The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  It is most clearly unsatisfactory because, in the terms in which it stands, it is equivocal. In spite of the 'something superior, not inferior', it reminds us too much of 'the bitter beauty of the

  universe and the frail human pride that confronts it for a moment undismayed'. It is, in fact, not clearly enough distinguishable from A Free Man's Worship :

  Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward fife; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Adas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. 1

  The tragic experience, however it is to be defined, is certainly not anything that encourages, or permits, an indulgence in the dramatization of one's nobly-suffering self. Mr Santayana's Seneca, of course, doesn't propose anything as crude. Nevertheless, as we ponder the 'disdain for humanity' and the 'defying . . . death', it strikes us that the Senecan attitude as described is perilously ready to subside into something of a kindred order to the prose of A Free Mans Worship: the differences aren't radical enough. We recall Mr Eliot's observations (in Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca) on the Senecan influence in Elizabethan drama, and its relation to the trick of rhetorical self-boosting.

  And whether Mr Eliot is right or not in associating Othello's self-dramatizing habit with the Senecan influence, he gives us the cue for saying that the attitude represented by Othello's last speech is radically untragic. This is so obvious as to seem, perhaps, not worth saying: Othello, for those who don't join in the traditional sentimentalization of the play, is a very obvious case. The essential point that has to be made is that his valedictory coup de thtdtre represents a rhetorical inflation, a headily emotional glorification, of an incapacity for tragic experience that marks the ordinary moments of us aU,

  1 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, p. 56.

  TRAGEDY AND THE 'MEDIUM' 129

  There is a passage of one of D. H. Lawrence's letters x that came into my mind when this point was under discussion:

  I am so sick of people: they preserve an evil, bad, separating spirit under the warm cloak of good words. That is intolerable in them. The Conservative talks about the old and glorious national ideal, the Liberal talks about this great struggle for right in which the nation is engaged, the peaceful women talk about disarmament and international peace. Bertie Russell talks about democratic control and the educating of the artisan, and all this, all this goodness, is just a warm and cosy cloak for a bad spirit. They all want the same thing: a continuing in this state of disintegration wherein each separate little ego is an independent little principality by itself. What does Russell really want ? He wants to keep his own established ego, his finite and ready-defined self intact, free from contact and connection. He wants to be ultimately a free agent. That is what they all want, ultimately—that is what is at the back of all international peace-for-ever and democratic control talks: they want an outward system of nullity, which they call peace and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to nothing, little mortal Absolutes, secure from question. That is at the back of all Liberalism, Fabianism and democracy. It stinks. It is the will of the louse. And the Conservative either wants to bully or to be bullied. And the young authoritarian, the young man who turns Roman Catholic in order to put himself under the authority of the Church, in order to enjoy the aesthetic quality of obedience, he is such a swine with cringing hind-quarters. . . etc.

  The particular justice or injustice of these animadversions needn't be discussed: one wouldn't go to Lawrence for judicial fairness towards persons or parties, and there are necessary political and kindred activities at levels at which the characteristic Lauren-tian contribution may well appear the reverse of helpful or encouraging. But it is just his part, as he sees it, to insist—with a passionate insistence exasperating toenergizers for movements and policies—that there are profounder levels; levels of experience that, though they tend constantly to be ignored, are always, in re^ spect of any concern for life and health, supremely relevant. The most effective insistence would be tragic art. Lawrence, in fact, might fairly (for my present purpose) be said to be pronouncing of the attitudes he stigmatizes that they are incompatible with tragic experience.

  At any rate, it is an essential part of the definition of the tragic that it breaks down, or undermines and supersedes, such attitudes. It establishes below them a kind of profound impersonality in which experience matters, not because it is mine—because it is to me it belongs or happens, or because it subserves or issues in purpose or will, but because it is what it is, the 'mine' mattering only in so far as the individual sentience is the indispensable focus of experience.

  The attainment in literature of this level, and of organization at this level, would seem to involve the poetic use of language, or of processes that amount to that. By the 'poetic' use of language I mean that which I described as 'dramatic' in discussing Johnson's criticism and the limits to his appreciation of Shakespeare. For Johnson, I said, expression was necessarily statement; critically, he couldn't come to terms with the use of language, not as a medium in which to put 'previously definite' ideas, but for exploratory creation. Poetry as creating what it presents, and as presenting something that stands there to speak for itself, or, rather, that isn't a matter of saying, but of being and enacting, he couldn't properly understand. In this he is representative of the eighteenth century, and (the point was made in discussion) it is significant that that century, which went in so much for formal tragedy, should have shown itself so utterly incapable of attaining the tragic. The use of language for the expression of ' previously definite' ideas needn't, of course, carry with it social and rational conventions as obviously limiting as the Augustan, but in proposing for the poet as his true business the lucid arrangement of ready-minted concepts Mr Santayana proposes (it seems to me) limitations as essentially disabling for tragedy as the Augustan. It may not be altogether true to say that in such a use of language— in die business of expressing 'previously definite' ideas—one is necessarily confined to one's 'established ego', one's * ready-defined self*. But it does seem as if the 'tragic' transcendence of ordinary experience that can be attained by a mind tied to such a use must inevitably tend towards the rhetorical order represented by Mr Santayana's account of Seneca's tragic philosophy (or— shall I say ?—by the Senecan attitude as no doubt fairly conveyed by Mr Santayana).

  Such an attitude is really an exaltation of the 'established ego',

  TRAGEDY AND THE 'MEDIUM' 131

  and, as we have seen, cannot be securely distinguished from the kind of attitude one strikes. The attainment of the level of experience at which emancipation from the 'ready-defined self is compelled involves an essentially different order of expression; one in which heightening is deepening, exaltation has nothing alcoholic about it, and rhetoric (as in Othello —for those who take what Shakespeare offers) is 'placed'.

  It is interesting to see Yeats, in his own way and by his own characteristic approach, making the point in question. He rebels, in his Aesthetically-given youth, against the flatness of the dialogue in post-Ibsenian drama (see Essays). Modern naturalistic speech, he feels, precludes beauty and significance. We can never, of course, feel quite safe, reading these protests in Yeatsian prose, against a suggestion of 'Rosa Alchemica' and the 'trembling of the veil'. Nevertheless he makes the necessary points and makes them fi
rmly. You cannot, he notes (see, e.g., p. 339), be passionate in educated modern speech: Ibsen in the attempt to overcome this difficulty invented a conventional rhetoric. Poetry, with attendant non-naturalistic conventions (see the essay on Certain Noble Plays of Japan)* is necessary in order to provide the distance and the frame without which there can be no intensity of the right kind. And then we come to this (The Tragic Theatre]: 'I saw plainly what should have been plain from the first line I had written, that tragedy must always be a drowning, a breaking of the dykes that separate man from man . . .' Yeats's intention in this, which is immediately related to his preoccupation with convention and the 'medium', has unmistakably the cfirectest relation to what I have been trying to say above.

  We might further invoke as obviously relevant Nietzsche's insistence on the Dionysiac. But perhaps after all the Nietzschean witness had better be dispensed with; at the best it introduces a disturbing vibration. The Nietzschean context is uncongenial to the present purpose, and a glance at it prompts the remark that the tragic calm (if calm' is the word), while not the product of any laxative catharsis, is not in the least the calm of the tensed and self^approving will.

  The sense of heightened life that goes with the tragic experience is conditioned by a transcending of the ego—an escape from all attitudes of self-assertion. 'Escape', perhaps, is not altogether a

  good word, since it might suggest something negative and irresponsible (just as 'Dionysiac* carries unacceptable suggestions of the Dark Gods). Actually the experience is constructive or creative, and involves a recognizing positive value as in some way defined and vindicated by death. It is as if we were challenged at the profoundest level with the question, *In what does the significance of life reside ?', and found ourselves contemplating, for answer, a view of life, and of the things giving it value, that makes the valued appear unquestionably more important than the valuer, so that significance lies, clearly and inescapably, in the willing adhesion of the individual self to something other than itself. Here, for instance, is D. A. Traversi writing l on Antony and Cleopatra (with his relative valuation of which, I had better add by the way, I don't agree):

  For death, which had seemed in the Sonnets and early tragedies to be incontrovertible evidence of the subjection of love and human values to Time, now becomes by virtue of Shakespeare's poetic achievement an instrument of release, the necessary condition of an experience which, though dependent upon Time and circumstance, is by virtue of its value and intensity incommensurate with them—that is 'immortal'. The emotions of Antony and Cleopatra are built upon 'dungy earth', upon 'Nilus' slime', and so upon Time which these elements by their nature imply; but, just as earth and slime are quickened into fire and air, whilst retaining their sensible qualities as constituent parts of the final experience, so Time itself becomes a necessary element in the creation of'immortality'.

  I quote this for its relevant suggestiveness. It seems to me to compare very interestingly with the following passage from D. W. Harding (whose distinctive strength in criticism—I add, in case I should have appeared to be betraying metaphysical ambitions—goes with a psychologist's approach):

  Death in itself was not his concern, but only death at the moment when life was simplified and intensified; this he felt had a significance which he represents by immortality. For him it was no more than the immortality of the possibilities of life. This immortality and the value he glimpses in the living effort of war in no way mitigate his suffering at the human pain and waste. The value of what was destroyed seemed to him to have been brought into sight only by the destruction, and he

  1 Approach to Shakespeare, pp. 126-7.

  TRAGEDY AND THE 'MEDIUM' 133

  had to respond to both facts without allowing either to neutralize the other. It is this which is most impressive in Rosenberg—the complexity of experience which he was strong enough to permit himself and which his technique was fine enough to reveal. 1

  I will not attempt to develop the kind of discussion of Tragedy that the juxtaposition of these passages might seem to promise— or threaten. It suits my purpose rather to note the stress laid by Harding on 'complexity' and 'technique' (compare Traversi's 'poetic achievement*—a phrase that sums up much preceding analysis of Shakespeare's verse), and to note further that he passes on to 'impersonality':

  To say that Rosenberg tried to understand all that the war stood for means probably that he tried to expose the whole of himself to it. In one letter he describes as an intention what he obviously achieved: ' I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life...' This willingness—and ability—to let himself be new-born into die new situation, not subduing his experience to his established personality, is a large part, if not the whole secret of the robustness which characterizes his best work ... Here as in all the war poems his suffering and discomfort are unusually direct ; there is no secondary distress arising from the sense that these things ought not to be. He was given up to realizing fully what was. He expressed his attitude in The Unicom:

  Lilith: I think there is more sorrow in the world Than man can bear.

  Nubian: None can exceed their limit, lady: You either bear or break.

  It was Rosenberg's exposure of his whole personality that gave his work its quality of impersonality. 2

  What Harding says about Rosenberg in these passages has clearly the closest relevance to Tragedy. And it is especially significant, for my theme, that they belong to the essay containing that discussion of the poetic use of language which I have found so useful in defining the limitations, in respect of the tragic, of Johnson and (I suggest) Mr Santayana.

  This significance, my main concern in this note, will get a

  1 Scrutiny, Vol. HI, pp. 362-3 (The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg}.

  suitable parting stress, if we consider I. A. Richards's treatment of * impersonality', which has, on the surface, resemblances to Harding's. Dr Richards deals with * impersonality' and Tragedy together in the same chapter (XXXII) of The Principles of Literary Criticism. These pages (245-253) contain some of the most valuably suggestive things in the book, and if, for my convenience, I dwell on die weakness, I have at any rate the justification that they are entailed by Richards's essential Neo-Benthamite ambition, which is irreconcilable with his best insight. (And I am urging that these pages should be read, or re-read.)

  The ambition asserts itself characteristically when Richards, having told us that, in the full tragic experience, the *mind does not shy away from anything, it does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone and self-reliant', goes on to pronounce toughly (p. 246):

  The joy which is so strangely at the heart of the experience is not an indication that 'all's right with the world* or that 'somewhere, somehow, there is Justice*; it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous system.

  For him, of course, Tragedy is the supreme instance of die inclusive organization of impulses; it is 'perhaps the most general all-accepting, all-ordering experience known' (p. 247). Experience, for die purposes of the new science, must be reducible to unit impulses, so that evaluation may be quantitative. We are not, then, surprised when we read (p. 248):

  This balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through die force of its exclusions, is not peculiar to Tragedy. It is a general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences of the arts. It can be given by a carpet or a pot or by a gesture as unmistakably as by the Parthenon, it may come about through an epigram as clearly as through a Sonata.

  I must confess myself to have found, with surprise, that I had carried away a wrong impression from this passage—an impression that Richards actually pronounces the tragic experience to be obtainable from a carpet or a pot. But it is easy to see how I came to form it, the argument moving as it does, with so easy and uninhibited a transition. And it is not at all easy to see how Richards can satisfactorily explain the
differences between any experience

  fitly to be called 'tragic* and the most inclusively-poised experience a carpet or a pot can be supposed to give. The scientifico-psychological ambition entails his taking his diagrams of poised and organized * impulses' or * appetencies' too seriously: he couldn't go on supposing he took his science seriously if he even began to recognize the remoteness of their relevance to concrete experiences.

  This may seem, so late in the day, too obvious a kind of criticism to be worth reiterating; but I want to give it a special point in relation to my main argument. No theory of Tragedy can amount to more than a blackboard diagram, a mere schematic substitute for understanding, unless it is associated with an adequate appreciation of the subtleties of poetic (or creative) language—the subtleties that are supremely illustrated in the poetry of Shakespeare. Such an appreciation, if operative, would have inhibited Dr. Richards's reliance on his 'impulses* and his 'nervous system*. This point is not the less worth making because he has always, in his Neo-Benthamite way, been interested in language and the meaning of meaning. He has, since the phase represented by The Principles of Literary Criticism, specialized in Semasiology. But no interest in language that is Benthamite in spirit, or controlled by a Neo-Benthamite ambition, can afford to recognize the profoundest aspects of linguistic 'communication* —those we find ourselves contemplating when we contemplate in the concrete the nature of tragic impersonality. Such an interest can no more be adequate to them than the Utilitarian calculus— with its water-tight unit self, confined, for all self-transcendence, to external transactions with other selves—could engage on the kind of interest in moral issues taken by George Eliot.