us, and bestows a pleasure at least different in kind from any they
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can often give. I t is what makes Marvell a classic ; o r classic i n a
sense in which Gray and Collins are not ; for the latter, with all
their accredited purity, are comparatively poor in shades of
feeling to contrast and unite.
We are baffled in the attempt to translate the quality indicated
by the dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature of our own time. Even Cowley is only able to define it by negatives :
Comely in thousand shapes appears;
Yonder we saw it plain ; and here 'tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.
It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new
term has been struck to replace it ; the quality seldom exists, and is
never recognized.
In a true piece of Wit all things must be
Yet all things there agree;
As in the Ark, join' d without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life.
Or as the primitive forms of all
(If we compare great things with small) ·
Which, without discord or confusion, lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.
So far Cowley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no
more than Cowley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must
risk much more than anxious generalizations. With our eye still
on Marvell, we can say that wit is not erudition ; it is sometimes
stifled by erudition, as in much of Milton. It is not cynicism,
though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with
cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition
because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of
experience ; and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a
constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible, which we find as
clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell. Such a general
statement may seem to take us a long way from The Nymph and
the Fawn, or even from the Horatian Ode ; but it is perhaps justified by the desire to account for that precise taste of Marvell's which finds for him the proper degree of seriousness for every
subject which he treats. His errors of taste, when he trespasses,
are not sins against this virtue ; they are conceits, distended
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metaphors and similes, but they never consist in taking a subject
too seriously or too lightly. This virtue of wit is not a peculiar
quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets of one age or of one
school ; it is an intellectual quality which perhaps only becomes
noticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets. Furthermore, it is
absent from the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, on
whose poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously been
based. To the best of their poetry wit is irrelevant :
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye,
That finds no object worth its constancy ?
We should find it difficult to draw any useful comparison between
these lines of Shelley and anything by Marvell. But later poets,
who would have been the better for Marvell's quality, were
without it ; even Browning seems oddly immature, in some way,
beside Marvell. And nowadays we find occasionally good irony,
or satire, which lack wit's internal equilibrium, because their
voices are essentially protests against some outside sentimentality
or stupidity ; or we find serious poets who seem afraid of acquiring
wit, lest they lose intensity. The quality which Marvell had, this
modest and certainly impersonal virtue - whether we call it wit or
reason, or even urbanity - we have patently failed to define. By
whatever name we call it, and however we define that name, it is
something precious and needed and apparently extinct ; it is what
should preserve the reputation of Marvell. C'itait une belle time,
comme on ne fait plus a Londres.
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MAR I E LLOYD
It requires some effort to understand why one person, among
many who do a thing with accomplished skill, should be greater
than the others ; and it is not always easy to distinguish superiority
from great popularity, when the two go together. Although I have
always admired the genius of Marie Lloyd I do not think that I
always appreciated its uniqueness ; I certainly did not realize that
her death would strike me as the important event that it was.
Marie Lloyd was the greatest music-hall artist of her time in
England : she was also the most popular. And popularity in her
case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment ; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which
has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest.
Among all of that small number of music-hall performers,
whose names are familiar to what is called the lower class, Marie
Lloyd had far the strongest hold on popular affection. The
attitude of audiences toward Marie Lloyd was different from their
attitude toward any other of their favourites of that day, and this
difference represents the difference in her art. Marie Lloyd's
audiences were invariably sympathetic, and it was through this
sympathy that she controlled them. Among living music-hall
artists none can better control an audience than Nellie Wallace. I
have seen Nellie Wallace interrupted by jeering or hostile comment from a boxful ofEastenders ; I have seen her, hardly pausing in her act, make some quick retort that silenced her tormentors
for the rest of the evening. But I have never known Marie Lloyd
to be confronted by this kind of hostility ; in any case, the feeling
of the vast majority of the audience was so manifestly on her side,
that no objector would have dared to lift his voice. And the
difference is this : that whereas other comedians amuse their
audiences as much and sometimes more than Marie Lloyd, no
other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life
of that audience, in raising it to a kind of art. It was, I think, this
capacity for expressing the soul of the people that made Marie
Lloyd unique, and that made her audiences, even when they
joined in the chorus, not so much hilarious as happy.
1]2
M A R I E LLOYD
In the details of acting Marie Lloyd was perhaps the most
perfect, in her own style, of British actresses. There are no cinema
records of her ; she never descended to this form of moneymaking ; it is to be regretted, however, that there is no film of her to preserve for the recollection of her admirers the perfect
expressiveness of her smallest gestures. But it is less in the
accomplishment of her act than in what she made it, that she
/>
differed from other comedians. There was nothing about her of
the grotesque ; none of her comic appeal was due to exaggeration ;
it was all a matter of selection and concentration. The most
remarkable of the survivors of the music-hall stage, to my mind,
are Nellie Wallace and Little Tich ; 1 but each of these is a kind of
grotesque ; their acts are an orgy of parody of the human race. For
this reason, the appreciation of these artists requires less knowledge of the environment. To appreciate, for instance, the last turn in which Marie Lloyd appeared, one ought to know what
objects a middle-aged woman of the char-woman class would
carry in her bag ; exactly how she would go through her bag in
search of something; and exactly the tone of voice in which she
would enumerate the objects she found in it. This was only part
of the acting in Marie Lloyd's last song, 'One of the Ruins that
Cromwell Knocked A baht a Bit'.
Marie Lloyd's art will, I hope, be discussed by more competent critics of the theatre than I. My own chief point is that I consider her superiority over other performers to be in a way a
moral superiority : it was her understanding of the people and
sympathy with them, and the people's recognition of the fact that
she embodied the virtues which they genuinely most respected in
private life, that raised her to the position she occupied at her
death. And her death is itself a significant moment in English
history. I have called her the expressive figure of the lower
classes. There is no such expressive figure for any other class. The
middle classes have no such idol : the middle classes are morally
corrupt. That is to say, their own life fails to find a Marie Lloyd
to express it; nor have they any independent virtues which might
give them as a conscious class any dignity. The middle classes, in
England as elsewhere, under democracy, are morally dependent
upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are subordinate to the
middle class, which is gradually absorbing and destroying them.
The lower class still exists ; but perhaps it will not exist for long.
In the music-hall comedians they find the expression and dignity
of their own lives ; and this is not found in the most elaborate and
expensive revue. In England, at any rate, the revue expresses
1 Without prejudice to the younger generation.
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almost nothing. With the decay o f the music-hall, with the
encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower
classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the
bourgeoisie. The working man who went to the music-hall and
saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing
part of the act ; he was engaged in that collaboration of the
audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most
obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his
mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous
action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and will receive, without
giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and
upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. He
will also have lost some of his interest in life. Perhaps this will be
the only solution. In an interesting essay in the volume of Essays
on the Depopulation of Melanesia, the psychologist W. H. R.
Rivers adduced evidence which has led him to believe that the
natives of that unfortunate archipelago are dying out principally
for the reason that the 'Civilization' forced upon them has
deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure
boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas,
when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motorcars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied
science has done everything possible with the materials on this
earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians. 1
1 These lines were written nine years ago [Ed. of 1932].
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ULY S S E S , ORDER, AND MYTH1
Mr. Joyce's book has been out long enough for no more general
expression of praise, or expostulation with its detractors, to be
necessary ; and it has not been out long enough for any attempt at
a complete measurement of its place and significance to be
possible. All that one can usefully do at this time, and it is a great
deal to do, for such a book, is to elucidate any aspect of the book -
and the number of aspects is indefinite - which has not yet been
fixed. I hold this book to be the most important expression which
the present age has found ; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. These are postulates for anything that I have to say about it, and I have no wish to waste the reader's time by elaborating my eulogies ; it has given
me all the surprise, delight, and terror that I can require, and I
will leave it at that.
Among all the criticisms I have seen of the book, I have seen
nothing - unless we except, in its way, M. Valery Larbaud's
valuable paper which is rather an Introduction than a criticism -
which seemed to me to appreciate the significance of the method
employed - the parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of appropriate
styles and symbols to each division. Yet one might expect this to
be the first peculiarity to attract attention ; but it has been treated
as an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author for the
purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the
completed structure. The criticism which Mr. Aldington directed
upon Ul)'Sses several years ago seems to me to fail by this oversight - but, as Mr. Aldington wrote before the complete work had appeared, fails more honourably than the attempts of those who
had the whole book before them. Mr. Aldington treated Mr.
Joyce as a prophet of chaos ; and wailed at the flood of Dadaism
which his prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of the
magician's rod. Of course, the influence which Mr. Joyce's book
may have is from my point of view an irrelevance. A very great
book may have a very bad influence indeed ; and a mediocre book
1 This article appeared in The Dial, November, 1923.
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may be i n the event most salutary. The next generation is
responsible for its own soul ; a m�n of genius is responsible to his
peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs. Still, Mr. Aldington's pathetic solicitude for the halfwitted seems to me to carry certain implications about the nature of the book itself to which I cannot assent ; and this is the important issue. He finds the book, if I understand him, to be an invitation to chaos, and an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial, and a distortion of reality. But unless I quote Mr.
Aldington's words I am likely to falsify. 'I say, mo
reover,' he
says, 1 'that when Mr. Joyce, with his marvellous gifts, uses them
to disgust us with mankind, he is doing something which is false
and a libel on humanity.' It is somewhat similar to the opinion of
the urbane Thackeray upon Swift. 'As for the moral, I think it
horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous : and giant and great
as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him.' (This, of the conclusion
of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms - which seems to me one of the
greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever achieved. It is
true that Thackeray later pays Swift one of the finest tributes that
a man has ever given or received : 'So great a man he seems to me
that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.' And Mr.
Aldington, in his time, is almost equally generous.)
Whether it is possible to libel humanity (in distinction to libel
in the usual sense, which is libelling an individual or a group in
contrast with the rest of humanity) is a question for philosophical
societies to discuss ; but of course if Ulysses were a 'libel' it would
simply be a forged document, a powerless fraud, which would
never have extracted from Mr. Aldington a moment's attention. I
do not wish to linger over this point : the interesting question is
that begged by Mr. Aldington when he refers to Mr. Joyce's
'great undisciplined talent'.
I think that Mr. Aldington and I are more or less agreed as to
what we want in principle, and agreed to call it classicism. It is
because of this agreement that I have chosen Mr. Aldington to
attack on the present issue. We are agreed as to what we want, but
not as to how to get it, or as to what contemporary writing exhibits
a tendency in that direction. We agree, I hope, that 'classicism' is
not an alternative to 'romanticism', as of political parties, Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat, on a 'turn-therascals-out' platform. It is a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its
place and time. One can be 'classical', in a sense, by turning away
from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand and selecting
1 English Review, April, 1921.
' ULYSSES ' , ORDER, AND MYTH
only mummified stuff from a museum - like some contemporary
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 25