‘I have often wondered vaguely, as from time to time I read fresh estimates by the critic of the moment upon the great masters of the past, or who are passing now, why it is that finality in this sort of criticism seems so rarely to be reached, and how it can be possible for the new critic of each succeeding age to put forward a revised estimate and to gain some acceptance for it. Surely, I would say to myself, the best critics of the day, the leading minds of a poet’s generation, ought to be able to lay down such a definite criterion once and for all, that it should afterwards be unassailable. For after all, the things that really matter are quite definite. Sheer absolute merit, sheer quality, is definite. When we open a certain book of plays at random, and come upon such a passage as —
“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Walks tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,”
or we turn a page or two and read —
“Unarm, Eros, the long day’s task is done,
And we must sleep,” when we light on such passages, and Shakespeare keeps letting fall such consummate trifles as these with a careless facility that almost frightens us, so entirely effortless it seems to be — we don’t argue, we know. We just say to ourselves, “Well, there you are! That’s it!”
‘Then again originality is quite a definite thing, it can be proved, indeed, by exact quotation; and as for novelty, which is much the same thing but not quite, being on a lower plane, it is the most easily proved of ah. Three instances of novelty, as such, occur to me, which I give in their historical order — the “faked” poems attributed to Ossian, which in the eighteenth century, by sheer novelty of treatment, almost carried by storm the best critical opinion of the day, with the exception of the sturdy Dr. Johnson and a few others; and then there is the case of Martin Tupper, whose Proverbial Philosophy, couched in a diction and versification which at least were something quite new to the reading public, had an enormous vogue. Well, these two books are long dead, and rightly so, being instances of novelty and little else. But in my third instance, that of Walt Whitman, we note a difference. Here we had novelty indeed, but we had, as well, original genius of a high order; and it is interesting to note that here the novelty was of little assistance to the poet, for many readers who loved the matter were repelled by the form. Still, Whitman is an instance of what I mean by the appeal of novelty as distinguished from originality of genius.
‘If, then, these tests can be so easily applied, and if real genius emits a radiance of its own that hardly demands a test at all, how is it that when the great critic A. has said his say and classified his man, thirty years later critic B. comes along, and thirty years afterwards critic C. each with a new estimate, and I am bound to say an estimate which often seems an improvement on its predecessor, more especially the one that is nearest to our own generation. And yet sheer quality, as such, remains the same through all the ages, and you can take a pencil and mark the passages 20 of sheer poetic beauty in the Iliad or the AEneid as easily as you can those in, say, Childe Harold, by Byron, or the Excursion, by Wordsworth, or say, The Ring and the Book, by Browning.
‘It seemed to me, pondering on these matters, that there was some missing element in all such criticism, or else in the matter criticized, always there, like radium, for instance, but not recognized or not sufficiently recognized — at any rate not kept constantly before the mind of reader or critic as it should be — and it was my business to try and find out what that was.
‘But I did not find the task so very easy. I thought and thought, but what I wanted would not come to the surface and become visible, though I was sure it was lurking there all the time.
‘I knew it was there, because I could perceive the effects though I could not identify the cause. Now I seem to have read somewhere that astronomers have found that there are certain dark stars — stars, that is, which for some reason neither emit nor reflect light. They are in fact invisible, and are only known to be there by the influence, the attraction or repulsion, that they are observed to exert upon the bodies that are their neighbours — their contemporaries in space, if I may so express it. It is, in fact, by that pull or push that the astronomer weighs them, measures them, gradually sizes them up, so to speak, and eventually gives them place and name among the hierarchy of heaven. Something like that was to be my task — to identify the invisible cause of an irregularity of movement among my literary planets.
‘Then again you will remember how Socrates, with his pupils grouped around him in some shady grove in Athens, or by the banks of the babbling Ilyssus, would propound to them some such question as this very one, and some pupil would reply, “I think, Socrates, that what we are seeking may be defined as so-and-so.” And Socrates would reply, “Well, that being so, we may fairly conclude that it is also so-and-so, may we not?” And, his pupils assenting, he would gently lead them on, by easy steps, until he had involved them in a palpable self-contradiction. Socrates would then say, “Well, supposing we begin again, and first ask ourselves what it is not, and so, by elimination, arrive at what it really is?” Now, something like that we have already done to-day. We have agreed that what I have called the missing element has nothing to do with the sheer quality of the writer, nor with that form of genius which we call originality, nor with novelty, for these things we can identify and define. By leaving them out, then, it is easier to run to earth the fox we are really after. (There is some slight mixing of metaphors here, I know, but, as some eminent person has said, the man who never mixes his metaphors never mixes anything — or words to that effect.)
‘Well, I got my fox by his brush at last and pulled him out, and though he is not much to look at, I think he is a genuine canis vulpes. What is usually missing, I think, in criticism or estimates of past writers, is a proper recognition of the special contemporary appeal which almost every good writer has for his own actual contemporaries, the subtle liaison, the bond between themselves and their actual contemporaries only, and never between the writer and later generations. Other bonds there are, of course, and plenty, between them and posterity; never this particular one.
‘Perhaps I may also speak of it, this thing that I call the “contemporary appeal”, as the “incommunicable thrill”. Other thrills there are, which may pass downwards through the centuries, but this particular one cannot be communicated by one generation to its successor. This thrill exists for its own generation alone.
‘Of course you may reply, “Oh, but we have always known that. We have always realized that a writer, whatever he may pretend, writes for, and at, his contemporaries and not posterity, and that his appeal to them must therefore be closer and more intimate than to later readers.” Well, that may be. But is it always steadily borne in mind by those who estimate past work afresh, brushing aside contemporary judgements, that to themselves there is and must be something missing, something they can never hope to recover, and a very real thing too, something you have no business to ignore, as it is too often ignored disdainfully — the contemporary appeal. Of course it is true that good literature is an almost imperishable thing which continues to glow and to palpitate through the generations that succeed its birth; but I am afraid that it is also true that literature which reflects very strongly the special taste of the day, such as the classicism of the eighteenth century, may become a sort of hortus siccus, a collection of pressed and dried flowers, in which the colour is still there, and the form, and you can recognize the petals, and stamens, and count them, but the first bloom and iridescence is gone for ever. But it was not gone for its contemporaries. They got that, but they cannot hand it on. Still, it was there at the time and, when it can be identified, it will prove to be a fine and precious thing, and poets are entitled to credit for it.
‘I wish I could present my thesis to you in more concise and clear-cut terms, and with more comprehensiveness than is to be found in the phrases “contemporary appeal” and “incommunicable thrill”; but if you will let me give you a few illustrations of what I really mean,
my contention will perhaps begin to make itself more clear.
‘Here is one. I remember reading in some memoir or autobiography or other — I cannot lay my hands on my authority at the moment — how on a certain night in the year 1850 a group of young men were assembled in the rooms then occupied by Rossetti, in Chatham Place, by the Black-friars Bridge, long ago pulled down. They were all young, all budding poets or artists, and the occasion was, that one of them, through his friendship with some printer or publisher, had been promised that night, as a special favour, an advance copy of a book of poetry that was to be published next day, — a book called In Memoriam by one Alfred Tennyson, a young poet then rapidly rising in public favour. The emissary was sitting at the publisher’s office at the moment, and the group were eagerly awaiting his return. It was past midnight when he entered at last, waving the magic volume over his head. The best reader was then selected, and the remainder of the night was spent in the reading aloud of these poems to a silent, enthralled, spellbound audience. It was broad daylight, the author tells us, when the meeting broke up at last, and he and his friends walked homeward along the Embankment, all still silent, still strangely moved and shaken, as if by some new revelation.
‘Now I am not going to criticize In Memoriam, one way or the other. I will only ask you to observe that if the most ardent Tennysonian now living, and there are still a few such, had by some singular chance or accident never read In Memoriam and it were put into his hands to-day, he would be surprised and delighted indeed, he would lose no time in possessing himself of its contents, but I do not think he would deliberately devote the hours of the night to something that could as well be tackled in the morning; and I think also that, while delighted, he would also be critical. He would compare, and analyse, and dissect this dead specimen of a past generation. Those boys of 1850, for they were little more than boys, never criticized. They were as it were drunk — drunk with the contemporary appeal, drunk with the incommunicable thrill.
‘Remember also that Rossetti and his followers were not, strictly speaking, Tennysonians at all. They were the founders of another school of poetry, a school that very soon drifted far away from the Tennyson idiom. But — they were contemporaries, that is the point of the story.
‘I will give you another instance, and a very similar one. This time I am going to put in the witness-box my own grandmother. When my grandmother was a young girl, living at home with her parents, in London I think, though I cannot be sure of that, one night a certain mild excitement was caused in the house by the arrival of the Edinburgh Mail. Now the Edinburgh Mail of those days was carried by a coach and four horses, and took some four days to get through with luck and travelling hard, so its arrival was something of an event. Well, there were the usual business letters for the father, and the long letters of gossip — Edinburgh and Glasgow gossip — crossed and re-crossed for the mother, and there was besides a dumpy package tied up with string, bearing the label of the well-known publishing firm of Ballantyne, and on this, the girl, my grandmother, fell with a shout of triumph, for she knew it could be nothing else but an early copy of the very latest Waverley Novel — I forget which of them it was now — a book waited for throughout the length and breadth of England with an intensity which seems strange to us now. So when the girl took her bedroom candlestick and climbed upstairs to her little room at the top of the house, she managed to carry the precious parcel with her, intending to start on the book the following day, as early as her domestic duties, which came first in those days, would permit her. Arrived in her bedroom, she said to herself, “I wonder if it would be very wrong of me if I just took a peep at the first page, merely to see how the story begins?” So she stretched herself on the hearthrug, with her candlestick on the floor beside her, and cut the string of the parcel. And the hours slipped by, and the candle burnt low, and the grey dawn began to filter in past the blind, and still the girl read on. And the candle guttered in its socket, and the dawn gave way to full daylight which took the place of the candle, and still the girl read on, entranced, bewitched, possessed and held spell-bound by a touch of the wand of him who was already known as the Wizard of the North.
‘Now let us suppose, if it is not making too monstrous a demand on your powers of imagination, that there was actually in existence to-day some young person who cared a straw for Walter Scott’s Works and who, by chance, had never read one of the best of them. Supposing it came into her hands, she would be delighted indeed, but it would be ridiculous to suppose that she would lie on the hard boards of her bedroom floor all night, like my poor little grandmother. Indeed a great part of her interest in the thing would be that which one takes in a literary curiosity. She would not be handling a real live pulsating thing, of which you could almost hear the heartbeats. But my grandmother was! For her there was the contemporary appeal, the thrill at its height. You see, she was one of Walter Scott’s contemporaries.
‘Let us take another instance, and this time we will go a little further back. In Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson, under the year 1777, we find him, Boswell, corresponding with a certain critic on the style of Dr. Johnson’s book, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. You will remember that Boswell took Dr. Johnson a tour through Scotland to try and cure him of his prejudice against the Scotch, which he did not succeed in doing, and when they got back they each of them wrote a book about it. The critic in question had “praised the very fine passage upon landing at Icolmkill” but proceeded to disapprove of “the richness of Johnson’s language”. Boswell then proceeds to quote the criticized passage, in full, in justification of its author:
‘“We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy, as may conduct us, indifferent and unmoved, over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. The man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”
‘Boswell continues, speaking for himself: “Had our Tour produced nothing else but this sublime passage, the world must have acknowledged that it was not made in vain. Sir Joseph Banks, the present respectable President of the Royal Society, told me, he was so much struck on reading it, that he clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration.” So far Boswell.
‘Now I want to say here, and at once, that when Sir Joseph Banks clasped his hands together and remained for some time in silent admiration, Sir Joseph Banks did what was only just and right. For it is indeed a fine passage. Written though it be in the rigid, frigid, somewhat ponderous style of the period, it is sonorous, well-balanced, beautifully restrained, and even deeply moving. English literature owes a great debt of gratitude to Johnson, and to others like him — if indeed there be any others like him — who have set themselves a severe and lofty standard of writing such as this; for such standard is a sort of fixative which keeps our language from slipping away, as it always has a tendency to do, into a careless slovenliness and inexactitude of expression. We do not read them now, neither their style nor their matter please us longer, but their works remain to show us with what earnest care, with what reverence and regard, the English language used to be treated by those who thought themselves worthy to write it. But what I want you to notice just now is that if you were to read this passage to “the present respectable President of the Royal Society”, whoever he may be, he would probably say, “Yes, that is an admirable specimen of a formal and laboured style of writing, now happily long past.” He would not clasp hi
s hands together — why indeed should he? He isn’t a contemporary, and if he remained silent for some time, it would probably be not from admiration, but from boredom. He is not moved by the contemporary appeal — he would feel no thrill. But Sir Joseph Banks, his predecessor, did and hence he acted in the manner Boswell has so faithfully recorded for us.
‘Here is another instance, from the same source. Boswell tells us that Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage, the poet, is (I am quoting now) “one of the most interesting narratives in the English language. Sir Joshua Reynolds”, he continues, “told me, that, upon his return from Italy, he met with it in Devonshire, knowing nothing of its author” (this was in Johnson’s early days) “and began to read it while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly that, not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move he found his arm totally benumbed.”
‘You see, poor Sir Joshua came off rather worse than Sir Joseph. The respectable Banks only suffered a temporary paralysis of the vocal organs, but Reynolds had a limb put out of action in this his first encounter with the irresistible eloquence of Johnson. I have never read this Life of Savage myself, so can express no opinion on the matter; but I do not remember ever having heard or seen this masterpiece quoted or referred to by any modern critic or writer or speaker. Yet Reynolds, who was a writer himself as well as a consummate artist, was as sound a literary critic as any of his critical generation.
‘Another criticism of the same book, written at the time of its publication, concludes with the following passage: “His reflections open to all the recesses of the human heart; and, in a word, a more just or pleasant, a more engaging or a more improving treatise, on all the excellencies and defects of human nature, is scarce to be found in our own, or perhaps any other language.”
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 101