The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  Finally, by way of illustrating how the moral aspect of the play is affected by an understanding of the form and convention, I must glance at that matter of Angelo's escape from death—and worse man escape (* ... the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice', etc.)—which has stuck in the throats of so many critics since Coleridge. One has, then, to point out as inoffensively as possible that the point of the play depends upon Angelo's not being a certified criminal-type, capable of a wickedness that marks him off from you and me:

  Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know

  THE COMMON PURSUIT

  That's like my brother's fault: if it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother's life.

  If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipp'd like him . ..

  There is a wider application than that which is immediately intended by the speaker. If we don't see ourselves in Angelo, we have taken the play very imperfectly. Authority, in spite of his protest, was forced upon him, and there are grounds for regarding him as the major victim of the experiment. He was placed in a position calculated to actualize his worst potentialities; and Shakespeare's moral certainly isn't that those potentialities are exceptional. It is not for nothing that Isabella reluctantly grants:

  I partly think

  A due sincerity govern'd his deeds Till he did look on me.

  If any further argument should seem necessary for holding it possible, without offending our finer susceptibilities, to let Angelo marry a good woman and be happy, it may be said in complete seriousness that he has, since his guilty self-committals, passed through virtual death; perhaps that may be allowed to make a difference. It is not merely that immediate death has appeared certain, but that his image of himself, his personality as he has lived it for himself as well as for the world, having been destroyed, he has embraced death:

  I am sorry that such sorrow I procure: And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy: 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

  The bright idea of the recent 'Marlowe' production, the idea of injecting point, interest and modernity into the play by making him a study in neurotic abnormality, strained and twitching from his first appearance, was worse than uncalled-for. But then, if you can't accept what Shakespeare does provide, you have, in some way, to import your interest and significance.

  THE CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARE'S LATE PLAYS

  A Caveat

  T HAVE before me two essays on Cymbeline. In the later 1 of JL them Fr. A. A. Stephenson both criticizes the account of the play offered by F. C. Tinkler in the earlier, 2 and offers a positive account of his own. With the criticisms I find myself pretty much in agreement; but I also find myself as unconvinced by the new interpretation as by Tinkler's—or any other that I have read. Fr. Stephenson, judging that Tinkler's attempt to explain the play in terms "of critical irony' and 'savage farce' doesn't cover the admitted data, himself observes, and argues from, what he takes to be a significant recurrence of Valuation-imagery'. But while developing his argument he at the same time—and this is the curious fact that seems to me to deserve attention—makes a firm note of another set of characteristics, and draws an explicit conclusion:

  the inequalities, the incongruities, the discontinuity, the sense of different planes, the only spasmodic and flickering life in Cymbeline. It must, I think, be recognized that Cymbeline is not an * organic whole', that it is not informed and quickened by an idea-emotion in all its parts.

  The stress laid on these characteristics of the play seems to me much more indisputably justified than that laid on the valuation-imagery. So much so, in fact, that the question arises: Why didn't both Fr. Stephenson and Tinkler (whose argument also derives from observation of these characteristics) rest in the judgment that the play *is not an " organic whole", that it is not informed and quickened by an idea-emotion in all its parts' 2 Why must they set out to show that it is, nevertheless, to be paradoxically explained in terms of a pressure of 'significance'—

  significance, according to Fr. Stephenson, of a kind that cannot be conveyed ?

  That two such intelligent critics, bent on conclusions so different, should countenance one another in this kind of proceeding suggests some reflections on the difficulties and temptations of Shakespeare criticism—and especially of criticism of the late plays—at the present time. We have left Bradley fairly behind. We know that poetic drama is something more than drama in verse, and that consideration of the drama cannot be separated from consideration of the poetry. We are aware of subtle varieties of possibility under the head of convention, and we know we must keep a vigilant eye open for the development of theme by imagery and symbolism, and for the bearing of all these on the way we are to take character, action and plot. Shakespeare's methods are so subtle, flexible and varied that we must be on our guard against approaching any play with inappropriate preconceptions as to what we have in front of us. By assuming that the organization is of a given kind we may incapacitate ourselves for seeing what it actually is, and so miss, or misread, the significance. What a following-through of F. C. Tinkler's and Fr. Stephenson's account will, I think, bring home to most readers is that we may err by insisting on finding a 'significance' that we assume to be necessarily there.

  I have put the portentous word in inverted commas in this last use of it, in order not to suggest a severity of judgment that is not intended. The play contains a great variety of life and interest, and if we talk of 'inequalities' and 'incongruities' it should not be to suggest inanity or nullity: out of the interplay of contrasting themes and modes we have an effect as (to fall back on the usefully corrective analogy) of an odd and distinctive music. But the organization is not a matter of a strict and delicate subservience to a commanding significance, which penetrates the whole, informing and ordering everything—imagery, rhythm, symbolism, character, episode, plot—from a deep centre: Cymbdine is not a great work of art of the order of The Winters Tale.

  The Winters Tale presents itself as the comparison with which to make the point, in that it belongs with Cymbeline to the late group of plays—plays that clearly have important affinities, though my purpose here is to insist on the differences. In academic

  tradition The Winter's Tale is one of the * romantic' plays; the adjective implying, among other things, a certain fairy-tale licence of spirit, theme and development—an indulgence, in relation to reality, of some of the less responsible promptings of imagination and fancy. Thus we have the sudden, unheralded storm of jealousy in Leontes, the part played by the oracle, the casting-out and preservation of the babe, the sixteen-year gap in the action, the pastoral scene (regarded as a pretty piece of poetical by-play) and, finally, the return to life after sixteen years' latency of Galatea-Hermione, in the reconciliation-tableau. But all this has in the concrete fulness of Shakespeare's poetry an utterly different effect from what is suggested by the enumeration. The Winter's Tale, as D. A. Traversi shows so well in his Approach to Shakespeare > is a supreme instance of Shakespeare's poetic complexity— of the impossibility, if one is to speak with any relevance to the play, of considering character, episode, theme, and plot in abstraction from the local effects, so inexhaustibly subtle in their inter-play, of the poetry, and from the larger symbolic effects to which these give fife.

  Properly taken, the play is not romantically licentious, or loose in organization, or indulgent in a fairy-tale way to human fondness. What looked like romantic fairy-tale characteristics turn out to be the conditions of a profundity and generality of theme. If we approach expecting every Shakespearean drama to be of the same kind as Othello, we criticize Leontes' frenzy of jealousy as disconcertingly sudden and unprepared. But if our preconceptions don't prevent our being adverted by imagery, rhythm, and the developing hints of symbolism—by the subtle devices of the poetry and the very absence of 'psychology'—we quickly see th
at what we have in front of us is nothing in the nature of a novel dramatically transcribed. The relations between character, speech and the main themes of the drama are not such as to invite a psychologizing approach; the treatment of life is too generalizing (we may say, if we hasten to add 'and intensifying'); so large a part of the function of the words spoken by the characters is so plainly something other than to 'create' the speakers, or to advance an action that can profitably be considered in terms of the interacting of individuals. The detail of Shakespeare's processes

  is is not the place for discussing; anyone who wants hints for the

  THE COMMON PURSUIT

  analysis will find all that can be asked in D. A. Traverses book. It is enough here to remind the reader of the way in which the personal drama is made to move upon a complexity of larger rhythms—birth, maturity, death, birth ('Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born'); Spring, Summer, Autumn . ..

  Sir, the year growing ancient. Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter . . .

  —so that the pastoral scene is something very much other than a charming superfluity. The power and subtlety of the organization—and this is a striking instance of Shakespeare's ability to transmute for serious ends what might have seemed irremediably romantic effects—are equal to absorbing into the profoundly symbolic significance of the whole even the coup de theatre with which Pauline justifies her sixteen years of double-living and funereal exhortation.

  As Fr. Stephenson points out, there is no such organization in Cymbeline. The romantic theme remains merely romantic. The reunions, resurrections and reconciliations of the close belong to the order of imagination in which 'they all lived happily ever after'. 1 Cloten and the Queen are the wicked characters, stepmother and son, of the fairy-tale: they don't strike us as the expression of an adult intuition of evil. Posthumus's jealousy, on the other hand (if I may supplement Fr. Stephenson's observation: *the "evil" characters, in particular, do not receive full imaginative realization'), is real enough in its nastiness, but has no significance in relation to any radical theme, or total effect, of the play. And here there is opportunity for a brief aside in illustration

  1 * A cc moment parut dona Luz, Fair timidc. (Des qu'il Taper^ut, le g£ne*ral la prit par k main.)

  "Ma niece, lui-dit-il, le visage joyeux, tu peux aimer sans crainte Cceur-Loyal, il est vraiment mon fils. Dieu a pennis que je le retrouve au moment oil j'avais renonc^ a jamais au bonheur !'*

  La jeune fille poussa un cri de joie et abandonna sa main a Rafael, qui tomba a ses pieds. En mSme temps le g&ie"ral s'approcha de sa femme et dans la reunion qui suivit on oublia tous les malheurs du passe" en songeant a Tavenir qui promettait tant de joie-*

  Les Trappeurs de T'Arkansas, Gustave Aimard.

  of the variety of Shakespeare's dramatic modes. Jealousy is a theme common to The Winter s Tale, Othello and Cymbeline. In The Winters Tale there is no psychological interest; we don't ask (so long as we are concerning ourselves with Shakespeare): What elements in Leontes' make-up, working in what way, explain this storm ? The question is irrelevant to the mode of the play. Othello, on the other hand, it would not be misleading to describe as a character-study. The explosive elements have been generated between the very specifically characterized Othello and his situation, and lago merely touches them off. Posthumus's case actually answers to the conventional account of Othello's: the noble hero, by nature far from jealous, is worked on and betrayed by devilish Italian cunning—lachimo is, quite simply, the efficient cause that lago, in the sentimentalized misreading of Othello, is seen as being. Posthumus suffers remorse for his murderous revulsion, but we are not to consider him degraded by his jealousy, or seriously blamable. Simply, he is a victim. He falls in with a villain who, out of pure malice, deceives him about Imogen, and, after strange vicissitudes, fairy-tale fortune brings the lovers together again to enjoy a life of hapiness. Shakespeare, that is, has taken over a romantic convention and has done little to give it anything other than a romantic significance. 1

  Why then should two such intelligent critics as those in question not settle down in the obvious judgment that the play challenges ? I have already suggested that the answer should be sought in terms of a reaction against what may be called the Bradley-Archer 2 approach to Shakespeare. In the case of Cymbeline the assumption that a profound intended significance must be discovered in explanation of the peculiarities of the play is fostered by the presence of varied and impressive evidence of the Shakespearean genius.

  Strength could be adduced in a wealth of illustration. I myself have long carried mental note of a number of passages from Cymbeline that seemed to me memorable instances of Shake-

  1 In Pericles lie took over a romantic play, and the three acts that are clearly his are remarkable for the potency of the transmuting 'significance'.

  2 See The Old Drama and the New by William Archer. T. S. Eliot comments interestingly on the book in the essay called 'Four Elizabethan Dramatists' (Selected Essays).

  speare's imagery and versification. Two in particulat I will mention. One is Posthumus's description of the battle [V. iii, lines 14 to 51], It is a remarkable piece of vigorous dramatic felicity. The precisely right tone, a blend of breathless excitement, the professional soldier's dryness, and contempt (towards the Lord addressed), is perfectly got. There are some fine examples 01 Shakespearean compression and ellipsis; and here, surely, is strength in imagery:

  and now our cowards, Like fragments in hard voyages, became The life of the need: having found the back-door open Of the unguarded hearts, heavens, how they wound!

  In 'like fragments in hard voyages' and the 'back-door' we have, in imagery, the business-like and intense matter-of-factness, at once contemptuous and, in its ironical dryness, expressive both of professional habit and of controlled excitement, that gives the speech its highly specific and dramatically appropriate tone. The other passage is Posthumus's prison speech in the next scene [V, iv, 3-29], so different in tone and movement:

  Most welcome, bondage! for thou art a way,

  I think, to liberty: yet am I better

  Than one that's sick of the gout; since he had rather

  Groan so in perpetuity than be cured

  By the sure physician, death, who is the key

  To unbar these locks.

  This doesn't belong to 'romantic comedy', nor does the dialogue with the gaoler at the end of the scene. And here, and in the many vigorously realized passages, we have the excuse for the attempt, in spite of'the inequalities, the incongruities, the discontinuity, the sense of different planes', to vindicate the play (for that, paradoxically, is Fr. Stephenson's aim as well as Tinkler's) in terms of a profound significance. But surely there should be no difficulty in recognizing that, wrestling with a job undertaken in the course or his exigent profession, Shakespeare might, while failing to find in his material a unifying significance such as might organize it into a profound work of art, still show from place to pkce, when prompted and incited congenially, his characteristic realizing genius ?

  Cymbeline, then, is not like The Winter's Tale a masterpiece. The Tempest is by more general agreement a masterpiece than The Winter's Tale, but it is a very different kind of thing (to complete briefly die hint of comparison I threw out above). Lytton Strachey in his essay on * Shakespeare's Final Period * (see Books and Characters), gives us an opening: ' There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare's prime are present here in still greater degree. In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis/ Lytton Strachey's 'unreality', strongly derogatory in intention, has to be understood, of course, in relation to the Bradley-Archer assumptions of his approach. Actually, it seems to me that The Tempest differs from The Winter's Tale in being much closer to the 'reality' we commonly expect of the novelist. The 'unreality', instead of penetrating and transmuting everything as in The Winter's Tale, is in The Tempest confined to P
rospero's imagery and its agents. Prospero himself, the Neapolitan and Milanese nobility and gentry, Stephano and Trinculo, the ship's crew—all these belong as much to the 'reality' of the realistic novelist as the play of Othello does. Prospero manages the wreck, lands the parties and directs their footsteps about the island to the final convergence, but they strike us, in their behaviour and conversation, as people of the ordinary everyday world. The courtiers are Elizabethan quality, and Gonzalo's attempt to distract the king and raise the tone of the conversation with a piece of advanced thought from Montaigne is all in keeping. Even Caliban (though sired by the devil on a witch) leads the modern commentator, quite appropriately, to discuss Shakespeare's interest in the world of new discovery and in the impact of civilization on the native.

  The 'unreality' functions in Ariel and in the power (as it were a daydream actualized) that enables Prospero to stage the scene of repentance and restitution. But the nature of this power as a licence of imagination stands proclaimed in the essential symbolism of the play; and not only does Prospero finally renounce magic, break his staff and drown his book, but the daydream has never been allowed to falsify human and moral realities. That Alonso should, without the assistance of magic, suffer pangs of conscience is not in the least incredible; on the other hand, we note that the sinister

  pair, Sebastian and Antonio, remain wiiat they were. They maybe fairly set over against Ferdinand and Miranda, and they represent a potent element in that world to which the lovers are returning, and in which, unprotected by magic, they are to spend their lives,

  O brave new world, That has such people in't!