1 Studies in Elizabethan Drama. By Arthur Symons.
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men's mouths . . . she is a woman to the last . . . so she dies . . . the plays
ends with a touch of grave pity
:
. · .
Presented in this rather unfair way, torn apart like the leaves
of an artichoke, the impressions of Mr. Symons come to resemble
a common type of popular literary lecture, in which the stories of
plays or novels are retold, the motives of the characters set forth,
and the work of art therefore made easier for the beginner. But
this is not Mr. Symons' reason for writing. The reason why we
find a similarity between his essay and this form of education is
that Antony and Cleopatra is a play with which we are pretty well
acquainted, and of which we have, therefore, our own impressions. We can please ourselves with our own impressions of the characters and their emotions ; and we do not find the impressions
of another person, however sensitive, very significant. But if we
can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Moveme1Zt in Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings,
as a revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and
Rimbaud and return to Mr. Symons' book, we may find that our
own impressions dissent from his. The book has not, perhaps, a
permanent value for the one reader, but it has led to results of
permanent importance for him.
The question is not whether Mr. Symons' impressions are
'true' or 'false'. So far as you can isolate the 'impression', the pure
feeling, it is, of course, neither true nor false. The point is that
you never rest at the pure feeling; you react in one of two ways,
or, as I believe Mr. Symons does, in a mixture of the two ways.
The moment you try to put the impressions into words, you
either begin to analyse and construct, to 'eriger en lois', or you
begin to create something else. It is significant that Swinburne,
by whose poetry Mr. Symons may at one time have been influenced, is one man in his poetry and a different man in his criticism ; to this extent and in this respect only, that he is
satisfying a different impulse ; he is criticizing, expounding,
arranging. You may say this is not the criticism of a critic, that it
is emotional, not intellectual - though of this there are two
opinions, but it is in the direction of analysis and construction, a
beginning to 'eriger en lois', and not in the direction of creation.
So I infer that Swinburne found an adequate outlet for the
creative impulse in his poetry ; and none of it was forced back and
out through his critical prose. The style of the latter is essentially
a prose style ; and Mr. Symons' prose is much more like Swinburne's poetry than it is like his prose. I imagine - though here
�me's thought is moving in almost complete darkness - that Mr.
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THE P ERFECT CR I T I C
Symons i s far more disturbed, far more profoundly affected, by
his reading than was Swinburne, who responded rather by a
violent and immediate and comprehensive burst of admiration
which may have left him internally unchanged. The disturbance
in Mr. Symons is almost, but not quite, to the point of creating ;
the reading sometimes fecundates his emotions to produce something new which is not criticism, but is not the expulsion, the ejection, the birth of creativeness.
The type is not uncommon, although Mr. Symons is far
superior to most of the type. Some writers are essentially of the
type that reacts in excess of the stimulus, making something new
out of the impressions, but suffer from a defect of vitality or an
obscure obstruction which prevents nature from taking its course.
Their sensibility alters the object, but never transforms it. Their
reaction is that of the ordinary emotional person developed to an
exceptional degree. For this ordinary emotional person, experiencing a work of art, has a mixed critical and creative reaction.
It is made up of comment and opinion, and also new emotions
which are vaguely applied to his own life. The sentimental
person, in whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which
have nothing to do with that work of art whatever, but are
accidents of personal association, is an incomplete artist. For in
an artist these suggestions made by a work of art, which are
purely personal, become fused with a multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and result in the production of a new object which is no longer purely personal, because it is a
work of art itself.
It would be rash to speculate, and is perhaps impossible to
determine, what is unfulfilled in Mr. Symons' charming verse
that overflows into his critical prose. Certainly we may say that in
Swinburne's verse the circuit of impression and expression is
complete ; and Swinburne was therefore able, in his criticism, to
be more a critic than Mr. Symons. This gives us an intimation
why the artist is - each within his own limitations - oftenest to be
depended upon as a critic ; his criticism will be criticism, and not
the satisfaction of a suppressed creative wish - which, in most
other persons, is apt to interfere fatally.
Before considering what the proper critical reaction of artistic
sensibility is, how far criticism is 'feeling' and how far 'thought',
and what sort of 'thought' is permitted, it may be instructive to
prod a little into that other temperament, so different from Mr.
Symons', which issues in generalities such as that quoted ncar the
beginning of this article.
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'L'ecri1:ain de st)'le abstrait est presque toujours un
sentimental, du moins un sensitif. L'ecri·vain artiste n'est
presque jamais un sentimental, et Ires rarement un sensitif.'
-LE PROBLEME DU STYLE
The statement already quoted, that 'poetry is the most highly
organized form of intellectual activity,' may be taken as a specimen of the abstract style in criticism. The confused distinction which exists in most heads between 'abstract' and 'concrete' is
due not so much to a manifest fact of the existence of two types
of mind, an abstract and a concrete, as to the existence of another
type of mind, the verbal, or philosophic. I, of course, do not
imply any general condemnation of philosophy ; I am, for the
moment, using the word 'philosophic' to cover the unscientific
ingredients of philosophy ; to cover, in fact, the greater part of the
philosophic output of the last hundred years. There are two ways
in which a word may be 'abstract'. lt may have (the word 'activity',
for example) a meaning which cannot be grasped by appeal to
any of the senses ; its apprehension may require a deliberate
suppression of analogies of visual or muscular experience, which
is none the less an effort of imagination. 'Activity' will mean for
the trained scientist, if he employ the term, either nothing at all
or something still more exact than anythi
ng it suggests to us. If we
are allowed to accept certain remarks of Pascal and Mr. Bertrand
Russell about mathematics, we believe that the mathematician
deals with objects - if he will permit us to call them objects -
which directly affect his sensibility. And during a good part of
history the philosopher endeavoured to deal with objects which
he believed to be of the same exactness as the mathematician's.
Finally Hegel arrived, and if not perhaps the first, he was certainly the most prodigious exponent of emotional systematization, dealing with his emotions as if they were definite objects which
had aroused those emotions. His followers have as a rule taken for
granted that words have definite meanings, overlooking the
tendency of words to become indefinite emotions. (No one who
had not witnessed the event could imagine the conviction in the
tone of Professor Eucken as he pounded the table and exclaimed
Was ist Geist ? Geist ist . . .
) If verbalism were confined to professional philosophers, no harm would be done. But their corruption has extended very far. Compare a mediaeval theologian or mystic, compare a seventeenth-century preacher, with any
'liberal' sermon since Schleiermacher, and you will observe that
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words have changed their meanings. What they have lost is
definite, and what they have gained is indefinite.
The vast accumulations of knowledge - or at least of information - deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known,
when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same
words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a
little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult
for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about
or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know
enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts. The
sentence so frequently quoted in this essay will serve for an
example of this process as well as any, and may be profitably
contrasted with the opening phrases of the Posterior Analytics.
Not only all knowledge, but all feeling, is in perception. The
inventor of poetry as the most highly organized form of intellectual activity was not engaged in perceiving when he composed this definition ; he had nothing to be aware of except his own
emotion about 'poetry'. He was, in fact, absorbed in a very
different 'activity' not only from that of Mr. Symons, but from
that of Aristotle.
Aristotle is a person who has suffered from the adherence of
persons who must be regarded less as his disciples than as his
sectaries. One must be firmly distrustful of accepting Aristotle in
a canonical spirit ; this is to lose the whole living force of him. He
was primarily a man of not only remarkable but universal intelligence ; and universal intelligence means that he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary intelligence is good only
for certain classes of objects ; a brilliant man of science, if he is
interested in poetry at all, may conceive grotesque judgments :
like one poet because he reminds him of himself, or another
because he expresses emotions which he admires ; he may use art,
in fact, as the outlet for the egotism which is suppressed in his
own speciality. But Aristotle had none of these impure desires to
satisfy ; in whatever sphere of interest, he looked solely and steadfastly at the object ; in his short and broken treatise he provides an eternal example - not of laws, or even of method, for there is no
method except to be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself
swiftly operating the analysis of sensation to the point of principle
and definition.
It is far less Aristotle than Horace who has been the model for
criticism up to the nineteenth century. A precept, such as Horace,
or Boileau gives us, is merely an unfinished analysis. It appears as
a law, a rule, because it does not appear in its most general form ;
it is empirical. When we understand necessity, as Spinoza knew,
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we are free because we assent. The dogmatic critic, who lays
down a rule, who affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete.
Such statements may often be justifiable as a saving of time ; but
in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he
must not make judgments of worse and better. He must simply
elucidate : the reader will form the correct judgment for himself.
And again, the purely 'technical' critic - the critic, that is, who
writes to expound some novelty or impart some lesson to practitioners of an art - can be called a critic only in a narrow sense. He may be analysing perceptions and the means for arousing perceptions, but his aim is limited and is not the disinterested exercise of intelligence. The narrowness of the aim makes easier the
detection of the merit or feebleness of the work ; even of these
writers there are very few - so that their 'criticism' is of great
importance within its limits. So much suffices for Campion.
Dryden is far more disinterested ; he displays much free intelligence ; and yet even Dryden - or any literary critic of the seventeenth century - is not quite a free mind, compared, for instance, with such a mind as Rochefoucauld's. There is always a tendency
to legislate rather than to inquire, to revise accepted laws, even to
overturn, but to reconstruct out of the same material. And the
free intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to inquiry.
Coleridge, again, whose natural abilities, and some of whose
performances, are probably more remarkable than those of any
other modern critic, cannot be estimated as an intelligence completely free. The nature of the restraint in his case is quite different from that which limited the seventeenth-century critics,
and is much more personal. Coleridge's metaphysical interest was
quite genuine, and was, like most metaphysical interest, an affair
of his emotions. But a literary critic should have no emotions
except those immediately provoked by a work of art - and these
(as I have already hinted) are, when valid, perhaps not to be
called emotions at all. Coleridge is apt to take leave of the data of
criticism, and arouse the suspicion that he has been diverted into
a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does not always appear
to be the return to the work of art with improved perception and
intensified, because more conscious, enjoyment ; his centre of
interest changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory sense
he is more 'philosophic' than Aristotle. For everything that
Aristotle says illuminates the literature which is the occasion for
saying it ; but Coleridge only now and then. It is one more
instance of the pernicious effect of emotion.
Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind - a mind which,
as it is rarely found among scientists except in fragments, might
better be called the intelligent mind. For there is no other
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intelligence than this, and so far as artists and men o f letters are
intelligent (we may doubt whether the level of intell
igence among
men of letters is as high as among men of science) their intelligence is of this kind. Sainte-Beuve was a physiologist by training; but it is probable that his mind, like that of the ordinary scientific
specialist, was limited in its interest, and that this was not,
primarily, an interest in art. If he was a critic, there is no doubt
that he was a very good one ; but we may conclude that he earned
some other name. Of all modern critics, perhaps Remy de
Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of Aristotle. An
amateur, though an excessively able amateur, in physiology, he
combined to a remarkable degree sensitiveness, erudition, sense of
fact and sense of history, and generalizing power.
We assume the gift of a superior sensibility. And for sensibility
wide and profound reading does not mean merely a more extended pasture. There is not merely an increase of understanding, leaving the original acute impression unchanged. The new
impressions modify the impressions received from the objects
already known. An impression needs to be constantly refreshed
by new impressions in order that it may persist at all ; it needs to
take its place in a system of impressions. And this system tends
to become articulate in a generalized statement of literary beauty.
There are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the
Divine Comedy which are capable of transporting even a quite
uninitiated reader, just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of
the language to decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty. This impression may be so deep that no subsequent study and understanding will intensify it. But at this point the impression is emotional ; the reader in the ignorance which we
postulate is unable to distinguish the poetry from an emotional
state aroused in himself by the poetry, a state which may be
merely an indulgence of his own emotions. The poetry may be an
accidental stimulus. The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure
contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion
are removed ; thus we aim to see the object as it really is and find a
meaning for the words of Arnold. And without a labour which is
largely a labour of the intelligence, we are unable to attain that
stage of vision amor intellectualis Dei.
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 7