kind of human achievement
in other categories; the other is that the term 'artist' covers a great
many different ways of handling a communicative medium, and
brilliant craftsmanship may be demonstrated by any one of an
indefinite number of kinds of cunning. This is particularly true
of the novel, which in English especially is aa 'impure' art form

LITERARY ESSAYS

or at least we have to consider it impure if we hold too narrow
a definition of art. Our ideal definition of the novel is helpful if
we consider it as an ideal towards which certain kinds of fiction
tend; but if we allow it to determine in advance what we are
going to see in a novel, it will end by obscuring the reasons why
fiction is in fact enjoyed, and thus divorcing the critic wholly
from the appreciative reader. A critic so divorced is engaged
merely in a kind of pedantic play, which may be amusing to
himself and his fellow professionals but has no further function.
It is in order to avoid this that I have thought it worth while to
emphasize certain distinctions between different kinds of novels
and their 'peculiar pleasures'.

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE

PERHAPS THE BEST-KNOWN PASSAGE from the Bible, to English-
speaking people, is the Authorized Version rendering of the
23rd Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still
waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear
no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou
annointest my head with oil: my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

This is an English poem, grave and pellucid in style, and it has
left a permanent influence on the imagery of English poetry and
the rhythms of English prose. The tone, one might say, is
Anglican, the same tone that we find in that great Church of
England poet, George Herbert. A Hebrew psalm has in this
version become an Anglican poem; it is a rendering of the
original Hebrew, true enough, but the rendering is stamped with
the temper of those who made it. Phrases such as 'green pastures'
and 'still waters', which are so important in setting the tone of
the whole poem, are not, in fact, literal renderings of the Hebrew
'binoth deshe and 'al mai mnuchoth 9 , which mean, respectively,
'by pastures of tender grass' and 'by waters of quietness'. The
Douay version, translating from the Latin Vulgate, renders the
second verse : 'In place of pasture there he hath placed me. Upon
the water of refection he hath brought me up', and though the
literal meaning is similar, the lyric flow has disappeared.

The difference is not doctrinal. The Anglican calm of the
Authorized Version rendering does not arise from the fact that the

Ip2 LITERARY ESSAYS

translators were drawing on the special features of their variety
of Protestant Christianity, for many of the special features of
their translation came originally from the Geneva translation of
1560, which was the work of Puritans who worked before the
Anglican compromise and who would not have accepted it if
they had known of it. The Geneva version begins: 'The Lord is
my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to rest in grene
pasture, and leadeth me by the stil waters. He restoreth my
soule, . . . ' The English psalter of 1530 begins the psalm: 'The
lorde is my pastore and feader: wherfore I shal not wante. He
made me to feade on a full plenteous bade grownde: and did
dryve and retche me at layser by the swete ryvers.*

The personality of the psalm, as it were, differs in each render-
ing. In the Vulgate the notion of 'Shepherd' disappears completely,
and instead of the psalm opening 'The Lord is my shepherd; I
shall not want', it begins : 'Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit'
(The Lord rules me, and nothing will be lacking to me). The
'green pastures' of the Geneva and Authorized versions are in the
Vulgate the much more factual, even technical, 'in loco pascuae,
while 'super aquam refectionis ('upon the water of refection', as
we have seen Douay translate it) stresses the reviving nature of
the waters and says nothing about their stillness. The whole tone
of the psalm is more businesslike and practical in the Vulgate.

Luther's German version has the greenness, but makes the water
fresh rather than still: 'Er weidet mich auf einer grunen Aue, and
fiihret mich zumfrischen Wasser? This is not too far removed from
the Authorized Version, though the first verse in Luther 'Der
Herr ist mein Hirte; mir wird nichts mangeln has not the flow of
the English, due largely to the accumulation of consonants. 'Mir
wird nichts mangeln 9 is a clumsy mouthful beside 'I sh.aU not want',
with its liquid '11' and V. And no European translation has the
perfect simplicity of the Hebrew: 'Yahwe ro-i, lo echsor!

If you cannot achieve the simplicity of the Hebrew original,
you can always try for a quite different effect. Here are the first
two verses of the psalm in de Saci's French Bible (Paris, 1759) :

C 9 est le Seigneur qui me conduit: rien ne pourra me mwquer.

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 193

U ma ttabli dans un lieu abondant en paturages: il ma tlevt pres Sum eau
fortifiante.

This is translated from the Vulgate, not the Hebrew, but it is
equally removed in tone from both. Nor does it bear any resem-
blance to the efficient German or the limpid English. The first
verse reads like a line from a neo-classic tragedy. One can almost
imagine someone inquiring of the heroine -Phedre, say,

Ah Ph&dre, who leads you yonder through the dark?
and Phedre answering,

C'est le Seigneur qui me conduit: rien ne pourra me manauer.
('Tis the noble lord himself: I can lack nothing now.)

Further, 6 eau fortifiante 9 suggests smelling salts, and the 'lieu abon-
dant en paturages suggests Marie Antoinette playing at being a
milkmaid rather than the realities of pastoral life in Palestine.

Every language, and sometimes every age, produces its own
Bible. The Authorized Version, with which English-speaking
readers are most familiar, represents the final successful attempt,
after nearly a hundred years of continuous effort, to put the Bible
into an English which does no violence to the natural genius of
the language: the Hebrew Bible is in this version a work of
English literature, and has all the assurance of an original work.
One can see this assurance developing through the earlier versions.
Here is the Authorized Version rendering of Joshua 24.26: 'And
Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and
took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by
the sanctuary of the Lord/ This is a simple enough sentence,
done in workmanlike prose, flowing naturally with nothing
forced or artificial about it. Compare it with the version in
Matthew's Bible of 1537: 'And Josua wrotte these wordes in
the boke of the law of God, and toke a great stonne and pitched
it on ende in the sayde place euen vnder an ocke that stode in the
sanctuary of the Lorde.' There is a verbosity here, arising from
the translator's anxiety to get in all of his original, and as a result
the tone is somewhat forced, the passage is not yet properly
acclimatized in English.

194 LITERARY ESSAYS

The Hebrew Bible, when properly domiciled in seventeenth
century English (and seventeenth century English, which Dr
Johnson in his Dictionary drew on as the great standard of English
vocabulary, has become the norm of English religious speech),
has a quality, a tone, even a meaning, as different from that of the
original as from that of any other translation. Luther's Bible,
which is the German equivalent of the English Authorized Version,
gives a very different feel to the passage from Joshua which I have
just quoted: "Undjosua schrieb dies alles ins Gesetzbuch Gottes; und
nahm einengrossen Stein und richtete ihn auf daselbst einer Eiche, die
bey dem Heiligthum des Herrn war! How different in essential
meaning is 'ins Gesetzbuch Gottes" from 'in the book of the law of
God', and again how different both these renderings are from the
three stark Hebrew words, 'b'sefer torath elohim. The German is
stark in its own way, but with the starkness of a report written
by an efficient civil servant. The English, with its long run of
monosyllables, each a word of elemental significance ('book',
law', *God',) has certain overtones of familiarity, or at least of
simple customarrness, for all its dignity. Yet Hebrew, Authorized
Version and Luther are more like each other than either is to the
English version of Monsignor Knox, who renders the phrase 'in
the book which contained the divine law', adding a verb and
changing a noun phrase into an adjective and in so doing giving a
sophisticated abstractness to the whole notion.

A good test of the intention of any translator, or group of
translators, is their rendering of the very first verse of the Hebrew
Bible. The Authorized Version translates : 'In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth', and you might think that that
was the only possible way to translate a very straightforward
original (unless, perhaps, you decided to make 'heaven' plural,
because of the form 'shamayim). Monsignor Knox, however,
renders the sentence: 'God, at the beginning of time, created
heaven and earth', which is a very different idiom indeed, an
idiom of didactic elegance rather than of primitive simplicity.
The French has something of Monsignor Knox's tone: 'Au
commencement Dieu cria le del et la terre 9 , which becomes even more

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 195

pronounced in the following verse: 'La terre etait informe et toute
nue; les tenebres couvraient la face de Yabime; et YEsprit de Dieu etait
portesur les eaux? The difference between this and the Authorized
Version 'And the earth was without form, and void; and dark-
ness was upon the face of the earth. And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters', is the difference between Virgil and
Homer, between the artificial epic and the natural epic. Indeed,
such a phrase as 'les tenebres couvraient la face de Yabime might have
come out of Victor Hugo. Luther is much more like the Author-
ized Version: 'Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde. Und die
Erde war wuste und leer, und es warfinster aufder Tiefe; und der Geist
Gottes schwebete aufdem WasserJ

The interesting word in the German is 'schwebete (hung in.
suspense, hovered) as a rendering of the Hebrew 'merachephetK-
Both the Authorized Version and Douay render simply 'moved',
while the Vulgate has 'ferebatur (was borne), translated in the
French version as 'etait porte. There is a long exegetical tradition,
both Jewish and Christian, attached to this word. The great
eleventh century Jewish commentator Solomon ben Isaac (gener-
ally known as Rashi) explains that the Throne of Glory was
suspended in the air and hovered over the face of the waters,
sustained by the breath (the Hebrew 'ruach 9 means both 'breath*
and 'spirit 5 ) of God and God's command, like a dove hovering
over die nest. Basil and other patristic commentators render
*incubabat\ which again has the notion of brooding and hatching.
And in Paradise Lost Milton (who knew Hebrew) wrote of the
Holy Spirit:

Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, has the sentence: 'That
is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days
hatched the world/ And Andrew Marvell, in his poem 'The
Waterfall', has the following lines:

196 LITERARY ESSAYS

Unless that spirit lead his mind
"Which first upon thy face did move,
And hatch* d all with his quickning love.

In the face of this strong tradition in favour of the notion of
brooding and hatching as implied in 'merachepheth 9 , the Author-
ized Version translators stuck to the simple 'moved'. The case is
interesting, for as a rule the use of biblical ideas of this kind in
English literature after 161 1 came through the Authorized Version.
There was, in fact, no word which would express in English the
varied suggestions attached to the original, and rather than do
violence to the language, the translators kept the simple and
general word, 'moved'. It is testimony to the store they set by
simple and idiomatic English.

Consider another example. Most of us know the opening of
the 4oth chapter of Isaiah from Handel's magnificent setting of
'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people', in his Messiah. The whole
of that passage in English has a grand cadence to it, rising to a
climax on 'her iniquity is pardoned' and dying away immediately
afterwards to a perfect close. (Handel, who wanted to end on
the climax, left out the closing phrase.)

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is
accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she has received of the Lord's
hand double for all her sins.

The meaning of the fine opening phrase is not clear. It seems
to mean 'Comfort yourselves, my people', but in fact the 'ye' is
not reflexive and the sense is, 'Comfort my people (says God to
the prophet)'. The Authorized Version translators risked ambi-
guity, not this time in order to keep the individual words simple,
but for the sake of the cadence. (There is even some reason for
believing that they deliberately tried to imitate the rhythm of the
original Hebrew, and put in the ambiguous 'ye' so that the phrase
would correspond in its cadence with the Hebrew 'nachamu,
nachamu ami 9 .) The Vulgate does have the reflexive sense; there
God is calling on the people to comfort themselves: ' Consolamini,

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 197

consolamini popule meus, dicit Deus vester,' which, the French ren-
ders: 'Consolez-vous, mon peuple, consolez-vous, dit votre Dieu.'
The ceremonial note of the English disappears in the utilitarian
Vulgate (though the Latin has a sonority of its own) and, even
more completely, in the elegant French. The French, indeed,
sounds to English ears rather like a ticket agent announcing
politely to a crowd of customers that all his tickets are sold out
and they must comfort themselves as best they can. Luther (fol-
lowing the Hebrew meaning) renders: 'Trostet, trostet, mein Volk,
spricht euer Gott\ which is forceful and effective. The German
continues: 'Redet mit Jerusalem freundlich und prediget ihr, dass ihre
Ritterschaft ein Ende hat, denn ihre Missethat ist vergeben; denn sie hat
zweyfaltiges empfangen von der Hand des Herrn, urn alle ihre Sunde*
This sounds a bit like a list of instructions issued in triplicate to
subordinate officials, but it has good prose rhythm and a fine
solidity. Solidity is perhaps the characteristic quality of Luther's
Bible. The English Bible, at least in the Authorized Version, has
a flowing limpidity combined with occasional ritual overtones;
the French Bible is elegant and polished and discreet; the German
Bible has a solid middle-class ring about it: it is a book for
substantial biirgerliche readers who stand no nonsense. A simple
Bible, a polite Bible, a bourgeois Bible and the Hebrew Bible
is none of these.

Another test is the famous and difficult one from the last
chapter of Ecclesiastes. The Authorized Version reads:

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men
shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those
that look out of the windows be darkened,

And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is
low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music
shall be brought low;

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the
way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden,
and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go
about the streets:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the
pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Ip8 LITERARY ESSAYS

Douay, rendering literally from the Vulgate, reads :

When the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall
stagger, and the grinders shall be idle in a small number, and they that look
through the holes shall be darkened:

And they shall shut the doors in the street, when the grinder's voice shall be
low, and they shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music
shall grow deaf.

And they shall fear high things, and they shall be afraid in the way, the almond
tree shall flourish, the locust shall be made fat, and the caper-tree shall be
destroyed: because man shall go into the house of his eternity, and the mourners
shall go round about in the street.

Before the silver cord be broken, and the golden fillet shrink back, and the
pitcher be crushed at the fountain, and the wheel be broken upon the cistern.

The obscurity is equal in both versions. The Authorized Ver-
sion makes capital out of the obscurity by choosing words which,
although simple in themselves, have overtones of vague sugges-
tion. 'And all the daughters of music shall be brought low,' is
more suggestive than the matter-of-fact 'shall grow deaf of the
Vulgate, and 'or ever the silver cord be loosed' more evocative
than 'before the silver cord be broken'. Douay tries to bully the
true sense out of the words by rendering each one with literal
correctness; the Authorized Version, while as literal as it can be,
chooses words which suggest meanings even when the precise
significance is obscure. Thus in the Authorized Version Eccle-
siastes is an English prose poem, and in the Douay translation
Ecclesiastes is a very competent rendering of a difficult Vulgate
text.

Dr Robert Gordis, in his edition and translation of Ecclesiastes
published in New York in 1945, gives us the modern scholar's
view of what the Hebrew really means:

In the day when the watchmen of the house tremble,

And the strong men are bent.

And the grinding maidens cease, for they are few,

And the ladies peering through the lattices grow dim.

When the doubled doors on the street are shut,

And the voice of the mill becomes low.

One wakes at the sound of a bird,

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 199

And all the daughters of song are laid low.
When one fears to climb a height,
And terrors lurk in a walk.

The hair grows white, like ripe almond-blossom,
The frame, bent like a grasshopper, becomes a burden,
And the caper-berry can no longer stimulate desire.

So man goes to his eternal home

While the hired mourners walk about in the street. . . .

This certainly clears up many obscurities. Much of the sug-
gestiveness is gone, but we really do know what the passage is all
about. To read this after reading the Authorized Version is like
looking at a distant mountain view after the mist has cleared and
the sun has come out; in the mist it seemed wonderful and
romantic, but we could not make out the individual features of
the scene at all. Clear and simple though the Authorized Version
so often is, readers respond more often than they think to the
vague thrills of the mist-enwrapped view rather than to the
details of the landscape. (One could go through the Book of
Job, for example, and point out scores of phrases which, in the
Authorized Version, have had an immense influence on the de-
velopment of English religious thought every one of them mis-
understood. But this is partly due to mistranslation of a difficult
text.)

But to return to Ecclesiastes. Consider now de Saci's French
translation of the passage I have been discussing:

lorsque les gardes de la maison commemeront a trembler; que les hommes les plus
forts s ebranleront; que celles qui avaient accoutuml de moudre } seront reduites en
petit nombre et deviendront oisives, et que ceux qui regardaient par les trous, seront
couverts de timbres;

quand onfermera lesportes de la rue, quand la voix de celle qui avait accoutume de
moudre serafaible, quon se levera au chant de Foiseau et que les files de Vharmonie
deviendront sourdes; . . .

avant que la chaine d 9 argent soit rompue, que la landelette d'or se retire, que la
cruche se brise sur lafontaine, et que la roue se rompe sur la dterne.

The rhythms here are not dissimilar from those of the Author-
ized Version they derive from the grouping of the phrases in

2OO LITERARY ESSAYS

the original Hebrew, and carry over in some degree into all
translations but there is a tone of secular elegance about the
French which derives from some profound quality of the French
literary language. And while the German retains the note of
romantic suggestion, it seems more solidly grounded in physical
occurrences than it does in the English:

. . . Und die Thtiren auf der Gasse geschlossen werden, doss die Stimme der
Milllerin leise wird, und erwachet, wenn der Vogel singet, und sich bucken die.
Tochter des Gesangs. . . .

There is something about 'VogeF that is lacking in 'bird', and a
phrase such as 'und erwachet, wenn der Vogel singe? suggests a
characteristic phase of German romantic poetry, while 'and he
shall rise up at the voice of the bird' (every word a monosyllable)
has an elemental folk feeling. The whole German rendering of
this passage is to the English of the Authorized Version rather
what the heavy magic of Heine's 'Das ist der alte Marchenwald 9 is
to the less sophisticated mystery of one of Wordsworth's 'Lucy'
poems:

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees.

There are, of course, other translations of the Hebrew Bible
besides English, French and German, each of which has its own
special flavour. The Italian, for example, sounds curiously un-
scriptural to those (and they probably include most non-Italian
readers of the language) who have got used to Dante as the
standard Italian example of a serious, formal, yet simple imagery
and vocabulary, and it is always a shock to find that the Italian
Bible sounds much more like the Decameron than like the Divina
Commedia. There is no limit to the comparing of different trans-
lations of the Hebrew Bible or to the different kinds of passages
narrative, prophetic, lyrical, gnomic whose varying appearance
in different languages can be discussed. The Hebrew Bible is the
source of many different Bibles, each drawing out some quality
in the original which would not at first necessarily strike the
reader of the Hebrew text; each is biblical in its own way, yet

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 2OI

none can claim to reflect wholly the Hebrew Bible. But then
what 'the Hebrew Bible' is can never be fully stated: it, too,
has been a different book to different readers and to different
generations.

There are other, and perhaps more profound, questions to be
asked about the translation of the Bible besides the literary ones.
Have different religions, and different denominations, managed
to produce renderings which convey a significance peculiar to
their own beliefs? This is certainly true of some key passages, for
example, in the prophets and in the Book of Job. For I know that
my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth', is the Authorized Version rendering of Job. 19.25,
and the reference is considered to be to the coming of Christ.
The American Jewish translation of 1917 renders : 'But as for me,
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He will witness at the
last upon the dust', where the Redeemer is, of course, God. In
fact, however, the Hebrew word 'goali probably has a legal
significance: much of the Book of Job is couched in legal ter-
minology, with Job demanding- to know what offence he is
charged with and asking for a defending counsel to take up his
cause. In this verse he seems to be expressing confidence that
eventually a defending attorney will stand up for him (against the
satan, who is not the Devil but the angel charged with public
prosecutions, as it were, by God). Both Jewish and Christian
interpreters have taken a more general, and indeed a more im-
pressive, meaning out of the text, but in doing so have obscured
the significance of much of its characteristic imagery. This is in
interesting case of the development of religious ideas changing
the meaning of the text.

A more obvious case is Isaiah 7.14, where the traditional
Christian rendering was for centuries: 'Behold, a virgin, shall
conceive . . . ' and the passage was taken as a prophecy of the
virgin birth of Christ. Modern, Christian scholarship recognizes
that 'virgin' is a deliberate mistranslation of the Hebrew, and
the American Revised Standard Version reads 'Behold, a
young woman shall conceive', in agreement with Jewish render-

2O2 LITERARY ESSAYS

ings. Then there is Isaiah 14.12, translated in the Authorized
Version as : 'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of
the morning', in accordance with the traditional Christian view
that this is a reference to the fall of Satan. But the Hebrew word
'hekl 9 means 'morning star' (rendered in Latin as 'Lucifer',
'light-bearer') and the prophet is using the term figuratively for
Babylon, which had fallen from its position of power and radiance ;
the Babylonians worshipped Istar, the morning star. The Ameri-
can Jewish translation renders : 'How art thou fallen from heaven,
O day-star son of the morning!' while the American Revised
Standard Version renders similarly: 'How you are fallen from,
heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!' Modern scholars, whatever
their religious beliefs, tend to put accuracy before doctrinal con-
siderations, with the result that there is much less difference
between Jewish and Christian renderings of the Hebrew Bible
today than there was three centuries ago.

More interesting, perhaps, than differences in the rendering of
individual words and phrases are the doctrinal implications of a
translation as a whole. As long as the Catholic Church did not
believe in vernacular translations, and held even the Vulgate to
be what might almost be called a technical work for the pro-
fessional churchman, there was no attempt to give grace and
polish to biblical renderings. The mediaeval Catholic layman got
his knowledge of the Bible indirectly through sermons and other
intermediary presentations by priests. And when the climate of
opinion eventually moved the Roman Catholic Church to bring
out its own translation, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, it produced a flinty literal rendering from the Vulgate.
In direct contrast, left-wing Protestantism believed in the Bible
as the only true source of the Christian religion and strove to
make vernacular versions available to all. But the belief in the
literal verbal inspiration of the Bible which accompanied this
attitude led to the Bible being regarded as a sort of divine refer-
ence book, to be quoted, regardless of the general context of any
given passage, as a series of separable texts, each with its precise
and literal significance. This produced no more feeling of literary

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 2O3

style than the Catholic belief in the professional and technical
nature of the Bible. It was left for the Anglican Church, which
believed in vernacular translation without going so far as the
bibliolatry of the Puritans, and considered the Bible as a monu-
ment of divine eloquence rather than as a divine reference book,
to sponsor Bible translation as a work of literature as well as a
work of theology. The Authorized Version, more than any
other biblical translation in any European language, was a literary
rendering; it was not a 'crib' but a work of literature in its own
right, written in a style which generations of translators had
gradually developed as the appropriate English style for that kind
of work. It is interesting that now that the Catholic Church has
long regarded vernacular translations as perfectly proper, the
modern Catholic translator tries hard to be literary rather than
technical in his rendering. Monsignor Knox's translation of the
Old Testament is the most 'literary' ever produced; it is written
in a deliberately artificial style, with carefully modulated rhythms,
paragraphs rising and falling in studied cadence, and sentences
flowing in a manner reminiscent of the later George Moore:

Thus Noemi left her dwelling place; and when she set foot on the road that
led to the domain of Juda, she turned to her companions, and bade either go
back to her own mother's house; May the Lord shew kindness to you, she
said, as you have shewn kindness to the memory of the dead, and to me; may
you live at ease with new husbands. And with that she gave them a parting
kiss. But no, they wept aloud, and declared they would go on in her company,
to the home of her own people. Come with me, my daughters? she answered.
Nay, you must go back. I have no more sons in my womb to wed you; go
back, daughters, and leave me; I am an old woman, past the age for marrying.

This is a remarkable accomplishment, and not merely a stylistic
one, for there is much scholarship distilled in each turn of phrase;
yet one cannot help feeling that this is almost too literary, that the
churchman converted to the view that the Bible which is a basic
technical document of his faith is also a supreme work of literature
is demonstrating rather too flamboyantly his new state of mind.

To most English-speaking readers, the literary style, or styles,
rather, for the Bible has many, made popular by the Authorized

204 LITERARY ESSAYS

Version seem to be most appropriate, because they are the most
familiar, and the problem is to make the Bible more accurate
without losing that cherished traditional flavour. The Revised
Standard Version, which is a revision of a revision of the Author-
ized Version, retains some of its magic but it has inevitably also
lost much, in its striving after greater accuracy. The American
Jewish translation, though it called itself 'a new translation', kept
the basic idiom of the Authorized Version more than might have
been expected. (For example, it preserved the misleading 'y e '
in 'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people', where the Revised
Standard Version has, 'Comfort, comfort my people says your
God'.) What do we now demand of an English translation of
the Bible? Surely a translation which is both accurate and grace-
ful, based on the soundest available scholarship and expressed in
fluent, idiomatic and dignified English. Such a translation is
bound to abandon even more of the Authorized Version tradition
than either the Revised Version or the Revised Standard Version
has done; yet to go to the other extreme and deliberately cut off
the poetic overtones of the original (as Dr Gordon sometimes
does in his version of Ecclesiastes, rendering, for example, 'Cast
thy bread upon the waters' as 'send your goods overseas', which
is a dull paraphrase, not a translation) is useless self-denial. A
scholarly literary translation, deriving without prejudice or pre-
conception from the best scholarship wherever it is found, and
creating its own style as it moves according to the literary forms
of the original, about which so much new knowledge is now
available, is a desideratum for Jew and Gentile alike. But the
problem is not as easy as this. The Bible is not only what modern
scholarship holds the text to mean; it is also what the text has
meant to generations of devout readers. Modern scholarship,
after all, is concerned to reconstruct the meaning originally in-
tended by die first writers or compilers of the text, but that
meaning caiuiot have been constant even for those early writers.
The simplest lyric poem, as every modern critic knows, takes on
new meanings with each sensitive reading, and how much more
so must a work like the Bible! Can modern scholarship in the

TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 2O5

English-speaking world conceive of a translation which, while
accurate and literary, manages at the same time to convey in its
idiom something of what the Hebrew Bible has meant to gene-
rations of readers, both Jewish and Christian? The ideal may sound
Utopian, but it is surely a task worth attempting.

RELIGION, POETRY AND THE 'DILEMMA' OF THE
MODERN WRITER 1

N" EARLY THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO JOHN MILTON, pondering
in his age and blindness over the mysteries of human fate
and thinJdng doubtless of the bitter frustrations and dis-
appointments of his own life, put into the mouth of his hero
Samson an almost desperate questioning of God's ways with
man:

God of our Fathers, what is man!
That thou towards him with hand so various,
Or might I say contrarious,

Temper'st thy providence through his short course,
Not evenly, as thou rul'st
The Angelic orders and inferior creatures mute,
Irrational and brute.

Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That wand'ring loose about
Grow up and perish, as the summer fly,
Heads without name no more rernember'd,
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
"With gifts and graces eminently adorn' d
To some great work, thy glory,
And people's safety, which in part they effect:
Yet toward these, thus dignifi'd, thou oft,
Amidst t-hir highth of noon,

Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard
Of highest favours past
From thee on them, or them to thee of service.

The cry is a familiar one in the history of literature. Why do the
wicked prosper and the virtuous suffer? It was a very real question
for Milton as he sat in darkness and heard the bells ring out the
end of all his political hopes, the end of his dream of being the

1 Delivered at the Institute for Religious and Social Studies, New York, on
3 ist January, 1950.

206

POETRY AND RELIGION 20y

poet and prophet of a new and regenerate England; as he heard
the celebrators of the restoration of Charles II,

The Sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine,

roistering in the streets outside. 'Why standest Thou afar off, O
Lord? Why hidest Thou thyself in times of trouble? . . . For the
wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and the covetous vaunteth
himself, though he contemn the Lord.' So the Hebrew psalmist
had long before asked the same question. It was Job's question,
too. 'Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard : I cry aloud,
but there is no justice.' 'Wherefore do the wicked live, become
old, yea, are mighty in power?'

This old question of theodicy, of the justice of God, or, if we
prefer, of the way in which the universe is organized so far as it
affects man, has long been a central theme in literature. The
answer is generally given in terms of attitude rather than of logic.
Job's problem disappears in a note of wonder wonder at the
grandeur and immensity of creation. The psalmist finds refuge in
faith: 'Better is a little that the righteous hath than the abundance

of many wicked For the wicked shall perish, and the enemies

of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs they shall pass away in
smoke, they shall pass away.' The Prometheus of Aeschylus, on
the other hand, strikes a note of heroic self-confidence eo-o/oas-
ju'co? e/cSi/ca iraex^ 'behold me, how unjust are my sufferings'.
These are very different answers to a single question, but they are
all literary answers rather than philosophical solutions. By this
I mean that the answers have force and meaning in virtue of
their poetic expression, of the place they take in the myth or
fable or situation presented, and of the effectiveness with which
they project a mood. Job's solution is no answer if detached from
its eloquent expression and paraphrased as a philosophical position.
Such a procedure would make Job sound merely pusillanimous,
just as it would make the psalmist a naive self-deceiver and
Prometheus a futile exhibitionist. In other words, we see in
earlier literature a religious (or mythological) tradition and a
literary tradition mutually supporting each other, each depend-

208 LITERARY ESSAYS

ing on the other for full richness of expression and significance.
Let me try to explain this point more fully by turning again to
Milton. We know that the justification of the ways of God to
men, the professed theme of Paradise Lost, was a major pre-
occupation of Milton's throughout his life. We see the problem
first stated in 'Lycidas', a poem ostensibly lamenting the death of
a young friend who died before he was able to fulfil his promise
as poet and teacher but actually concerned with the larger prob-
lem of the ambitious idealist in an uncertain and arbitrary world.
What is the use of dedicating oneself to a future of service to
humanity (in Milton's case, through the writing of poetry 'doc-
trinal and exemplary to a nation') if one might be cut off at any
moment, before even one's period of self-preparation was
completed?

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?

The question is turned this way and that throughout the poem,
and every kind of traditional answer suggested before the real
answer emerges in the mood and tone of the conclusion:

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th* Oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray.
He touch* t the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the Sun had stretch* d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twich't his Mande blue:
Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

Like God's answer to Job in the whirlwind, this is not a logical
disposal of the problem, but the distillation of a mood in the
light of which die poet is able to carry on. The quiet sunrise
which proclaims a new day brings a note of humility and accep-
tance to the poet, who now describes himself as an 'uncouth
swain* that is, an unknown or unlearned rustic and with that

POETRY AND RELIGION 20p

comes the determination to do what one can while one can, to
enjoy such beauty as life grants and to turn one's hand to what
lies to be done without too much speculation on possible accidents :
'Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new' has the sound
both of peace and of purpose.

When his blindness came, some fifteen years later, Milton
again raised the question of God's justice in so dealing with him:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
I fondly ask?

But Patience replies, and stills the poet's questioning with a
picture of various services rendered by different men actively or
passively, God being best served by those Vho best bear his mild
yoke'; and the poem ebbs quietly away on the concluding line:
'They also serve who only stand and wait/ Has this answer
vindicated God's justice? No; but it has projected a mood in the
light of which life seems more interesting, more significant, and
more tolerable.

In Paradise Lost the justification of the ways of God to men is
developed on a more deliberate and even grandiose scale. On the
surface Milton, by telling the story of man's fall in Eden, is
showing that man fell by a deliberate abuse of his free-will, so
that he has himself and not God to blame, and also pointing out
that God provided a scheme of redemption which would enable
those who made the effort to attain to a state far above that from
which Adam fell. Thus man deserved what he got by deliberately
doing evil, but God in His mercy brought good out of evil by
the Christian scheme of redemption. This is the cold, paraphras-
able message of Paradise Lost, but it is neither the true meaning of
the poem nor the real way in which Milton justified the ways of
God to men. The real justification of God's dealings with men

210 LITERARY ESSAYS

lies in the implicit contrast between the ideal idleness of the
Garden of Eden and the changing and challenging world of moral
effort and natural beauty which resulted from the Fall. This
argument is presented obliquely and continuously through mood
and imagery: when the beauty of Eve in her unfallen state is
described in terms of classical myths which give an atmosphere
of ineffable loveliness to the whole picture we get a sense of values
which can only emerge in the fallen human imagination. The
posdapsarian world (to use the theological term) may lack the
bliss of Eden, with its perpetual spring and its freedom from the
curse of earning one's daUy bread by the sweat of one's brow,
but the procession of the seasons which was part of the punish-
ment of the Fall provides some of Milton's most moving imagery,
while symbols of rustic labour with its beauty and dignity con-
tradict or at least modify the explicit statement that work was
imposed on man as a curse. Even prelapsarian nature, ideal
nature before the Fall, can only be made desirable in our eyes in
terms drawn from a posdapsarian consciousness, just as good can
only be made significant in terms of moral effort against known
evil evil known only in man's fallen state.

The real theme of Paradise Lost is man's essential and tragic
ambiguity, illustrated in the fact that love is bound up with
selfishness (as when Adam follows Eve's example in eating the
forbidden apple because he cannot live without her) ; that good
is bound up with evil; that the beauty which adorns the earth as
it passes from seed-time to harvest, from the white of winter to
the gay colours of spring, is bound up with change, and change,
which means growth, also means decay; that the rich pattern of
different human civilizations as Milton passes them under review
with all the magic of exotic and musical place names and the
excitement of geographical discovery was made possible by the
curse of Babel; that the dignity and beauty of rustic labour, the
basis of some of Milton's finest similes, is the other side of the
law which decrees starvation and suffering for those who can
find no land or no work. In the personal outburst at the beginning
of the third book, what the blind Milton most laments are those

POETRY AND RELIGION 211

sights of seasonal change which resulted from the loss of Eden's
perpetual spring :

Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of EVIL or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off. ...

They are 'the cheerful ways of men' still, in spite of 'the sons of
Belial flown with insolence and wine'. And the curse that e in the
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread' can make possible the
imagery of such lines as these:

As one who long in populous City pent,
Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Air,
Forth issuing on a Summer's Morn to breathe
Among the pleasant Villages and Farms
Adjoin'd, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of Grain, or tedded Grass, or Kine,
Or Dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound. . . .

This is how Milton justifies the ways of God to men by
showing through the emotional pattern of his great poem how
everything worth while that we can conceive of is made possible
by the results of the Fall. Again, this is not a logical but a poetic
solution to his problem, like the solution of Job and of the
psalmist. A religious tradition and a poetic sensibility co-operated
to produce an effect which needed both but which was wholly
produced by neither.

In Samson Agonistes Milton handled this problem for the last
time. Samson the hero was brought pitifully low, apparently
deserted by God, and he recovered only to destroy himself with
his enemies. Samson's moral recovery is a main theme of the
play, but we know from the beginning that there is no going back
to the young heroic Samson doing great deeds for his country.
He recovers only to die. Is that fair or just on God's part? Is that
the only answer to his great cry: 'God of our Fathers, what is

212 LITERARY ESSAYS

man!'? No: the real answer is an aesthetic one; it lies in the
'katharsis' which the tragedy produces. The chorus sums up the
significance of the action in the well-known conclusion:

His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

This is Milton's interpretation of the Aristotelian 'katharsis', the
purgation of the emotions through pity and fear, which is
Aristotle's view of the function of tragedy. The calm of mind
produced by the tragic 'katharsis' is at the same time the mood
which accepts God's dealings with men as just. At the end of his
life Milton completely and finally reconciled religion and aes-
thetics, the Christian and the humanist, by justifying the ways of
God to men in terms of a mood distilled aesthetically by tragedy.
What Professor Douglas Bush has called 'the dilemma of a sacred
poet and a Puritan bred in the congenial air of Renaissance
classicism' was resolved by applying a classical notion of the
function of tragedy to the solution of Job's question.

What I am trying to show is that the interplay between religious
and aesthetic impulses has always been fruitful in literature and
that an appreciation of it is independent of the reader's creed or
philosophical system. One could demonstrate a similar interplay
in Dante and Shakespeare as well as in the Greek dramatists. But
I must hasten on, to ask the questions that we are most concerned
with here. Has the contemporary literary artist anything to learn
from this? Has die disintegration of community of belief which
most observers agree to be a characteristic of our present age
altered the situation so radically that the kind of thing done by
Aeschylus and Dante and Milton. posing questions suggested by

religion and answering them in literary or aesthetic terms

becomes impossible? Is there an unbridgeable gap between the
past of literature and the contemporary literary artist?

These are not easy questions to answer, and they certainly
cannot be adequately answered here. I am all too conscious of
the dangers of facile generalization and of the ease with which a

POETRY AND RELIGION 213

showy thesis can be developed by the manipulation of an arbitrary
selection of examples. As I try to cast my mind's eye over the
vast array of works of literary art from the Book of Job to a
poem by Mr Eliot and think of the numerous changes in taste
and attitude, the immense diversity of works and of writers, and
the vastly different conscious objectives which different artists
have set themselves, I can see how tentative and inadequate any
answer to the questions I have raised must be even if I were much
more of a polymath than I can allow myself to claim. But in the
realm of critical ideas nothing significant can be achieved without
boldness; so, having listed the dangers, let me now proceed to
ignore them.

What does the loss of a common background of religious
attitudes and symbols mean to literature? The problem has
agitated poets for over a century. Nearly a hundred years ago
Matthew Arnold, in his poem 'Dover Beach', expressed a view
which is central to our present discontents. Looking out over
the Straits of Dover on a calm, moonlit night he listened to
the splash of the waves on the shore and thought how Sophocles
had heard in that sound 'the turbid ebb and flow of human
misery'. He continued:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

214 LITERARY ESSAYS

This mood of what Professor Trilling has called 'controlled
self-pity', this elegiac note which enables the poet to face a world
without faith, represents a rather different use of poetic devices
from that which we find at the conclusion of Job or even in
Milton. The earlier writers, it is true, projected a mood, which is
what Arnold is doing, but it was a mood which enabled man to
achieve new equanimity and go about his business untroubled. In
Job, in the older Greek dramatists, in Dante, in many of Shakes-
peare's tragedies, and in Milton, a 'katharsis' is achieved which
frees writer and reader alike from inhibitive brooding. One
might even venture a rash generalization and say that these older
works freed man for action, while much romantic literature
consigns man to perpetual introspection. In fact, this might be
if not an adequate at least a workable definition of the two terms,
'classical' and 'romantic'. When Milton grows impatient with
God and his destiny he writes a poem which resolves his doubts
through projecting a mood of acceptance and preparation for
action. Keats, concerned with the same fear that haunted Milton
in 'Lycidas', afraid, that is, lest he might die 'before my pen has
gleaned my teeming brain', found an answer in pure introspection :

When I behold upon the night's starred face
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

How different this is from 'Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and
Pastures new' or even 'They also serve who only stand and wait'.
Can we go so far as to say that an art with a religious back-
ground can achieve 'katharsis' more effectively than one without
one? The Romantic poets, who substituted introspective plan-
gency for religious assurance, often saw the function of art quite
differently from the way in which Dante or Shakespeare saw it.

POETRY AND RELIGION 215

Differences between Dante the mediaeval Catholic and Shake-
speare the tolerant humanist are numerous and profound enough,
but they are both religious in the sense in which I am using the
term, a sense in which Keats and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold
are not religious. The ending of Hamlet or Macbeth, with the
reasserting of the norm and the preparation for daily activity is,
in the largest symbolic sense, comparable to the ending of Dante's
Inferno : 'e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (And thence we came
forth to see again the stars).

The release from troubled introspection into action is, however,
very far from being the objective or the achievement of, say,
Tennyson's 'Break, break, break', Arnold's 'Dover Beach' we
can all add indefinitely to the list which cultivate that very state
from which the classical 'katharsis' (I am using the term now
widely and symbolically) seeks to relieve writer and reader. The
cultivation of this state is not, it should be added, peculiar to the
English Romantic poets : there is, in fact, no more perfect example
of it than in that remarkable sonnet 'L' Infinite 9 by the Italian poet
Leopardi in which a mood of complete surrender to trance-like
contemplation is deliberately cultivated :

Cosi tra questa

Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar me. dolce in questo mare.

Thus amid this vastness my thought is drowned,
And shipwreck is sweet to me in such a sea.

The mood of 'Dover Beach' or 'Break, break, break' is not, of
course, uniquely Romantic : it is not the mood so much as the use
to which it is put in the poem that differentiates Arnold's des-
cription of the waves breaking on the lonely shore from similar
descriptions in the classics from say, the picture of Achilles in
the twenty-third book of the Iliad mourning for his dead comrade
Patrodus as he lay ev Kadapa> 56 k KV^ar 9 CTT' ytovos tfAuJeovcov
(in a lonely place where the waves plashed upon the shore).
That is one of the most evocative if you like, romantic lines
in Greek literature, but its purpose is not to exploit the temporary

2l6 LITERARY ESSAYS

mood of plangent meditation but to prepare the way for the
final 'katharsis' of Achilles' anger and grief.

Nevertheless, as Matthew Arnold saw as clearly as anybody, a
mood of self-pity, however controlled and beautifully expressed,
cannot for long remain a literary norm. In England, the mid and
late nineteenth century poets played all possible variations on it
and its potentialities were soon exhausted. A classical reaction set
in in the second decade of the present century, with T. E. Hulme
calling on the poets, in a misquoted line from the seventeenth
century dramatist John Webster, to 'end your moan and come
away'. Hulme advocated, and prophesied, a period of c dry, hard,
classical verse'. The cry was taken up by Eliot and others, and a
revolution in poetic taste was achieved within a generation. 'The
poet', wrote Eliot in 1917, 'has not a "personality" to express, but
a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a persona-
lity, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar
and unexpected ways.' But in fact neither Eliot nor any other
significant poet of our time was content to make of poetry the
mere arranging of impressions and experiences in peculiar and
unexpected ways. If the classical poets again using the terms
widely and symbolically had created literature by exploiting the
impact of personality on a religious tradition, and the Romantic
poets had exploited personality by itself, what was the modern
poet to do, who shared the Romantic poets' confusion about
religion and at the same time repudiated their exploitation of
personality? They could, of course, take Voltaire's position, and
say that if God did not exist it would be necessary to create him,
and some of the arguments brought forward by Air Eliot in his
prose writing almost suggest that at tunes this is the line that he
took. In his later poetry, however, from 'Ash Wednesday' on,
Mr Eliot has been concerned with the impact of personality on a
religious tradition, and in the Four Quartets he has been remarkably
successful in distilling a mood in the light of which the religious
position becomes meaningful if not logically demonstrable. And
that, as we have seen, is the way classical art works.
But Mr Eliot's solution is not wholly satisfactory, and certainly

POETRY AND RELIGION 2iy

not one that can be successfully employed by others, because,
however sincerely his religious emotion is felt (and it is not for
the literary critic to presume to judge that), the materials it works
on are academic and its documents not central to any religious
tradition. (Saint John of the Cross, for example, is a more
fundamental source of imagery and structure in many of his
poems than the Bible or the prayer book, and there is a curious
air of coy connoisseurship about his handling of religious docu-
ments.) There is, in fact, however much Mr Eliot may repudiate
personality in poetry, a highly idiosyncratic personality at work
here whose solutions of common problems are not really helpful
to others, for all the influence of his merely technical procedures
on younger poets.

The conflict between faith and reason, between religion and
experience, is not the modern problem our contemporary writers
have to solve. The more vital the religious tradition, the more
real and fruitful has that conflict been : it is, as I have tried to show,
in Job, the Greek dramatists, Paradise Lost, as well as in Dante and
Shakespeare. The modern problem is to find a valid tradition
with reference to which literary artists can pit their personality
with poetic profit. There is always a gap between a traditional
formulation of values and individual experience, and across that gap
sparks the poetic insight. You can sometimes get away with mak-
ing your own tradition, as in a sense Eliot has, for his Christian
tradition is not, I venture to think, identical with any of the main
forms of the Christian tradition in Western civilization, but there
is something both artificial and dangerous about this: for how
can there be tension between your personal experience and the
impersonal tradition, when the impersonal tradition is something
you have discovered or created for yourself? Yet there are ways
out of this dilemma dangerous ways, and not always imitable
ways,but nevertheless ways which have on occasion been success-
fully taken. Let me glance briefly at two of these, that taken by
W. B. Yeats and that taken by Dylan Thomas.

There is a well-known statement of his early position made by
Yeats in his autobiographical work, The Trembling of the Veil:

2l8 LITERARY ESSAYS

I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested,
of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion,
almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of
personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on
from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from
philosophers and theologians

If this was all that Yeats had done, he would not have become
the great poet we know him to have been. For to repudiate the
religious tradition and to put in its place a tradition derived from
the reflection of that repudiated tradition in art and philosophy
is neither logical nor helpful. What is religion but the primary
expression of those basic myths and values which in turn are used
by artists in the way I have tried to suggest? The genuine agnostic
can understand and appreciate a religious tradition in life and art,
and understand how the tensions between that tradition and in-
dividual personality have helped to produce great art, but he
certainly cannot go to that art and pick out from it a religious
tradition unacceptable to him in its explicit form, though Yeats
was not alone in thinking that this could be done. What makes
Yeats's statement of his problem so interesting is not the solution
he suggests but the awareness of the problem that it shows. He
needed a religious tradition to work with, but he could not accept
any tradition specifically denominated as religious.

We know, of course, what he eventually did. He built for
himself out of the oddest and most miscellaneous material a
symbolic system with reference to which he could organize his
poetic expression. But if it was his own system, created by
himself, how could he set himself over against it to develop those
tensions between individual insight and impersonal system which
I have suggested are the most significant way in which a poet can
use a tradition? The answer is that the conflict in Yeats's poems is
not between himself and the system, but between two aspects of
the system, which, being a dialectical one, a balancing of opposites,
afforded him all the tensions he could handle. The system itself,
with its lunar phases and towers and spinning tops and spiral
staircases, was based on the perpetual merging of opposites. As

POETRY AND RELIGION

you climb the spiral staircase you move through all the points on
the circumference of a circle, but when you reach the top of the
spiral, which is a circle with an infinitely small circumference,
you are at all points in the circumference simultaneously. Yeats's
poetic imagery had been from the beginning dominated by a
conflict of opposites; in his early poetry we find perpetually the
human world contrasted with the supernatural world of faery,
the familiar and domestic with the wild and strange, the tame
with the heroic, the Christian with the pagan. Later on, his
images seem to coalesce into a tertium quid, so that simple contrasts
disappear and we find symbolic probings into the underlying
affinity of apparent opposites. We have this implicidy in the
'Byzantium' poems, and quite explicitly in some of the 'Crazy
Jane' poems :

A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

Or consider:

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom: young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

Or this, from 'A Woman Young and Old' :

How could passion run so deep

Had I never thought

That die crime of being born

Blackens all our lot?

But where the crime's committed

The crime can be forgot.

'Out of our quarrel with others we make rhetoric/ Yeats once
remarked; 'out of our quarrel with ourselves, poetry/ Instead of
the two poles being personality and tradition, they become op-
posing aspects of personality. A self-made tradition can only be
of value to the literary artist when it contains self-contradictions.
My thesis has been, as will, I hope, be dear by now, that a

220 LITERARY ESSAYS

religious tradition is of value to the literary artist as providing a
challenge to individual experience out of which art may result.
When that tradition disintegrates, the poet can take refuge in
elegiac introspection or he can create or discover a tradition of
his own. The former practice may produce much that is valuable,
but in the nature of things it cannot be maintained for long, its
potentialities being limited and its possibilities soon exhausted.
The latter can only work when the created or discovered tradition
is complex enough to contain within itself the tensions which the
great artist needs ; if it does not contain those tensions, then the
artist is merely shadow boxing when he employs the tradition,
since, being the product of his own imagination, it cannot at the
same time be a challenge to his imagination.

Thus Yeats's dialectical symbolic system if I may use such an
ugly term for lack of a better enabled him to organize the images
and ideas in his poetry so as to achieve profound poetic statement.
Instead of his own personality wrestling with the tradition, we
find opposing elements of his own personality fighting it out and
becoming reconciled within the tradition that he pieced together
himself. This does not mean that we must understand still less
that we must agree with the fantastic system which Yeats
elaborated in A Vision before we can understand or appreciate his
poems. Of his best poems it can be safely said that his system is a
device to help him achieve the rich and significant patterning of
image and idea out of which effective poetic expression is distilled.
That significant patterning can be recognized, with all its rich
overtones of meaning, in such a poem as 'Byzantium' without
any reference to A Vision. Indeed, an attempt to interpret the
poem too specifically in terms of Yeats's system narrows the
meaning unduly and shuts off the reverberating meanings which
give the poem its greatness. There are some poems of Yeats
which do require the application of the system for their appre-
ciation, but these are his less successful ones.

Dylan Thomas has achieved a very different kind of richly
echoing poetic statement, but his success, too, is the result of his
creation or discovery of a synthetic tradition in the light of which

POETRY AND RELIGION 221

the proper tensions can be created and resolved. Christianity,
Freudian psychology, Welsh folklore, are only some of the
elements which he employs together in profound counterpoint
to produce some of the most exciting poetry of our time. For a
clearer understanding of what modern problem Thomas is solving
by this counterpointing of apparently contradictory elements in
our culture, let me quote from an author who, in an earlier phase
of his career, was painfully aware of the problem, and who has
since tried to solve it in a very different way from that chosen by
Thomas. Aldous Huxley, in the opening chapter of his novel
Antic Hay (1923) makes Theodore Gumbril, the disillusioned
school master, meditate in the school chapel as follows :

No, but seriously, Gumbnl reminded himself, the problem was very
troublesome indeed. God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exulta-
tion, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought that was all
right. But God as truth, God as 2 4- 2=4. that wasn't so clearly all right. Was
there any chance of their being the same? Were there bridges to join the two
worlds?

Gumbril decided that there were not, and therein lay his dilemma.
Or again, take the description of the string orchestra in the third
chapter of Point Counter Point (1928) :

Pongileoni's blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had
shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to
it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on
the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrana tympani; the
interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate
the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid
of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds
in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain,
and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered *Bach!'

God as a sense of warmth about the heart as opposed to God
as 2+2=4; music as a series of sound waves impinging on a
physiological organism and music as something significant and
moving these are expressed as irreconcilable alternatives. Both
explanations seem to be true, yet each seems to deny the other*
If the dilemma is posed this way, the only solution would seem
to be either complete scepticism or complete irrationality, and

222 LITERARY ESSAYS

neither scepticism nor irrationality can provide a proper environ-
ment for great art. "What the modern artist needs is some device
which will enable him to hold these conflicting attitudes in sus-
pension, as it were, or perhaps it could be better described as a
state of tension, or of counterpoint, so that instead of being in-
hibitive of value they can increase and enrich value.

Huxley's observation about music is neither new nor original.
Shakespeare's Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing, remarks in
an ironic moment: Is it not strange that sheeps* guts should hale
souls out of men's bodies?' Unlike Huxley, Shakespeare was not
tortured by this perception: he includes it dramatically as one
element in the complex and paradoxical nature of things, so that
it enriches rather than frustrates his picture of human values in
action.

Returning now to Dylan Thomas, we note that his poetic
technique enables him to handle in brilliant counterpoint all the
different explanations of human situations given by religion,
science, and folklore:

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,

Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator

Laying my ghost in metal,

The scales of this twin world tread on the double,

My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,

To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,

Image of images, my metal phantom

Forcing forth through the harebell,

My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,

I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,

Create this twin miracle.

What the modern artist needs is not so much a faith as a poetic

POETRY AND RELIGION 223

principle to enable him to counterpoint against each other the
different aspects of knowledge of which the modern world has
made him aware. Consider this fact. "We know, or we think
we know, so much about psychological conditioning, about the
psycho-somatic aspects of illness, about the effect of childhood
frustrations on adult vices, that we are in danger of being unable
to pass any moral judgment on individuals. This man committed
rape or murder, but we know that he saw something terrible in
the woodshed when he was three, was brought up in a slum, was
bullied by a drunken stepfather, had his emotions and instincts
warped and frustrated in this way or that, so that we cannot really
blame him for what he eventually was driven to do. Tout com-
prendre, cest tout pardonner, to know all is to forgive all, says the
French proverb; but to forgive all is to make it impossible to
write the Divine Comedy or Hamlet or Paradise Lost. If we knew
all about the inhibitions of King Claudius's childhood, we could
not make him the villain in a tragedy. If we knew all lago's
psychological history we might be tempted to spend all our
sympathy on him rather than on Othello. And it did not take
even that much psychology to make the Romantics turn Milton's
Satan into a hero. If our judgments of men are to be dissolved, in
psychological understanding, we can no longer pattern a tragedy
or create any significant work of art with a human situation as
its subject matter. Certainly a behaviourist psychology and I
use this term in its widest sense leaves little room for an appraisal
of personality as such, and without an appraisal of personality as
such why should Hamlet's death be any more significant than
that of Polonius?

Yet Hamlet's death, and all that leads up to it is significant
because it is implicitly set against a tradition of what is valuable
in human personality, and out of the implicit conflict with this
tradition which held, among other things, that a good man was
doing right to punish an evil one the tragedy emerges. Cannot
we too acquire a double vision and set the fact of value in human
personality beside the psychological knowledge that would seem
to break down the basis of such value, and contemplate the sub-

224 LITERARY ESSAYS

sequent tensions in art? Cannot the poet, at least, answer Huxley's
question by accepting simultaneously both of his alternatives as
each true in its own way and finding a richness of observation
and expression in which the conflict can be resolved? Even in
life, cannot we both forgive a man and pass judgment on him?
All the more so, surely, should we be able to achieve this twofold
attitude in art, which has so many devices for focussing multiple
vision.

The problem of the modern literary artist, therefore, is not to
find usable myths so much as to find ways of handling knowledge
in a context of value. Knowledge should explain without ever
explaining away ;-proof that Keats' s genius flowered early because
he had tuberculosis neither explains away the genius nor makes
tuberculosis a desirable disease; a study of the nervous system can
tell us all sorts of fascinating things about what makes us tick, but
cannot alter the basic fact that we do tick and the conviction that
in the last analysis that fact is mysterious and ineffable; neither
physiology nor psychology nor sociology nor economic history,
for all the valuable insights they give us into man's behaviour, can
alter the fundamental mystery of the god in the machine man
being, as Molly Bloom describes a character in Joyce's Ulysses,
'poached eyes on ghost'.

So I dissociate myself from the myth-hunters, who see the
modern literary artist's basic need as new myths, as well as from
those who deplore the lack of a common religious background
in our civilization. I think cultural pluralism is a good thing. I
think it is both wise and civilized to realize that no single religious
creed represents either the final historical truth about what hap-
pened or the final theological truth about the nature of man and
his relations with ultimate reality, but that any creed may have
valuable insights to contribute. Any piece of faith which is
destroyed by new knowledge is destroyed only in its formal ex-
pression, not in its fundamental reality or if it is destroyed in its
fundamental reality, then it clearly corresponds to no real need
or perception and ought to be abandoned cheerfully. We need
neither new knowledge nor new faith, but rather the ability to

POETRY AND RELIGION 225

handle what we have. And that ability, since it involves the
counterpointing of apparently contradictory insights, can best be
given us by the artist, whose profession it is to distil rich signifi-
cance out of such counterpointing.

There is then no inseparable gulf between the modern literary
artist and his predecessors. If his predecessors enjoyed a more
stable background of belief, they still needed to set their individual
insights against that background before they could achieve the
highest kind of art. We have more balls to juggle in the air, more
conflicting claims to focus into a rich pattern of significance, more
items of knowledge to organize into a profound and total vision
of man's fate. That what should be regarded as an opportunity is
often regarded as an inhibition is the result of social and other
factors too complicated to be discussed here. Part of the trouble
with the modern artist is that he has too many tools and a very
indistinct notion of what he should do with them, with the result
that he spends a great deal of time simply displaying them. If the
artist would spend less time alternately bewailing his 'alienation'
from society and flourishing his unemployed skills he might
realize the exciting opportunity that awaits him. Everybody is
so busy explaining everybody else's lack of success. To the chorus
of breast-beaters, prophesiers of doom, laudatores temporis acti,
beraters of popular taste, deplorers of poets' obscurity, interpre-
ters of the modern dilemma, and all the poetasters, criticasters, and
undertakers of the Muse who dance upon the grave of literature
in the expectation of being hired to conduct the funeral, I can
only say, as the Lord said to Job as he sat wailing among the ashes,
'Who is this that darkeneth counsel with words without know-
ledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man.'