What brings about the recognition is, in the first place, the deeply disturbing a Cf. J. C. Ransom’s comments on this school of critics, pp. 230-31 above.

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

spectacle of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. I can find nothing in the text that forces us to look on these two sets of strange creatures in any other light than that in which Gulliver sees them—not, that is, as personified abstractions, but simply as two concrete species of animals: existent species for Gulliver, hypothetical species for us. The contrast he draws between them involves the same pair of antithetical terms (the one positive, the other privative) that he has been accustomed to use in contrasting men and the other animals. The essential character of the Houyhnhnms, he tells us, is that they are creatures ‘wholly governed by reason'; the essential character of the Yahoos is that They are the most unteachable of brutes', without The least tincture of reason'. The world of animals in Houyhnhnmland, in other words, is divided by the same basic difference as the world of animals in Europe. Only, of course—and it is the shock of this that prepares Gulliver for his ultimate abandonment of the definition of man he has started with—it is a world in which the normal distribution of species between ‘rational creatures’ and irrational ‘brutes' is sharply inverted, with horses, which he cannot help admiring, in the natural place of men, and manlike creatures, which he cannot help abhorring, in the natural place of horses.

This is enough in itself to cause Gulliver to view his original formula for his own species, as he says, ‘in a very different light'. But he is pushed much further in the same misanthropic direction by the questions and comments of his Houyhnhnm master, acting as a kind of Socrates. What thus develops is partly a 1 eduction to absurdity of man's ‘pretensions to the character of a rational creature and partly a demonstration of the complete parity in essential nature between men and the Houyhnhnmland Yahoos. There is of course one difference unlike the Yahoos, men are after all possessed of at least a ‘small proportion , a small pittance' of reason, some in greater degree than others. But I can see no clear signs in the text that this qualification is intended to set men apart as a third, or intermediate, species for either Gulliver or the reader. For what is basic in the new definition of man as a merely more ‘civilized’ variety of Yahoo is the fundamentally irrational ‘disposition’ which motivates his habitual behaviour; and in relation to that his ‘capacity for reason' is only an acquired attribute which he is always in danger of losing and of which, as Gulliver says, he makes no other use, generally speaking, than To improve and multiply those vices whereof his ‘brethren [in Houyhnhnmland] had only the share that nature allotted them'.

It is clear what a satisfactory historical explanation of this line of argument in the Voyage would have to do. It would have to account for Swift's patent assumption that there would be a high degree of satirical force, for readers in 1726, in a fable which began with the notion that man is pre-eminently a rational creature and then proceeded to turn this notion violently upside down, and which, in doing so, based itself on a division of animal species into the extremes of rational creatures' and irrational ‘brutes' and on the paradoxical identification of the former with horses and of the latter with beings closely resembling men. Was there perhaps a body of teaching, not so far brought into the discussion of the Voyage but widely familiar at the time, that could have

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

supplied Swift with the particular scheme of ideas he was exploiting here? I suggest that there was, and also that there is nothing strange in the fact that it has been hitherto overlooked by Swift’s critics. For one principal medium through which these ideas could have come to Swift and his readers—the only one, in fact, I know of that could have given all of them—was a body of writings, mainly in Latin, which students of literature in our day quite naturally shy away from reading: namely, the old-fashioned textbooks in logic that still dominated the teaching of that subject in British universities during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 3

It is impossible not to be impressed, in the first place, by the prominence in these textbooks of the particular definition of man which the Voyage sought to discredit. Homo est animal rationale [‘man is a rational animal’] : no one could study elementary logic anywhere in the British Isles in the generation before Gulliver without encountering this formula or variations of it (Nullus homo est irrationalis [‘No man is irrational’]) in his manuals and the lectures he heard. It appears as the standard example of essential definition in the great majority of logics in use during these years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin; and in most of those in which it occurs, it is given without comment or explanation as the obviously correct formula for man’s distinctive nature, as if no one would ever question that man is, uniquely and above all, a rational creature. It is frequently brought in many times over, in various contexts, in individual textbooks: I have counted a dozen or so occurrences of it in Milton’s Art of Logic, and many times that number in the Institutionum logicarum ... libri duo of Franco Burgersdijck (or Burgersdicius), which was one of the most widely used, and also one of the longest lived, of all these writings—it appeared in 1626 and was still prescribed at Dublin when Edmund Burke went there as a Junior Freshman in 1744. 4 I shall have some more to say of Burgersdicius, or ‘Burgy’ as Burke called him, presently; but it is worth noting that he provides us, in one passage, with the very question on which much of the fourth Voyage was to turn and with the answer Swift was not to give to it: ‘Quaerenti enim, Quale animal est homo? apposite respondetur, Rationale.’ [To the question “What kind of animal is man?” the correct answer is, “Rational”.’]

Not only, however, was the definition omnipresent in these books, but there is some evidence that it was thought of, in Swift’s time, as the special property of the academic logicians. Locke, for instance, calls it in his Essay ‘the ordinary Definition of the Schools’, the ‘sacred Definition of Animal Rationale ’ of ‘the learned Divine and Lawyer’; it goes, he implies, with ‘this whole Mystery of Genera and Species, which make a noise in the Schools, and are, with Justice, so little regarded out of them’ (III. iii. 10; vi. 26; iii. 9). And there are other later testimonies to the same effect; among them these opening lines of an anonymous poem of the period after Gulliver, once ascribed to Swift—‘Ihe Logicians Refuted’:

Logicians have but ill defin’d As rational, the human kind;

Reason, they say, belongs to man,

But let them prove it if they can.

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,

By ratiocinations specious,

Have strove to prove with great precision,

With definition and division,

Homo est ratione preditum; [man is endowed with reason] But for my soul I cannot credit 'em. 5

But the logicians had more to offer Swift than the great authority which they undoubtedly conferred on the definition 'rational animal'. They could have suggested to him also the basic principle on which the inverted animal world of Houyhnhnmland was constructed, and consequently the disjunction that operated as major premise in his argument about man. Whoever it was, among the Greeks, that first divided the genus 'animal' by the differentiae ‘rational' and iirational, there is much evidence that this antithesis had become a commonplace in the Greco-Roman schools long before it was taken up by the writer who did more than anyone else to determine the context in which the definition animal rationale was chiefly familiar to Englishmen of Swift's time. This writer was the Neoplatonist Porphyry of the third century, whose little treatise, the Isagoge, or introduction to the categories of Aristotle, became, as is well known, one of the great sources of logical theorizing and teaching from the time of Boethius until well beyond the end of the seventeenth century. There is no point in going into the details of Porphyry's doctrine: what is important for our puipose here is the new sanction he gave to the older division of animal species through his incorporation of it into the general scheme of differentiae for the category of substance which was later known as the arbor porphyriana or Porphyry s tree, especially in the diagrams of it that became a regular feature of the more elementary textbooks. Here it is, set forth discursively, in the crabbed prose of Burgersdicius (I quote the English version of 1697, but the Latin is no better). In seeking the definition of man, he writes, we must first observe that

Man is a Substance; but because an Angel is also a Substance; That it may appear how Man differs from an Angel, Substance ought to be divided into Corporeal and Incorporeal. A Man is a Body, an Angel without a Body: But a Stone also is a Body: I hat therefore a Man may be distinguished from a Stone, divide Bodily or Corporeal Substance into Animate and Inanimate, that is, with or without a Soul. Man is a Corporeal Substance Animate, Stone Inanimate. But Plants are also Animate: Let us divide therefore again Corporeal Substance Animate into Feeling and void of Feeling. Man feels, a Plant not: But a Horse also feels, and likewise other Beasts. Divide we therefore Animate Corporeal Feeling Substance into Rational and Irrational. Here therefore are we to stand, since it appears that every, and only Man is Rationale . G

And there was, finally, one other thing in these logics that could have helped to shape Swift s invention in the fourth Voyage. In opposing man as the only species of rational animal to the brutes, Porphyry obviously needed a specific instance, parallel to man, of an irrational' creature; and the instance he chose— there were earlier precedents for the choice 7 —was the horse. The proportion rational is to 'irrational' as man is to horse occurs more than once in the Isagoge, and the juxtaposition, in the same context, of homo and equus was a

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

frequently recurring cliche in his seventeenth-century followers, as in the passage in Burgersdicius just quoted: other species of brutes were occasionally mentioned, but none of them nearly so often. And anyone who studied these books could hardly fail to remember a further point—that the distinguishing 'property’ of this favourite brute was invariably given as whinnying ( facultas hinnicndi ); equus, it was said again and again, est animal hinnibile.

To most Englishmen of Swift’s time who had read logic in their youth—and this would include nearly all generally educated men—these commonplaces of Porphyry’s tree, as I call them for short, were as familiar as the Freudian commonplaces are to generally educated people today, and they were accepted, for the most part, in an even less questioning spirit, so that it might well have occurred to a clever satirist then, that he could produce a fine shock to his readers’ complacency as human beings by inventing a world in which horses appeared where the logicians had put men and men where they had put horses, and by elaborating, through this, an argument designed to shift the position of man as a species from the annual rationale branch of the tree, where he had always been proudly placed, as far as possible over towards the animal irrationale branch, with its enormously less flattering connotations. But have we any warrant for thinking that this, or something like it, was what Swift actually had in mind? It is clearly possible to describe the Voyage as, in considerable part at least, an anti-Porphyrian satire 8 in the genre of the poem I quoted from earlier, The Logicians Refuted’. But is there any evidence that Swift planned it as such?

That the Porphyrian commonplaces had been known to him in their full extent from his days at Trinity College in the early 1680s we can hardly doubt in view of the kind of education in logic he was exposed to there. Among the books which all Junior Freshmen at Dublin in those years were required to study or hear lectures on, we know of three in which the Porphyrian apparatus and examples had a prominent place: the Isagoge itself (which was prescribed by the statutes of the College to be read twice over during the year), the older logic of Burgersdicius, and the newer Institutio logicae of Narcissus Marsh. It is true that Swift, according to his own later statement, detested this part of the curriculum, and it is true that on one examination in the 'philosophy’ course (specifically Physica), in his last year, his mark was Male [Bad] (he had a Bene [Good] in Greek and Latin). But this was an examination in a more advanced part of the Aristotelian system, and it is likely that he had fared better in the earlier examination in logic, since he had evidently been allowed to proceed with his class. It is possible, moreover, to infer from his occasional use of logical terms in his later writings that, abhorrent as the subject was to him, the time he had been compelled to spend on it as a Junior Freshman was not a total loss. He at least remembered enough of it to allude familiarly in different places to such things as a 'long sorites’, 'the first proposition of a hypothetical syllogism’, and the fallacy of two middle terms in a single syllogism; 9 and if this was possible, there is good reason to suppose that he had not forgotten the much simpler Porphyrian points about genera, species, and definition, ‘rational’ versus ‘irrational’ animals, men and horses which he had been introduced to at the same time.

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

The crucial question, however, is whether he had these notions of the logicians actively in mind when, in the 1720s, he conceived and wrote the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms'. And here it will be well to take a fresh look at the two much-quoted letters about Gulliver's Travels which he sent to Pope in 1 7 2 5 , just after that work was completed. In the first of these, that of 29 September, after having told Pope that his chief aim is ‘to vex the world rather than divert it' and that he hates and detests ‘that animal called man’, he goes on to remark: ‘I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it should be only rationis capax [capable of reason]. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion.' In the second letter, that of 26 November, he desires that Pope and ‘all my friends’ will ‘take a special care that my disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age, for I have credible

witnesses ... that it has never varied from the twenty-first to the f ty-eighth

year of my life’. He then adds a passage which has been read as a retraction of the judgment on humanity expressed in the first letter, although the final sentence makes clear, I think, that it was not so intended:

I tell you after all, that I do not hate mankind; it is vous autres [Pope and Bolingbroke] who hate them, because you would have them reasonable animals, and are angry for being disappointed. I have always rejected that

definition, and made another of my own. I am no more angry with than

I am with the kite that last week flew away with one of my chickens; and yet I was glad when one of my servants shot him two days after.

The casual references in both letters to ‘that definition' animal rationale and reasonable animals'—which Swift tells Pope he has ‘always rejected’ have usually been interpreted by his modern critics as allusions to such contemporary philosophical or theological heresies (from Swift's point of view) as the ‘optimism’ of Shaftesbuiy or the rationalism' of Descartes and the deists. It is surely, however, a much less far-fetched conjecture, especially in view of the familiar textbook Latin of the first letter, to see in ‘that definition’ nothing other or more than the sacred definition’ of the logicians which had been inflicted on him, by thoroughly orthodox tutors, in his undergraduate days at Dublin.

I find this explanation, at any rate, much harder to disbelieve than any other that has been proposed; and all the more so because of another passage in the first letter which is almost certainly reminiscent of the Trinity logic course in the early 1680s. It is the famous sentence—just before the allusion to ‘that definition animal rationale ' and leading on to it—in which Swift says: ‘But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, I eter, Thomas, and so forth.' Now to anyone at all widely read in the logic textbooks of Swift's time two things about this sentence are immediately evident: first, that the distinction it turns on is the distinction to be found in nearly all these books between a species of animals and individual members of that species; and second, that the names ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth’ are wholly in line with one of the two main traditions of names for individuals of the species man that had persisted side by side in innumerable manuals of logic

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos , and the history of ideas

since the Middle Ages: not, of course, the older tradition of classical names— Socrates, Plato, Alexander, Caesar—but the newer tradition (which I have noted first in Occam, although it doubtless antedates him) that drew upon the list of apostles—Peter, John, Paul, James, Thomas, in roughly that descending order of preference. (Other non-classical names, like Stephen, Catharine, Charles, Richard, also appear, but much less frequently.)

We can go further than this, however. For although all three of Swift's names occur separately in various texts (Thomas least often), the combination ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth' was an extremely unusual one. I have met with it, in fact, in only one book before 1725; and I have examined nearly all the logics, both Latin and English, down to that date for which I can find any evidence that they had even a minor circulation in Britain. The exception, however, is a book which Swift could hardly have escaped knowing as an undergraduate, since it was composed expressly for the use of Trinity College students by the then Provost and had just recently come ‘on the course' when he entered the College in 1682—namely, the Institutio logicae, already referred to, of Narcissus Marsh (Dublin, 1679: reissued Dublin, 1681). Early in the book Marsh gives a full-page diagram of Porphyry's tree, with its inevitable opposition of animal — rationale—homo and animal — irrationale — brutum; and here, as individua under homo, we find ‘Joannes, Petrus, Thomas, &c.' And a little later in the book the same names are repeated in the same order as individual specimens of homo in Marsh's analytical table for the category substantia .

Was this combination of names, then, Marsh's invention? There is one further circumstance which suggests that it may well have been. We know from his own testimony, 10 as well as from internal evidence, that the source on which he based the greater part of his Dublin logic of 1679 was his own revision, published at Oxford in 1678, of the Manuductio ad logicam of the early seventeenth-century Jesuit logician Philippe Du Trieu. Now of the two passages in the Dublin book that contain Swift's three names, the first—the diagram of Porphyry's tree—has no counterpart in the Oxford book of 1678, although it has in Du Trieu's original text, where the names are ‘Petrus' and ‘Joannes'. It seems likely, then, that Marsh first thought of the combination ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth' when he revised his earlier revision of Du Trieu for his Trinity students in 1679; and this is borne out by what he did at the same time with the other passage—the table of substance. This he retained almost exactly as it had been in Du Trieu except for the names under homo: here, where in 1678 he had reprinted Du Trieu's ‘Stephanus, Johannes, Catharina, &c.', he now wrote ‘Johannes, Petrus, Thomas, &c.' Which would seem to imply a certain sense of private property in these particular names in this particular combination.

It is somewhat hard, then, not to conclude that Swift was remembering Marsh's logic as he composed the sentence, in his letter to Pope, about ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth'. But if that is true, can there be much doubt, in view of the Porphyrian context in which these names appear in Marsh, about what tradition of ideas was in his mind when he went on to remark, immediately afterwards, that ‘the great foundation of misanthropy' on which ‘the

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

whole building of his Travels rested was his proof—against Marsh and the other logicians he had been made to study at Trinity—of ‘the falsity of that definition animal rationale ’? 11

Notes

1. See his ‘Errors concerning the Houyhnhnms’, MP, lvi, 1958, 92-7. To this may now be added Edward Rosenheim, Jr.’s The Fifth Voyage of Lemuel Gulliver: a footnote’, MP, lx, 1962, 103-19, and his Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago, 1963), passim.

2. The list of writings that reflect this preoccupation is now a fairly long one; in the present essay I have had in view chiefly the following: Ernest Bernbaum, ‘The significance of “Gulliver’s Travels” ’, in his edition of that work (New York, 1920); T. O. Wedel, ‘On the philosophical background of Gulliver’s Travels’ , SP, xxiii 1926, 434-50; John F. Ross,

Comedy of Lemuel Gulliver’, in Studies in the Comic (University of California Publications in English, vol. viii, no. 2, 1941), pp. 175-96; Robert B. Heilman, Introduction Jj? ~. s ^ition of Gulliver’s Travels (New York, 1950), especially pp. xii-xxii; Ernest Tuveson, Swift! the Dean as satirist', University of Toronto Quarterly, xxii, 1953, 368-75; Roland M. Frye, ‘Swift’s Yahoo and the Christian symbols for Sin’, JHI, xv, 1953, 201-15; W. A. Murray's supplementary note to Frye, ibid., pp. 596-601; Samuel H. Monk, ‘The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver , Sewanee Review, briii, 1955, 48-71; Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘The origins of Gullivers Travels, PMLA, lxxii, 1957, 880-99 (reprinted with some revisions in his The Personality of Jonathan Swift [London, 1958]); Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the A g e of Compromise (Lawrence, Kansas, 1958); Calhoun Winton, ‘Conversion on the road to Houyhnhnmland', Sewanee Review, Ixviii, i960, 20-33; Martin Kallich, ‘Three ways of

ooking at a horse: Jonathan Swift’s ‘Voyage to the Houyhnhnms' Again', Criticism, ii, i960, 107-24.

3. There are useful descriptions of many, though by no means all, of these in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956).

4. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, edited by Thomas W. Copeland, I (Cambridge

and Chicago, 1958), iv, 7-9, 21, 28. 5

, B fi sy , B ° dy ’^°-1 ’ 18 October 1759. Both the ascription to Swift, which occurs in

rnMcm f P h efiXed , h u fi M St j n , 0Wn printing °‘ the P°<™. and the later ascription to Goldsmith seem to me highly dubious. y

l ° gi r a: ° r j An Abstrac f and Translation of Burgersdicius His logick (London, 1097). PP- 13714 (second pagination). ’

in 7 p C g £ ( ^ uintllian> IttsUtutio oratorio, VII. iii, 3, 24. For the contrast of man and horse

est a 3 y e 7 r SCe f es P ecialI y Migne, PL, Ixiv, col. 128 (Boethius’ translation): ‘Differentia est quod est aptum natum dividere ea quae sub eodem genere sunt: rationale enim et nration 31 , hominem et equum quae sub eodem genere sunt animali dividunt.'

(MP Ix^oimT/^^c: 5 Pj in f ed ' m 7. cpbeague Edward Rosenheim has pointed out

fcmrth v! 2 TJL' f* hl < S Tv an u s Art > P- 100 n.) that this description of the

th Voyage as an anti-Porphyrian satire’ needs some clarification. How, he asks ‘are

our own opinions changed by Swift’s discrediting the definition of man to be found in such texts on logic as that of Narcissus Marsh ? Is the reader’s scepticism being chiefly directed text * themselves? (Crane’s phrase, “anti-Porphyrian satire” suggests that he may think so.) Or, on the other hand, is the satire directed against the substance of the pr w P v 0S ' t r ltse } { w 'thout particular concern for the contexts in which it has appeared?’ it i y ^ hraSe ’ 1 f mUSt ackn owIedge, clearly invites the construction Rosenheim puts on it. It does seem to imply that Just as the targets of Swift’s satire in Part III of Gulliver

hi a msTnTr TlT and r eCt T 0f ‘ hc in much tie ^ame sense

ms targets in Part IV were the academic logicians of the Porphyrian school Mv actual

fr™ l betw<!en the Voyage and these logicians, however, is quite different

from th,s and much c oser to the view Rosenheim himself expounds in the latter nart of Ins essay. L.ke him, I regard the fourth Voyage, not as an attack on either log dans o O0C flow as was h,s opinion of this subject), but as a satirical 'homily' dTected agamtt

ArThu! 1 0 °l7 Y l,nive " al . ohiect-namely, that form of human prfde which the late Arthur O. Lovejoy once called 'the generic pride of man as such' (Essays in the flLoJy

Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

of Ideas, p. 63), the pride that springs from the imagined superiority of man as a species over all other living creatures in some major aspect of his nature.

For Swift in the fourth Voyage, the chief foundation of this pride was the almost universally prevalent conviction, which the academic logicians in the tradition of Porphyry and his Greek and Roman predecessors did so much to keep alive, that the essence of man—and hence of all men—is contained in ‘that definition animal rationale ’. He had only to prove the falsity of this, and he had knocked out one of the great supports—perhaps the greatest support—of man’s pretension to unique eminence in the animate world. This—I think Rosenheim would agree with me—was the major task he set himself in contriving his fable of Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, to the end of shocking his readers into that attitude of philosophic misanthropy (‘not in Timon's manner’) which consisted in thinking less exaltedly of themselves and expecting less of virtue and sense from their fellow creatures.

9. See John M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire (Cambridge, Mass.,

1953 )* P- 73 - Cf. also Swift, ‘A Preface to the B p of S m's Introduction’, in Works,

edited by Temple Scott, iii, 150.

10. See his preface ‘Ad lectorem’ in the 1681 issue (it is missing from some copies but can be found in the Cambridge University Library copy and in that belonging to Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin); also the entry for 20 December 1690, in his manuscript diary. I owe this latter reference to Mary Pollard, of Archbishop Marsh’s Library. For the rather complicated bibliographical history of Marsh’s Institutio logicae (the title was altered to Institutions logicae in the reissue of 1681), see her article, ‘The printing of the Provost’s Logic and the supply of text-books in the late seventeenth century’, in Friends of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin: Annual Bulletin, 1959-61.

11. I have discussed some further aspects of the subject in a brief article, ‘The Rationale of the Fourth Voyage’, in Gulliver's Travels: an annotated text with critical essays, edited by Robert A. Greenberg (New York, 1961), pp. 300-7, and in a review of two papers on Swift and the deists, in PQ, xl, 1961, 427-30.

Marshall McLuhan (b. 1911) was born and brought up in Canada. He studied at Manitoba University and subsequently at Cambridge, England, where he experienced the teaching of Dr F. R. Leavis. McLuhan’s own early criticism (mainly periodical essays written while he was teaching at St Louis University) was somewhat Leavisian in character, defending and interpreting the work of certain modern writers as preservers of important cultural values in the hostile environment of mass society. In the 1940s, however, McLuhan moved towards a more objective, more analytical engagement with mass culture, of which the first result was his study of modern advertising, The Mechanical Bride: folklore of industrial man (New York, 1951). This pioneering study was almost entirely ignored until The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographical man (1962) made McLuhan a figure of international fame and controversy. He is now Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

The Gutenberg Galaxy is based on the assumption that the nature and development of human knowledge are best understood by studying our modes of perception and communication, which are subject to change. In the words of McLuhan’s most celebrated aphorism, ‘the medium is the message’. In primitive, preliterate societies (so the theory goes) communication is basically oral-aural, but involves all the senses in person-to-person encounters. The next phase of cultural development is that of script, which depersonalizes communication to some extent, but not entirely. It is the printing press (invention of Gutenberg) which divorces communication from all senses except the visual. In the Gutenberg era, knowledge is acquired in silence and solitude as the mind follows the linear, logical connections of the printed text. The human family and the Gestalt of the human person are fragmented into various specialized functions, with consequent alienation and angst. The Gutenberg era, however, is already being superseded by electric and electronic media, especially television, which operate in a way analogous to primitive oral-aural communication, converting the world into a ‘global village’.

McLuhan’s subsequent publications, which include Understanding Media (New York, 1964), and The Medium is the Massage (New York, 1967), are all extensions or explorations of the ideas expounded in The Gutenberg Galaxy. With that book, McLuhan transformed himself from a literary critic into a cultural historian and utopian prophet, but much of his illustration and inspiration is drawn from imaginative literature—Blake and Joyce being especially important influences.

The weaknesses of McLuhan’s argument as regards both evidence and logic have been pointed out often enough, and his characteristic defensive gambit—

610

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

to suggest that his critics, by their objections, merely demonstrate their Gutenberg conditioning—is not entirely satisfactory. But he has probably done more than any other single man to make us conscious of the various media of communication as media, instead of merely attending to the information they carry. He has done this partly by synthesizing and expressing with epigrammatic force a great deal of specialized scholarship in a wide range of different fields. The extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy reprinted below, which is mainly about Pope's The Dunciad, illustrates McLuhan’s ability to startle the reader into viewing a familiar object from an unfamiliar angle.

cross references: 37. Walter J. Ong

38. Norman O. Brown 44. R. S. Crane.

commentary: Jonathan Miller, McLuhan (1971)

George Steiner, ‘On reading Marshall McLuhan', in Language and Silence (1967)

[The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations

before that

Whittaker* notes (p. 98) that the space of Newton and Gassendi was ‘so far as geometry was concerned, the space of Euclid: it was infinite, homogeneous, and completely featureless, one point being just like another.. / Much earlier our concern had been to explain why this fiction of homogeneity and uniform continuity had derived from phonetic writing, especially in print form. Whittaker says that from a physics point of view the Newtonian space was ‘mere emptiness into which things could be put’. But even for Newton, the gravitational field seemed incompatible with this neutral space. ‘As a matter of fact, the successors of Newton felt this difficulty; and, having started with a space that was in itself simply nonentity having no property except a capacity for being occupied, they proceeded to fill it several times over with ethers

“Edmund Whittaker, Space and Spirit (Hinsdale, 111 ., 1948).

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

designed to provide electric, magnetic, and gravitational forces, and to account for the propagation of light’ (pp. 98-9).

Perhaps no more striking evidence of the merely visual and uniform character of space was given than in the famous phrase of Pascal: ‘Le silence eternel des espaces infinis m’effraie’ [The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me’]. Some meditation on why silent space should be so terrifying yields much insight into the cultural revolution going on in human sensibilities by the visual stress of the printed book.

But the absurdity of speaking of space as a neutral container will never trouble a culture which has separated its visual awareness from the other senses. Yet, says Whittaker, ‘in Einstein’s conception, space is no longer the stage in which the drama of physics is performed: it is itself one of the performers; for gravitation, which is a physical property, is entirely controlled by curvature, which is a geometrical property of space’ (p. 100).

With this recognition of curved space in 1905 the Gutenberg galaxy was officially dissolved. With the end of lineal specialisms and fixed points of view, compartmentalized knowledge became as unacceptable as it had always been irrelevant. But the effect of such a segregated way of thinking has been to make science a departmental affair, having no influence on eye and thought except indirectly through its applications. In recent years this isolationist attitude has weakened. And it has been the effort of this book to explain how the illusion of segregation of knowledge had become possible by the isolation of the visual sense by means of alphabet and typography. Perhaps it cannot be said too often. This illusion may have been a good or a bad thing. But there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our own technologies.

In the later seventeenth century there is a considerable amount of alarm and revulsion expressed concerning the growing quantity of printed books. The first hopes for a great reform of human manners by means of the book had met disappointment, and in 1680 Leibnitz was writing:

I fear we shall remain for a long time in our present confusion and indigence through our own fault. I even fear that after uselessly exhausting curiosity without obtaining from our investigations any considerable gain for our happiness, people may be disgusted with the sciences, and that a fatal despair may cause them to fall back into barbarism. To which result that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing might contribute very much. For in the end the disorder will become nearly insurmountable; the indefinite multitude of authors will shortly expose them all to the danger of general oblivion; the hope of glory animating many people at work in studies will suddenly cease; it will be perhaps as disgraceful to be an author as it was formerly honourable. At best, one may amuse himself with little books of the hour which will run their course in a' few years and will serve to divert a reader from boredom for a few moments, but which will have been written without any design to promote our knowledge or to deserve the appreciation of posterity. I shall be told that since so many people write it is impossible for all their works to be preserved. I admit that, and I do not entirely disapprove those little books in fashion which are like the flowers of a springtime or like the fruits of an autumn, scarcely surviving a year. If they are

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

well made, they have the effect of a useful conversation, not simply pleasing and keeping tne idle out of mischief but helping to shape the mind and language. Often their aim is to induce something good in men of our time, which is also the end I seek by publishing this little work .. A

Leibnitz here envisages the book as the natural successor, as well as executioner, of scholastic philosophy, which might yet return. The book as a spur to fame and as the engine of immortality now seems to him in the utmost danger from ‘the indefinite multitude of authors'. For the general run of books he sees the function of serving as a furtherer of conversation ‘keeping the idle out of mischief and ‘helping to shape the mind and language’. It is clear that the book was yet far from having become the main mode of politics and society. It was still a surface fact which had only begun to obscure the traditional lineaments of Western society. With regard to the continuing threat of scholastic renewal there is the ever-present literary or visual complaint about oral scholasticism that it is words, words, words. Leibnitz, writing on the ‘Art of Discovery’, says:

Among the Scholastics there was a certain Jean Suisset called the Calculator, whose works I have not yet been able to find and I have seen only those of a few disciples of his. This Suisset began to use Mathematics in scholastic arguments, but few people imitated him because they would have to give up the method of disputation for that of book-keeping and reasoning, and a stroke of the pen would have spared much clamor. 2

Pope’s Dunciad indicts the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and Romantic revival. Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation

In 1683-4 there appeared in London by Joseph Moxon, M cchanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing. The editors point out (p. vii) that ‘it put in writing a knowledge that was wholly traditional’, and that Moxon’s book ‘was by forty years the earliest manual of printing in any language’. Like Gibbon in his retrospect of Rome, Moxon seems to have been animated by a sense of print as having reached a terminus. A similar sentiment inspires The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books by Dean Swift. But it is to The Dunciad that we must turn for the epic of the printed word and its benefits to mankind. For here is the explicit study of plunging of the human mind into the sludge of an unconscious engendered by the book. It has been obscured to posterity, in keeping with the prophecy at the end of Book IV, just why literature should be charged with stupefying mankind, and mesmerically ushering the polite world back into primitivism, the Africa within, and above all, the unconscious. The simple key to this operation is that which we have had in hand throughout this book—the increasing separation of the visual faculty from the inter-

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

play with the other senses leads to the rejection from consciousness of most of our experience, and the consequent hypertrophy of the unconscious. This ever-enlarging domain Pope calls the world 'of Chaos and old Night'. It is the tribal, non-literate world celebrated by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane .

Martinus Scriblerus 0 in his notes to The Dunciad reflects on how much more difficult it is to write an epic about the numerous scribblers and industrious hacks of the press than about a Charlemagne, a Brute, or a Godfrey. He then mentions the need for a satirist ‘to dissuade the dull and punish the wicked', and looks at the general situation that has brought on the crisis:

We shall next declare the occasion and the cause which moved our Poet to this particular work. He lived in those days when (after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as a scourge for the Sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover’d the land: Whereby not only the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily molested, but unmerciful demands were made of his applause, yea of his money, by such as would neither earn the one, or deserve the other; At the same time, the Liberty of the Press was so unlimited, that it grew dangerous to refuse them either: For they would forthwith publish slanders unpunish’d, the authors being anonymous; nay the immediate publishers thereof lay sculking under the w T ings of an Act of Parliament, assuredly intended for better purposes. 3

Next he turns (p. 50) from the general economic causes to the private moral motivation of authors inspired by ‘Dulness and Poverty; the one born with them, the other contracted by neglect of their proper talents ...' In a word, the attack is on applied knowledge as it manifests itself in ‘Industry’ and ‘Plodding’. For authors inspired by self-opinion and the craving for self-expression are driven into ‘setting up this sad and sorry merchandise’.

By means of the agglomerate action of many such victims of applied knowledge—that is, self-opinionated authors endowed with Industry and Plodding— there is now the restoration of the reign of Chaos and old Night and ‘the removal of the imperial seat of Dulness their daughter from the City to the Polite world’. As the book market expands, the division between intellect and commerce ends. The book trade takes over the functions of wit and spirit and government.

That is the meaning of the opening lines of the first editions of the poem:

Books and the man I sing, the first who brings The SmithCeld Muses to the ears of Kings.

It seemed quite unnatural to the ‘polite world' of the time that decision-making and kingly rule should be accessible to popular authors. We no longer consider it odd or revolting to be ruled by people for whom the book of the month might appear quite respectable fare. Smithfield, \Vhere Bartholomew Fair was kept, was still a place for book-peddling. But in later editions Pope changed the opening:

°The Scriblerus Club, formed about 1713, included Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot and Gay. They collaborated in the composition of The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, a satire on ‘false tastes in learning’, and Pope used the name as a pseudonym in writing notes to The Dunciad.

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

The mighty Mother, and her Son, who brings The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings.

He has encountered the public, the collective unconscious, and dubbed it ‘the mighty Mother', in accordance with the occultism of his time. It is Joyce's ‘Lead kindly Fowl' (foule, owl, crowd), which we have seen earlier.

As the book market enlarged and the gathering and reporting of news improved, the nature of authorship and public underwent the great changes that we accept as normal today. The book had retained from manuscript times some of its private and conversational character, as Leibnitz indicated in his evaluation. But the book was beginning to be merged in the newspaper as the work of Addison and Steele reminds us. Improved printing technology carried this process all the way by the end of the eighteenth century and the arrival of the steam press.

Yet Dudek in Literature and the Press (p. 46) considers that even after steam-power had been applied to printing:

English newspapers in the first quarter of the century, however, were by no means designed to appeal to the whole population. By modern standards they would be considered too dull to interest more than a small minority of

serious readers Early nineteenth century newspapers were run largely

for the genteel. Their style was stiff and formal, ranging between Addisonian gracefulness and Johnsonian elevation. The contents consisted of small advertisements, of local affairs and national politics, especially of commercial news

and long transcriptions of parliamentary reports the best current literature

was noticed in the newspapers.... ‘In those days', Charles Lamb recalled, ‘every morning paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an

author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs '

And since the divorce between the language of journalism (journalese) and the literary use of language had not yet been brought about, we find in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century that some of the principal men of letters contributed to the newspapers or made a living by writing.

But Pope peopled his Dunciad with these very figures, for his perceptions and criticisms were not personal or based on a private point of view. Rather he was concerned with a total change. It is significant that this change is not specified until the fourth book of The Dunciad, which came out in 1742. It is after introducing the famous classics master, Dr Busby of Westminster School, that we hear the ancient and especially Ciceronian theme concerning the excellence of man (IV, 11 , 147-50):

The pale Boy-Senator yet tingling stands,

And holds his breeches close with both his hands.

Then thus. ‘Since Man from beast by Words is known,

Words are Man’s province, Words we teach alone.’

Earlier we had noted the meaning of this theme for Cicero who regarded eloquence as an inclusive wisdom harmonizing our faculties, unifying all knowledge. Pope is here quite explicit in citing the destruction of this unity as deriving from word specialism and denudation. The theme of the denudation of consciousness we have followed continuously throughout the Renaissance. It

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

is also the theme of Pope’s Dunciad. The Boy-Senator continues:

When Reason doubtful, like the Samian letter,

Points him two ways, the narrower is the better.

Plac’d at the door of Learning, youth to guide,

We never suffer it to stand too wide.

To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,

As Fancy opens the quick springs of Sense,

We ply the Memory, we load the brain,

Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain.

Confine the thought, to exercise the breath;

And keep them in the pale of Words till death.

Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design'd,

We hang one jingling padlock on the mind:

A Poet the first day, he dips his quill;

And what the last? a very Poet still.

Pity! the charm works only in our wall,

Lost, lost too soon in yonder House or Hall.

Pope has not received his due as a serious analyst of the intellectual malaise of Europe. He continues Shakespeare’s argument in Lear and Donne’s in the Anatomy of the World:

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

All just supply and all relation.

It is the division of sense and the separation of words from their functions that Pope decries exactly as does Shakespeare in King Lear. Art and science had been separated as visual quantification and homogenization penpfratcJ to every domain and the mechanization of language and literature proceeded:

Beneath her foot-stool Science groans in Chains,

And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains.

There foam’d rebellious Logic gagg’d and bound,

There, stript fair Rhet’ric languish’d on the ground . 4

The new collective unconscious Pope saw as the accumulating backwash of private

self-expression

Pope had a very simple scheme for his first three books. Book I deals with authors, their egotism and desire for self-expression and eternal fame. Book II turns to the book sellers who provide the conduits to swell the tides of public confession. Book III concerns the collective unconscious, the growing backwash from the tidal wave of self-expression. It is Pope’s simple theme that the fogs of Dulness and new tribalism are fed by the printing press. Wit, the quick interplay among our senses and faculties, is thus steadily anaesthetized by the encroaching unconscious. Anybody who tried to get Pope’s meaning by considering the content of the writers he presents would miss the needed clues. Pope is offering a formal causality, not an efficient causality, as an explanation of the

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

metamorphosis from within. The entire matter is thus to be found in a single couplet (1,11. 89-90):

Now night descending, the proud scene was o'er,

But liv'd, in Settle's numbers, one day more.

Print, with its uniformity, repeatability, and limitless extent, does give reincarnate life and fame to anything at all. The kind of limp life so conferred by dull heads upon dull themes formalistically penetrates all existence. Since readers are as vain as authors, they crave to view their own conglomerate visage and, therefore, demand the dullest wits to exert themselves in ever greater degree as the collective audience increases. The ‘human interest' newspaper is the ultimate mode of this collective dynamic:

Now May’rs and Shrieves all hush’d and satiate lay.

Yet eat, in dreams, the custard of the day;

While pensive Poets painful vigils keep,

Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep. 5

Of course, Pope does not mean that the readers will be bored by the products of sleepless poets or news writers. Quite the contrary. They will be thrilled, as by seeing their own image in the press. The readers' sleep is of the spirit. In their wits they are not pained but impaired.

Pope is telling the English world what Cervantes had told the Spanish world and Rabelais the French world concerning print. It is a delirium. It is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness. But for us in the 1960s, print has much of the quaint receding character of the movie and the railway train. In recognizing its hidden powers at this late date we can learn to stress the positive virtues of print but we can gain insight into the much more potent and recent forms of radio and television also.

In his analysis of books, authors, and markets, Pope, like Harold Innis in The Bias of Communication, assumes that the entire operation of print in our lives is not only unconscious but that for this very reason it immeasurably enlarges the domain of the unconscious. Pope placed an owl at the beginning of The Dunciad, and Innis entitled the opening chapter of The Bias of Communication, ‘Minerva's Owl’: ‘Minerva's Owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk

Aubrey Williams has a fine treatment 6 of the second Dunciad of 1729 in which he quotes Pope's own words to Swift:

The Dunciad is going to be printed in all pomp... It will be attended with Proeme, Prolegomena, Testimonia Scriptorum, Index A uthorum, and Notes Variorum. As to the latter, I desire you to read over the text, and make a few in any way you like best, whether dry raillery, upon the style and way of commenting of trivial critics; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory; or collecting the parallel passages of the ancients.

Instead, that is, of a mere individual book attack on Dulness, rope has provided

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

a collective newspaper format and much ‘human interest' for the poem. He can thus render the plodding industry of Baconian applied knowledge and group toil with a dramatic quality that renders, yet irradiates, the very Dulness he decries. Williams* points out (p. 60) that the reason why ‘the new material attached to the poem has never been adequately defined is due, I think, to the assumptions most critics and editors have made: that the notes are to be taken at the level of history, and that their main purpose is to continue the personal satire in a prose commentary'.

The last book of The Dunciad proclaims the metamorphic power of mechanically applied knowledge as a stupendous parody

of the Eucharist

The entire fourth book of The Dunciad has to do with the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy, the translation or reduction of diverse modes into a single mode of homogenized things. Right off, (11. 44-5) this theme is rendered in terms of the new Italian opera.

When lo’ a Harlot form soft sliding by,

With mincing step, small voice, and languid eye;

In the new chromatics, Pope finds ( 11 . 57-60) the all-reducing and homogenizing power that the book exercises on the human spirit:

Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;

One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

To the same notes thy sons snail hum, or snore.

And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.

Reduction and metamorphosis by homogenization and fragmentation are the persistent themes of the fourth book (11. 453-6):

O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes And Reason giv'n them but to study Flies !

See Nature in some partial narrow shape,

And let the Author of the Whole escape:

But these were the means by which, as Yeats tells us:

Locke sank into a swoon;

The Garden died;

God took the spinning jenny Out of his side.

The popular mesmerism achieved by uniformity and repeatability, taught men the miracles of the division of labour and the creation of world markets. It is these miracles that Pope anticipates in The Dunciad, for their transforming power had long affected the mind. The mind now afflicted with the desire and power to climb by sheer sequential additive toil:

a Aubrey Williams, Pope’s Dunciad (Baton Rouge, La., 1955).

McLuhan [The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

Why all your Toils? Your Sons have learn’d to sing.

How quiclc Ambition hastes to ridicule!

The Sire is made a Peer, the Son a Fool.

Then follows a decisive passage of explicit comment (11. 549 57 ) on the Gutenberg miracles of applied knowledge and human transformation:

On some, a Priest succinct in amice white Attends; all flesh is nothing in his sight!

Beeves, at his touch, at once to jelly turn,

And the huge Boar is shrunk into an Urn:

The board with specious miracles he loads,

Turns Hares to Larks, and Pigeons into Toads.

Another (for in all what one can shine?)

Explains the Seve and Verdeur of the Vine.

Wnat cannot copious Sacrifice attone?

Pope deliberately makes the miracles of applied knowledge a parody of the Eucharist. It is the same transforming and reducing power of applied knowledge which has confounded and confused all the arts and sciences, for, says Pope, the new t ranslatio studii or transmission of studies and disciplines by the printed book has not been so much a transmission as a complete transformation of the disciplines and of the human mind as well. Studies have been translated exactly as was Bottom the Weaver.

How closely Pope’s progress of Dulness over the earth conforms to the concept of translatio studii can be seen easily if lines 65-112 of Dunciad III are compared to this statement of the historic theme by an English humanist of the fourteenth century, Richard de Bury: ‘Admirable Minerva seems to bend her course to all the nations of the earth, and reacheth from end to end mightily, that she may reveal herself to all mankind. We see that she has already visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks, the Arabs and the Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and now has happily come to Britain, the most noble of islands, nay, rather a microcosm in itself, that she may show herself a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians.’ 7

And Pope in making Dulness the goddess of the unconscious is contrasting her with Minerva, goddess of alert intellect and wit. It is not Minerva but her obverse complement, the owl, that the printed book has conferred on Western man. ‘However ill-fitting their heroic garb/ Williams remarks (p. 59), ‘one at last finds the dunces invested with uncivilizing powers of epic proportions.’ Supported by the Gutenberg technology, the power of the dunces to shape and befog the human intellect is unlimited. Pope’s efforts to clarify this basic point have been in vain. His intense concern with the pattern of action in his armed horde of nobodies has been mistaken for personal spite. Pope was entirely concerned with the formalistic pattern and penetrative and configuring power of the new technology. His readers have been befogged by ‘content’ obsession and the practical benefits of applied knowledge. He says in a note to Book III, 1 . 337*

Do not gentle reader, rest too secure in thy contempt of the Instruments for such a revolution in learning, or despise such weak agents as have been

McLuhan /The Dunciad and the Gutenberg galaxy]

described in our poem, but remember what the Dutch stories somewhere relate, that a great part of their Provinces was once overflow'd, by a small opening made in one of their dykes by a single Water-Rat.

But the new mechanical instrument and its mesmerized and homogenized servants, the dunces, are irresistible:

In vain, in vain,—The all-composing Hour Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old !

Before her. Fancy's gilded clouds decay,

And all its varying Rain-bows die away.

Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,

The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.

As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,

The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;

As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest.

Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;

Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.

See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,

While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep.

And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.

She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,

Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!

Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Physic of M ctaphysic begs defence,

And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense l See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

In vain! thev gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

And unawares Morality expires.

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine !

Lo ! thy dread Empire, chaos ! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All . 8

This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to Wake.

Notes

1. Selections , ed. Philip P. Wiener, pp. 29-30.

2. Ibid., p. 52.

3. The Dunciad (B), cd. James Sutherland, p 49

4- Ibid., IV, 11 . 21-4. P

5. Ibid., IV, 11 . 9 i4 .

6. Pope’s Dunciad , p. 60.

7- Ibid., p. 47.

gurbl^versfon^of W ml ^ qMotatlon ,s ’ intentionally or unintentionally,

kuroicu version ot Sutheilands text and variants.I y

a

George Steiner (b. 1929) was born in Paris and had a cosmopolitan education in France, America, and England. After holding a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, he joined the editorial staff of the Economist. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where he wrote Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York, 1959) and began his comparative survey of tragedy, The Death of Tragedy (1961). Steiner's subsequent publications have been mainly in the form of occasional essays and review articles, many of which were collected in Language and Silence (1967). This volume reflects the impressive range of Steiner’s interests and linguistic competence, including essays on Homer, Schoenberg, Levi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Georg Lukacs, pornography, language, literary education, and many other topics. In an age of specialisms and nationalisms, George Steiner has striven commendably to view the art and intellectual endeavour of Western civilization as a single entity—one which he sees as now threatened with extinction by various kinds of political, social and linguistic barbarism. In particular he has been preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with the fate of the Jews under Hitler’s Nazi regime, and with the problems of coming to terms with that holocaust both as a cultural historian and as a human being. Steiner’s cosmopolitan and apocalyptic perspective gives a special interest to his appraisal of the intensely (some might say narrowly) English temperament and achievement of Dr F. R. Leavis. The essay was originally published in Encounter in 1962, marking the retirement of Dr Leavis as a teacher at Cambridge, and is reprinted here from the abridged Penguin edition of Language and Silence (1969). A Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961, Steiner is familiar with Dr Lea vis’s academic milieu. In the same period, however, he has travelled extensively, and has held visiting professorships at Princeton, Harvard, and New York universities.

In addition to the publications mentioned above, George Steiner is editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (1966) and the author of three novels published together under the title Anno Domini (1964).

CROSS REFERENCES: 17. L. C. Knights

21. D. W. Harding 41. Rene Wellek

621

Steiner F. R. Leavis

F. R. Leavis

No ceremony. Only a don, spare of voice and stature, but unforgettable in his intensity, leaving a lectern in a Cambridge hall and brushing out the door with a step characteristically sinuous, lithe, and unheeding.

Yet when Dr Leavis quits Mill Lane for the last time, an era will have ended in the history of English sensibility. No less, perhaps, than that of Wittgenstein or R. H. Tawney, Leavis’s retirement, the cessation of his teaching at Cambridge, marks an intricate, controversial chapter in the history of feeling.

That a literary critic should have done so much to re-shape the tenor of spirit in his time, that he should have enforced on the development of literary taste much of his own unrelenting, abstract gait—the man walks in the outward guise of his thought—is, of itself, an arresting fact. In the vulgate sense literary criticism is not that important. Most critics feed upon the substance of literature; they are outriders, hangers-on, or shadows to lions. Writers write books; critics write about books in an eternity of second-hand. The distinction is immense. Where criticism endures, it does so either because it is a counterpart to creation, because the poetic force of a Coleridge and a T. S. Eliot gives to their judgment the authority of private experience, or because it marks a signal moment in the history of ideas. The vitalizing power of the Poetics is historical; it depends only in minor part on our awareness of the works Aristotle is actually citing. The great mass of criticism is ephemeral, bordering on journalism or straightforward literary history, on a spurt of personal impression scarcely sustained, or on the drab caution of tradition, erudite assent. Very few critics survive in their own right. Those that do—and how many can one add to Dr Johnson, Lessing, Sainte-Beuve, and Belinsky"?—make of criticism an act of pivotal social intelligence. They work outward from the particular literary instance to the far reaches of moral and political argument.

This has been radically the case with Leavis. Writing of Ulysses, Ezra Pound declared: ‘We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate/ Leavis would add that only criticism can see to it that literature does the job. Behind this vision of criticism as ‘the central humanity’, as the exhibitor and guardian of values which are no less moral and social than they are technical, lies a complex, articulate theory of the critical process.

To Leavis, the critic is the complete reader: ‘the ideal critic is the ideal reader.’ He realizes to the full the experience given in the words of the poet or the novelist. He aims at complete responsiveness, at a kind of poised vulner-

a Gotthold Lessing (1729-81) was the chief figure of the German Enlightenment, and author of Laokoon (1766). Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69) was a prolific French critic and literary historian. Vissarian Grigoryevich Belinsky (1810-48) was the founder of modern Russian literary criticism and the champion of Dostoievsky and Turgenev.

Steiner F. R. Leavis

ability and consciousness in the encounter with the text. He proceeds with an attention which is close and stringent, yet also provisional, and at all times susceptible to revaluation. Judgment arises from response; it does not initiate it:

The critic's aim is, first, to realize as sensitively and completely as possible this or that which claims his attention; and a certain valuing is implicit in the realizing. As he matures in experience of the new thing he asks, explicitly and implicitly : 'Where does this come? How does it stand in relation to ...? How relatively important does it seem?' and the organization into which it settles as a constituent in becoming 'placed' is an organization of similarly 'placed' things, things that have found their bearings with regard to one another, and not a theoretical system or a system determined by abstract considerations."

The critical judgment (the 'placing') is put forward with an attendant query: ‘This is so, isn't it?' And what the critic hopes for is qualified assent, a ‘Yes, but ..which will compel him to re-examine or refine his own response and lead to fruitful dialogue. This notion of dialogue is central to Leavis. No less than the artist—indeed, more so—the critic is in need of a public. Without it the act of ideal reading, the attempt to recreate the work of art in the critical sensibility is doomed to becoming arbitrary impression or mere dictate. There must exist or be trained within the community a body of readers seeking to achieve in vital concert a mature response to literature. Only then can the critic work with that measure of consent which makes disagreement creative. Language itself is a supreme act of community. The poem has its particular existence in a ‘third realm’, at a complex, unstable distance between the poet's private use of words and the shape of these same words in current speech. To be realized critically the work of literature must find its complete reader; but that reader (the critic) can only quicken and verify his response if a comparable effort at insight is occurring somewhere around him.

Such effort bears directly on the fortunes of society. The commanding axiom in Leavis's life-work is the conviction that there is a close relation between a man's capacity to respond to art and his general fitness for humane existence. That capacity can be woken and richened by the critic. Literacy of feeling is a pre-condition to sane judgment in human affairs: ‘thinking about political and social matters ought to be done by minds of some literary education, and done in an intellectual climate informed by a vital literary culture'. Where a society does not have within it a significant contemporary literature and the parallel exercise of critical challenge, ‘the “mind” (and mind includes memory) is not fully alive’. In short, Leavis’s conception of literary criticism is, above all else, a plea for a live, humane social order.

Hence the tremendous importance he ascribes to the idea of a university. Like Newman (who is one of the really distinctive influences on his style and manner), Leavis regards the ideal university as the root and mould of those energies of spirit which can keep the body-politic functioning in a sane, creative way.

a The quotation is from ‘Criticism and Philosophy’, an essay in which Dr Leavis replied to certain criticisms of his book Revaluation (1936) by Rene Wellek. ‘Criticism and Philosophy’ is reprinted in Leavis’s The Common Pursuit (1952).

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All his criticism has sprung from the context of teaching. The words which come at the close of the preface to Revaluation are meant literally: The debt that I wish to acknowledge is to those with whom I have, during the past dozen years, discussed literature as a “teacher”: if I have learnt anything about the methods of profitable discussion I have learnt it in collaboration with them/ If he execrates the 'academic mind’, losing no occasion to pour upon it the vials of his prophetic scorn, it is because Leavis believes that Oxford and Cambridge, in their present guise, have largely betrayed the true, indispensable functions of teaching. But he has dwelt inside their walls in angry devotion.

Much of the finest in Leavis’s performance is unrecapturable, being the sum of a generation of actual teaching, of unstinting commitment to the art of broken discourse between tutor and pupil. Yet his impact extends formidably beyond Downing [College]. He has made a banal academic title inseparably a part of his own name; the Muses have conferred only two doctorates, his and Dr Johnson’s. Like certain writers of narrow, characteristic force, Leavis has set aside from the currency of language a number of words and turns of phrase for his singular purpose. Strong use has made these words nearly his property; ils portent la griffe du maitre [they bear the stamp of the master] : ‘discrimination ... centrality ... poise ... responsibility ... tactics ... enforcement ... realization ... presentment ... vitalizing ... performance ... assent ... robustness. ...’ ‘Close, delicate wholeness’; ‘pressure of intelligence’; ‘concrete realization’; ‘achieved actuality’—are phrases which carry Leavis’s signature as indelibly as ‘high seriousness’ bears that of Matthew Arnold.

The list is worth examining. It does not rely on jargon, on the shimmering technical obscurities which mar so much of American New Criticism. It is a spiky, grey, abstract parlance, heavy with exact intent. A style which tells us that Tennyson’s verse ‘doesn’t offer, characteristically, any very interesting local life for inspection’, or that ‘Shakespeare’s marvellous faculty of intense local realization is a faculty of realizing the whole locally’ can be parodied with fearful ease. But what matters is to understand why Leavis ‘writes badly’, why he insists on presenting his case in a grim suet of prose.

His refusal of elegance is the expression of a deep, underlying Puritanism. Leavis detests the kind of ‘fine’ writing which by flash of phrase or lyric surge of argument obscures thinness of meaning or unsoundness of logic. He distrusts as spurious frivolity all that would embroider on the naked march of thought. His manner is so easy to parody precisely because there lies behind it so unswerving a preoccupation with the matter in hand, so constant a refusal to be distracted by grace of touch. It has a kind of noble ugliness and points a finger of Puritan scorn at the false glitter of Pater.

But the source of Leavis’s style, of that bleak, hectoring yet ultimately hypnotizing tone, may lie even deeper. One striking fact distinguishes him from all other major critics. So far as I am aware, he has never wished or striven to be a writer—a poet, novelist, or playwright. In the criticism of Dryden, Coleridge, and Arnold, there is an immediate neighbourhood of art. In Edmund Wilson there lurks a disappointed novelist. Sainte-Beuve yielded to his critical genius with rage in heart, having failed to match the fiction and lyric verse of

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his romantic peers. John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, are poets who turned to criticism either in defence or elaboration of their own view of poetry, or when the vein of invention had run dry. In most great critics (perhaps even in Johnson) there is a writer manque . 1

This has two effects. It can make of criticism a minor art, an attempt to achieve, by force of style, something like the novel or drama which the critic has failed to produce successfully. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Sainte-Beuve’s critical portraits, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, have in them strong relics of poetic form. Blackmur's critical essays are often poems arrested. This can produce a grace of persuasion to which Leavis hardly comes near. But he would not wish to. For it can also entail a subtle disloyalty to the critical purpose. Where it becomes a substitute for ‘creative writing', where it shows the scars of lost dreams, criticism tends towards rhetoric, self-revelation, shapely aphorism. It loses its grip on the objects before it turns into an unsteady mirror held up by the critic to his own ambitions or humility.

Leavis conveys persistently the absolute conviction that criticism is a central, life-giving pursuit. It need offer no apology for not being something else. Though in a manner radically different from that of the poet, it creates possibilities of apprehension and a consensus of perceived values without which poetry could not be sustained. To see Dr Leavis at his lectern, compact and indrawn as if wary of some inner challenge, yet richly communicative to his listeners, is to observe a man doing precisely the job he wishes to do. And it is a job he regards as immensely important.

What has he made of it?

Unlike Coleridge or Hegel, Leavis has not initiated a formal theory of art; he has not sought to redefine the epistemology of aesthetic judgment. He regards the generalizing, abstract mode of philosophy as sharply distinct from the specific re-creative perception which is the job of the literary critic; philosophic training might lead to

blunting of edge, blurring of focus and muddled misdirection of attention: consequences of queering one discipline with the habits of another. The business of the literary critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of response and to observe a peculiarly strict relevance in developing his response into commentary; he must be on his guard against abstracting improperly from what is in front of him and against any premature or irrelevant generalizing

of it or from it There is, I hope, a cnance that I may in this way have

advanced theory, even if I haven't done the theorizing. I know that the cogency and precision I have aimed at are limited; but I believe that any approach involves limitations, and that it is by recognizing them and working within them that one may hope to get something done. a

The ‘general ideas' behind Leavis's criticism are derived, in large part, from T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, I. A. Richards, and William Empson. By the time he began his own revaluation of the history of English poetry, Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Graves had already proclaimed the quality of the new. The attitudes which inspired The Oxford Book of English Verse to give Donne only

a The quotation is from ‘Criticism and Philosophy' (see note on p. 623 above).

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as much space as Bulwer Lytton and less than a third as much as Herrick, or which made of Bridges a major figure who had, in munificence of heart, been patron to the eccentric thwarted talent of Hopkins, were already under critical fire. After Prufrock and the first Pound and Eliot essays, it was becoming increasingly difficult to regard Tennyson or Swinburne as the sole or preeminent forces directing English poetry. A colder air was blowing.

Leavis’s reorientation of critical focus—his stress on that lineage of intelligence and realized form which goes from Shakespeare and the Metaphysicals to Pope, Blake, Hopkins, and Eliot—is rooted in the change of sensibility occurring in the 1920s and the early ’30s. What he has done is to give that change its most precise and cogent critical justification. His mastery lies not in the general devising, but in the particular instance.

Here there is much that will live among the classic pages of criticism. Wherever one turns in the impressive array of Leavis’s writings, one is arrested by the exhilarating presence of an intelligence superbly exact, and having within reach formidable resources of historical and textual knowledge. That intelligence is brought into close, subtle commerce with the poem in an act of total awareness which is, in the best instances, near to art. Leavis is difficult to quote from because the progress of response is so continuous and dense-woven. Yet certain moments do stand out for sheer brilliance and propriety of gathered insight.

The reading of Hopkins’s Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves (from New Bearings in English Poetry ) is unusual in that it shows Leavis recreating the sense and impact of the poem not only by responsive judgment, but by a kind of lyric counterpart:

The trees are no longer the beautiful, refreshing things of daylight; they have turned fantastically strange, hard and cruel, ‘beak-leaved’ suggesting the cold, hard light, steely like the gleam of polished tools, against which they appear as a kind of damascene-work (‘damask’) on a blade. Then follows the anguished surrender to the realization:

‘... Our tale, O our oracle ! / Let life, waned, ah let life wind Off her one skeined stained veined variety / upon all on two spools; part, pen, pack

Now her all in two flocks, two folds—black, white; / right, wrong .. /

The run of alliterations, rimes and assonances suggests the irresistible poignancy of the realization. The poem ends with a terrible effect as of unsheathed nerves grinding upon one another. The grinding might at first be taken to be merely that or ‘right’ against ‘wrong’, the inner conflict of spirit and flesh, and the pain that which the believer knows he must face, the simple pain of renunciation. Yet we are aware of a more subtle anguish and a more desperate plight.

•

Criticism is, necessarily, comparison. But only a great critic is able to make of the act of preference, of the ‘placing’ of one writer above another, an exercise of equal illumination. The sustained, gradually deepening comparison of Pope and Dryden in Revaluation is one of Leavis’s master strokes. Setting the Dunciad beside Mac Flecknoe, Leavis notes that

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above every line of Pope we can imagine a tensely flexible and complex curve, representing the modulation, emphasis, and changing tone and tempo of the voice in reading; the curve varying from line to line and the lines playing subtly against one another. The verse of Mac Flecknoe, in the comparison, is both slack and monotonous; again and again there are awkward runs and turns, unconvinced and unconvincing, requiring the injected rhetorical conviction of the declaimer to carry them off.

Yet at once, the qualifying mechanism of Leavis’s approach intrudes. The comparison ‘ is unfair: Dryden’s effects are all for the public ear’. Read in a spirit appropriate to their intent, Dryden’s satiric poems were ‘magnificently effective'. But the spirit which Pope demands is something different; behind his immediate effects lies an organization finer, more inward than that required or exhibited by Dryden. Indeed, it is his limitations which make of Dryden the ‘great representative poet of the later seventeenth century’. He belongs entirely to the community of reigning taste. There is between him and the sensibility of the time none of the distance, critical or nostalgic, that forces upon Marvell or Pope a greater delicacy of organization: ‘Dryden is the voice of his age.’ The whole analysis is masterly; it shows how Leavis reads with what Klee would have called ‘the thinking eye’.

That eye is at work again, though narrowed, in Leavis’s examination of Milton’s style: ‘He exhibits a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words ... habituation could not sensitize a medium so cut off from speech—speech that belongs to the emotional and sensory texture of actual living and is in resonance with the nervous system.’ I believe that Leavis is wrong, that Milton (like Joyce) built of language a realness no less coherent or filled with the roughage of experience than is common speech—but the cogency and challenge of Leavis’s case are obvious.

No single passage illustrates more compactly the peculiar genius of Leavis’s criticism than the close of his essay on Swift:

It is not merely that he had an Augustan contempt for metaphysics; he shared the shallowest complacencies of Augustan common sense: his irony might destroy these, but there is no conscious criticism.

He was, in various ways, curiously unaware—the reverse of clairvoyant. He is distinguished by the intensity of his feelings, not by insight into them, and he certainly does not impress us as a mind in possession of its experience.

We shall not find Swift remarkable for intelligence if we think of Blake.

The judgment is formidable for comprehensiveness, for coolness and finality of tone, for sheer implication of evidence marshalled and weighed. The ‘mind in possession of its experience’—here a purely critical note—takes on pertinent, sombre precision if we recall that Swift’s intellect fell into the literal possession of madness. But there is more: the power of the verdict is gathered in the final touch, in the evocation of Blake, placed so designedly as the last word. The rapprochement of Blake and Swift is of itself superb criticism. Here it sets a seal of relative dimension, of comparable but unequal greatness. Only those who have themselves wrestled with the task of trying to say something fresh

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or perceptive about established classics, will fully realize how much there is of preliminary response, of close, unbroken thought, behind Leavis’s concise assurance.

Undoubtedly, Leavis’s principal achievement is his critique of the English novel. The Great Tradition is one of those very rare books of literary comment (one thinks of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets or Arnold’s Essays in Criticism) that have reshaped the inner landscape of taste. Anyone dealing seriously with the development of English fiction must start, even if in disagreement, from Leavis’s proposals. Whereas much of what Leavis argued about poetry, moreover, was already being said around him, his treatment of the novel has only one precedent—the essays and prefaces of Henry James. Like James, but with a more deliberate intent of order and completeness, Leavis has brought to bear on the novel that closeness of reading and expectation of form reserved previously for the study of poetry or poetic drama.

Now every book reviewer or undergraduate is able to mouth insights about the ‘stature’ of Jane Austen, the ‘mature art’ of George Eliot, or the ‘creative wealth’ of intelligence in The Portrait of a Lady. Today it would see ludicrous or wilfully eccentric to deny that The Secret Sharer or Women in Love are works of consummate art and classics of imagined life. But the very triumph of it should not make us forget the novelty, the unflinching audacity of Leavis’s revaluation. Even where we challenge his list for ranking or omission, our sense of the novel as form, of its responsibility to moral perception and ‘vivid essential record’, is that defined by Leavis’s treatment. The assertion that after the decline of the epic and of verse drama the prose novel has concentrated the major energies in western literature—an assertion put forward provisionally by Flaubert, Turgenev, and James—is now a commonplace. It was not so when Leavis first focused on a chapter in Middlemarch or a paragraph in N ostromo the same kind of total apprehension exhibited in relation to Shakespeare or Donne. The mere suggestion (at present nearly a cliche) that there is in Heart of Darkness a realization of evil comparable to the study of diminishing moral awareness in, say, Macbeth, has behind it a revolution in criticism. More than any man except James, Leavis has caused that revolution.

Only in part by his actual writings; the impact has been that of a persona. Like Peguy," Leavis has stood out against the climate of the age in a stance of harried isolation, partially real, partially strategic. 1 remember waiting for those grey, austerely wrapped numbers of Scrutiny as one waits for a bottle flung into the sea. Inevitably, by their grey garb, by the angular tightness of print and page, they conveyed the image of a prophet, surrounded by a tiny, imperilled guard of the elect, expounding and disseminating his acrid truths by bent of will and privation. As a schoolboy, I sent in my subscription with a feeling of embarrassed awe, with a sense of conspiratorial urgency, as if there was food and fuel to be bought so as to keep going an enterprise of eminent danger. In a time of fantastic intellectual cheapness, of unctuous pseudo-culture and sheer indifference to values—in the century of the book club, the digest and the

“Charles Peguy (1873-1Q14) was a French writer isolated in his lifetime by his unconventional religious and political views.

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hundred great ideas on the instalment plan—Leavis’s ‘necessary attitude of absolute intransigence’ has had an exemplary, moving force. But he has sustained that attitude at a cruel psychological cost.

He has had to define, and in significant measure, create for himself ‘the Enemy’. Like a fabled, heraldic monster, the Enemy has many heads. They include the Sunday papers and the Guardian and all dons who write for them; the Times Literary Supplement , Mr Pryce-Jones and his father (who enters the myth of vituperation in an obscure, recurrent fashion); the Third Programme ‘intellectuals’ and the entourage of the New Statesman; the British Council and Encounter; Mr John Hayward, Pfofessor C. S. Lewis, Lord David Cecil, and all who divide the study and teaching of literature with the pursuit of elegance or science fiction; and, of late, pre-eminent among hydra-heads, C. P. Snow. The Enemy represents cosiness, frivolity, mundane cliques, the uses of culture for mutual adulation or warmth. He incarnates ‘the currency values of Metropolitan literary society and the associated University milieu’. The Enemy creates philosophic giants such as Mr Colin Wilson in a Sunday morning only to trample on them when the wind turns. He propagates the notion that Virginia Woolf was a major intellect or that the life-blood of English thought pulses in the Athenaeum, in the still waters of All Souls or in Printing House Square. The Enemy is the Establishment of the mind. His brow is middle and his tone is suave.

Behind this contrived dragon there is a certain complex reality. Being geographically compact, English intellectual life is sharply susceptible to the pressures of club and cabal; the artifice of renown can be swiftly conjured or revoked. In small ponds sharks can be made to pass for momentary leviathans. It is also true that there is between the universities and the world of press, magazine and radio an alliance of brisk vulgarization. An unusual number of academics have a flair for showmanship; too often, ideas which are, in fact, intricate, provisional and raw to the throat, are thrown to the public as if they were bouquets. Watching some of the more brilliant performers at work, one would scarcely suppose that thought and scholarship are a rare, lonely, often self-consuming exercise of the spirit when it is at full, painful stretch. Above all, there is in the English intellectual and artistic establishment a dangerous bias towards personal charm, towards understatement and amateur grace. The judgments of critics and Fellowship electors are too often shadowed by the complex, hardly indefinable yet deep-rooted criteria of social acceptance. The ‘good chap’, the man one would care to dine with, glides smoothly to the top. The awkward, spiky, passionate genius—whether he be a great historian of politics, the inventor of the jet or the author of The Rainbow—fits ill into the soft grooves of the great common room. The corridors of power or official sponsorship are closed to his obtrusive, tactless intensity.

Unquestionably, Leavis has suffered under the bland claw of coterie culture. And he may be right in his fierce, nonconformist belief that the possibilities of a genuinely educated community—a community able to judge and echo what is radical and serious in art—are being constantly eroded by the ‘near-culture’ of the Brains Trust and the Sunday review. At a time when he was already

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being widely recognized (particularly in America) as the most compelling voice in the teaching of literature, Leavis found among his own university colleagues little but hostility or amused distaste. Like Peguy's Cahievs dc la quinzaine, which alone match it in sustained integrity and wealth of provocation, Scrutiny was made possible by an utter expense of private energy. Unable to pay its contributors, receiving no official support, it was passed under silence by those (i.e. the British Council) who were seeking to define to the world what was most vital in English culture. The first, and so far the only, gathering from its pages was made in America, on a purely private basis, by Eric Bentley fl Yet between these facts and the legend of self and society in which Leavis has encased his spirit there is a wide, tragic gap. As if out of some essential solitude,

, h e has conjured up a detailed melodrama of persecution and neglect, of conspiracy and betrayal. Though surrounded by disciples who ape even what is most ephemeral in his mannerisms, though approached from many lands by those who hear and acclaim him, Leavis clings tenaciously to the mask of the pariah. He alludes to his endurance at Cambridge as a stroke of occult good fortune, as an oversight by the Enemy. He has in the past refused invitations from America lest dark malignity achieve its ends during his absence. Though a number of distinguished critics have been among his students and sought to carry on his own vision (Turnell, D. A. Traversi, Marius Bewley, L. C. Knights), there is hardly one with whom Leavis has not broken. Though he claims that he invites no more than qualified, challenging assent, Leavis has come to demand, perhaps unconsciously, complete loyalty to his creed. The merest doubt or deviation is heresy, and is soon followed by excommunication from the kirk. Thus, although he is one of the greatest teachers of the age, he leaves behind few representatives of what is most vital in his manner. There are those who can mimic his lashing tone, his outward austerities and turns of phrase. But like the rows of students who snicker, in drilled fidelity, at every rasping mention of Sunday papers', Leavis's immediate followers do him little honour. They merely bark and fang on the heels of his greatness.

But it is not the personal commitment to artificial or obsolete polemics, it is not the charring expense of nerve or intellect that matter. These are sad, demeaning aspects; but they are, in the last analysis, private to Dr Leavis. What needs alertness is the measure in which Leavis's melodramatic image of his own life and role has bent or corroded his critical judgment. It is this which gives his assault on C. P. Snow what relevance it has.

The Richmond Lecture 6 was an ignoble performance . 2 In it, Leavis yielded entirely to a streak of obsessed cruelty. Over and over, he proclaimed to his audience that Snow was ignorant, that he knew nothing of literature or history and not much, one gathered, of science. Such an attempt to prove by mere rep-

a The Importance of Scrutiny (New York, 1948). Since this essay was written A Selection /rom Scrutiny’, compiled by F. R. Leavis, has been published (Cambridge, 1968).

Dr Leavis s Richmond Lecture Two Cultures? The significance of C. P. Snow (Cam-bridge, 1962) was an attack upon Lord (then Sir Charles) Snow and his Rede Lecture of 1 959 , The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. It provoked a great deal of controversy and public discussion.

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etirion is characteristically totalitarian. Though he is personally ignorant of America, Leavis threw out shop-worn cliches about the ‘emptiness' of American life, about the inhumanity of technological values. One realized, with a painful start, how much of Leavis's arsenal of insight dates back to the mythologies and tactics of the 1930s. Whereas Snow is wholly of the present, responsive in every way to what is new and jarring in our novel condition, Leavis has sought to bring time to a halt in a pastoral, Augustan dream of order.

Leavis accused Snow of using cliches; his own performance was nothing else. Banality followed on banality in dull virulence. He did not even attempt to engage seriously what is crucial in Snow’s argument—the sense of a realignment in international affairs, the redefinition of literacy to include the syntax of number. Snow is, indeed, trying to be a ‘new kind of man', if only in that he wishes to be equally and vitally at home in England, Russia, or the United States. Now it could be argued, in a close, discriminating way, that this ‘new ubiquity’ of the imagination jeopardizes those values of narrow, rooted inwardness for which Leavis stands. Though a rearguard action, such counter-statement to Snow would be stimulating. But none was forthcoming; instead of argument came stale insult. On the one hand was ‘Snow’, on the other side were a set of approved cliches—‘life’, ‘humane values’, ‘vital intelligence’. What has been advertised as a responsible examination of the concept of ‘the two cultures’ dissolved—as so much else in Leavis’s recent work has done—into a ceremonial dance before the dark god, D. H. Lawrence.

Leavis’s relation to Lawrence has become obsessive, ft has passed from rational exposition into a weird self-identification. Lawrence is not only the ‘greatest English writer of the twentieth century’, but a master of life, a prophet by whose teaching alone our society may recapture humane poise and creative fire. That there is much in Lawrence which is monotonous and hysterical, that very few of his works are unflawed by hectoring idiosyncrasies, that there was little in his genius either of laughter or tolerance—these are considerations Leavis can scarcely allow. In a dualistic image, as artificial and shallow as all Manicheism, Leavis opposes Lawrence to all that is inhuman, frivolous, insensitive or modish in our culture. To query Lawrence, or to propose as Snow has done by his work and example that there are crises of spirit and political fact more actual or different than those dreamt of in Women in Love, is to query ‘life’. Yet nothing could be less humane or more devoid of the tact of living encounter than was Leavis’s harangue. Hearing it, one was brought up against the stubborn fact that a critic, however great, is barred from certain generosities of imagination to which an artist has title.

The Richmond Lecture and much else that is indefensible in Leavis’s late pronouncements may soon be forgotten. But even at its prime, Leavis’s criticism exhibits certain grave limitations and quirks. If the scope of his radical accomplishments is to be defined, these too must he noted.

There are the overestimates (particularly in Leavis’s early criticism) of such minor talents as Ronald Bottrall or the novelist, L. H. Myers. There is the lack of any confrontation, large or sustained, with the poetry of Yeats, a body of work, one would have thought, no less in need of close valuation than that of

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Eliot or Pound. Like the Augustan critics, Leavis has been most at ease with the poetry in which the pulse of argument and systematic intelligence beats strong. Hence his decisive reading of Manberley but his disinclination to allow for the occasions of pure lyric force, of articulate image, in the parched chaos of Pound’s Cantos.

With respect to the novel, one’s sense of omission is more acute. The case of Dickens is notorious:

The genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests. ... The adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness. I can think of only one of his books in which his distinctive creative genius is controlled throughout to a unifying and organizing significance, and that is Hard Times.

The limitation proposed here has always seemed to me restrictive of Leavis, not of Dickens. And the preference of Hard Times over such manifestly ampler achievements as Bleak House or Great Expectations is illuminating. In the main, Dickens is working outside the criteria of organizing awareness and significance’ exhibited in The Wings of the Dove or Nostromo. But there is another vein of utter seriousness, of seriousness of committed feeling, of vehement imaginative enactment. It is this which Dickens possesses and that makes of him, after Shakespeare, the principal creator of remembered life in English literature . 3

Equally suggestive of a limitation in allowed criteria has been Leavis’s neglect of Joyce. He has observed in Ulysses set pieces of sensuous realization, but has nowhere done justice either to the architectural genius of the book, or to its enrichment and renovation of the language. Leavis has taken over D. H. Lawrence’s scorn and misapprehension of Joyce’s achievement. By Leavis’s own requirements of seriousness and vitalizing moral poise, much in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist should rank high in the tradition. But he has read in the obscuring light of a false distinction. The choice is not Lawrence or Joyce. Both are indispensable; and it is Joyce who has done as much as any writer in our age to keep English confident and creative.

Closely related to this imperception of Joyce is Leavis’s failure to extend the reach of his criticism to two other novelists, both of them masters of poetic structure and vision. The one is Melville; a lineage of the English novel which can find a central place for James and an important preliminary role for Hawthorne, but which tells us nothing of Moby Dick or Benito Cereno (a tale to match the finest in Conrad), is necessarily incomplete. Only a full response to Dickens, Melville, and Joyce, moreover, makes possible a just approach to the novelist whom I take to be, after Hardy and Lawrence, the eminent master of modern English fiction—John Cowpcr Powys. If neither The Glastonbury Romance nor Wolf Solent (the one English novel to rival Tolstoy) can find a place in the Great I raclition, it is precisely because their distinctive virtues— lyric, philosophical, stylistic, religious—lie outside the central but narrowing grasp of Leavis’s sensibility.

One other great domain lies outside it. Leavis has refused to concern himself,

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on any but a perfunctory scale, with foreign literature. There is in this refusal a proud scruple. If criticism presumes complete response to a text, complete possession, how can a critic hope to deal maturely with anything but his own language? There is, unquestionably, a stringent honesty in this position. But it can be carried too far. How, for example, could most critics refer to landmarks as dominant, as unavoidable as the Bible, Homer, Dante, or Goethe, if they did not rely, in one or the other instance, on the crutch of translation? And is it not the duty of a critic to avail himself, in some imperfect measure at least, of another language—if only to experience the defining contours of his own ?

Leavis’s austere concentration may, indeed, have a deeper root. The vision of a nonconformist, morally literate England, of an England in the style of Bunyan, Cobbett, and D. H. Lawrence, informs his critical thought. ‘Englishness’ is in Leavis’s interior vocabulary a notion of tremendous positive force; it connotes a specific tone and natural excellence: ‘in Rasselas we have something deeply English that relates Johnson and Jane Austen to Crabbe’. Much of the argument against Joyce is conducted in terms of the native as against the eccentric and uprooted. Joyce’s experiments with language reflects a ‘cosmopolitan’ sophistication. The veritable genius of English lies nearer home:

This strength of English belongs to the very spirit of the language—the spirit that was formed when the English people who formed it were predominantly rural.... And how much richer the life was in the old, predominantly rural

order than in the modern suburban world When one adds that speech in

the old order was a popularly cultivated art, that people talked (so making Shakespeare possible) instead of reading or listening to the wireless, it becomes plain that the promise of regeneration by American slang, popular city-idiom, or the invention of transition-cosmopolitans is a flimsy consolation for our loss.

Written in 1933, this passage has a curious ring; it belongs to that complex of agrarian autonomism, of la terre et ses morts [the land and its deadl, which ranges from Peguy and Barres to Allen Tate and the southern Fugitives in America. Behind it shimmers an historical vision (largely fanciful) of an older order, rural, customary, moralistic. It is the vision of men who fought the First World War—as Leavis did, a Milton in his pocket—only to observe what had been striven for at inhuman cost decline into the cheap chaos of the 1920s.

Leavis’s ‘critical nationalism’, which contrasts so sharply with the far-ranging humanism of an Edmund Wilson, is an instrument of great discrimination and power. But it has limiting consequences. The wide, subtle plurality of modern culture, the interplay of languages and national styles, may be regrettable— but it is a fact. To ‘place’ Henry James without close reference to Flaubert and Turgenev; to exalt the treatment of politics in Nostromo and Middletriarch without an attendant awareness of [Dostoievsky’s] The Possessed; to discern the realization of social nuance in Jane Austen without allowing the presence of Proust in the critical context; all this is to proceed in an artifice of isolation. Is it possible to discuss comprehensively the nature of prose fiction without introducing, at signal stages of the argument, the realization that Kafka has altered, lastingly, the relations between observed and imagined truth? Could Leavis

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advance as far as he does in support of Lawrence, of Lawrence's treatment of social feeling, if he set Women in Love next to The Brothers Karamazov?

This resolute provincialism has its counterpart in Leavis’s treatment of time. There is scarcely anything written during the past twenty years that he has found worthy of serious examination. He has abdicated from one of the commanding functions of criticism, which is to perceive and welcome the new. One has the impression that he cannot forgive Auden for the fact that English verse should have a history after Eliot even as he cannot forgive Snow for suggesting that the English novel should have a future beyond Lawrence. To use an epithet which he himself applies to Johnson, Leavis’s criticism has, since 1945, rarely been ‘life-giving'. Dealing with contemporary literature it has pleaded not from love but from scorn.

These are, obviously, major reservations. They accumulate towards the image of a career divided midway by some essential constriction of mood and purpose. Much in the late Leavis exhibits a quality of inhumane unreality (the Richmond Lecture being merely a flagrant instance). The depth of insight is increasingly marred by waspish contempt. There has been no criticism since RymerV less magnanimous.

It is this which makes any ‘placing' of Lcavis’s work difficult and premature. Great critics are rarer than great poets or novelists (though their gift is more distant from the springs of life). In English, Johnson and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold are of the first order. In the excellence of both Dryden and Saintsbury there is an unsteadiness of focus, a touch of the amateur. Among moderns, T. S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson are of this rare company. What of Leavis? One's instinct calls for immediate assent. There is in the sum of his labours a power, a cogency that looms large above what has been polemic and harshly arrogant in the circumstance. If some doubt persists, it is simply because criticism must be, by Leavis's own definition, both central and humane. In his achievement the centrality is manifest; the humanity has often been tragically absent.

a Thomas Rymcr (1641-1713), a Restoration writer and critic best known for his severe criticisms of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, including Shakespeare.

Notes

1. This is very obviously true of the past. It may no longer be so Distinctions

between literary genres are losing their relevance. Increasingly, the ‘act of writing’ supersedes, in its problematic, self-conscious character, the particular form chosen. The role of the essay and of fact/fiction in present literature suggests that the whole distinction between creation and criticism, between analytic statement and poetic invention needs rethinking. Both may be, as Roland Barthes says, part of a linguistic totality more significant, more comprehensive than either.

2. Looking back, one is struck by the underlying political, social significance of the affair. The controversy between Leavis and Snow is, essentially, a controversy over the future shape of life in England. It sets the vision or reactionary utopia of a small, economically reduced but autonomous and humanistically literate England against that of a nation renewed, energized, rationalized according to technological and mass consumer principles. It is, thus, a debate over the relationship of England both to its own past and to

Steiner F. R. Leavis

the essentially American present. England’s future, the kind of society in which Leavis’s and Snow's children will grow up and live—or from which they will emigrate—hinges on the alternative chosen. Can England, a small, crowded island, blessed neither by climate nor natural elbow-room for waste, ‘go modern’ without sacrificing irreplaceable amenities of tolerance and humane leisure? But can any of the latter survive effectively if it diminishes too sharply, if it folds inward into a kind of ‘post-Habsburg’ provincialism? These are, I think, the questions underlying the Leavis/Snow debate, and they give to it a dignity far exceeding the obsessive, injurious form of the Richmond Lecture.

3. Dr Leavis is, reportedly, at work on a full-scale critical study of Dickens’s major novels. A number of essays which may be part of this study have already appeared in print. Such a book will not only be of very great interest in itself, but as constituting one of the rare instances in which Dr Leavis has ‘revalued’ one of his own, and most influential, dismissals. [This book, Dickens the Novelist, by F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, appeared in 1970.]

Wystan Hugh Auden (b. 1907) is generally recognized as the most distinguished of the English poets who emerged in the ’thirties. Auden’s poetry in that decade reflected his involvement (on the left wing side) in political and economic issues, his extensive travels, and the intellectual influences of Marx and Freud. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States and his intellectual development subsequently took a religious turn. In recent years he has lived paitly in America and partly in Austria. The standard editions of his poems are Collected Shorter Poems i 9 2 7'57 (1966) and Collected Longer Poems (1968), though many of his readers have regretted the revisions and omissions in these volumes.

Since 194° Auden has lectured and taught at many universities, especially in the United States. In 1960-1 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. As a literary critic, however, Auden has not acquired academic habits. In the Foreword to his most lecent collection of occasional criticism, The Dyer's Hand (1963), he wrote: ‘A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I ha\e reduced them, when possible, to sets of notes, because, as a reader, I prefer a critic s notebooks to his treatises.’ Recently Auden has published his commonplace book, A Certain World (1971), in lieu of an autobiography. ‘Writing’ is reprinted from The Dyer's Hand .

CROSS REFERENCES: 2. W. B. Yeats

6. T. S. Eliot

It is the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, ‘He said/

H. D. Thoreau

20. Paul Valery 28. Jean-Paul Sartre

commentary: Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Monroe

K. Spears (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964)

The art of literature, vocal or written, is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates.

A. N. Whitehead

636

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All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon ‘inspiration’, the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every ‘original’ genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or a medium.

Literary gatherings, cocktail parties, and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no ‘shop’ to talk. Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting cases, about experiences, that is to say, related to their professional interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

In theory, the author of a good book should remain anonymous, for it is to his work, not to himself, that admiration is due. In practice, this seems to be impossible. However, the praise and public attention that writers sometimes receive does not seem to be as fatal to them as one might expect, fust as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

Writers can be guilty of every kind of human conceit but one, the conceit of the social worker: ‘We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know/

When a successful author analyses the reasons for his success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born with, and overestimates his skill in employing it.

Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.

When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.

Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong. Lots of people are willing to admit that they don’t understand painting or music, but very few indeed who have been to school and learned to read advertisements will admit that they don’t understand English. As Karl Kraus said: ‘The public doesn’t understand German, and in Journalese I can’t tell them so.’

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How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modem Mathematics and comparing it unfavourably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.

To say that a work is inspired means that, in the judgment of its author or his readers, it is better than they could reasonably hope it would be, and nothing else.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work ‘comes’ to him. Among those works which are failures because their initial conceptions were false or inadequate, the number of self-commissioned works may well be greater than the number commissioned by patrons.

The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshipper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.

The Oracle claimed to make prophecies and give good advice about the future; it never pretended to be giving poetry readings.

If poems could be created in a trance without the conscious participation of the poet, the writing of poetry would be so boring or even unpleasant an operation that only a substantial reward in money or social prestige could induce a man to be a poet. From the manuscript evidence, it now appears that Coleridge’s account of the composition of ‘Kubla Khan’ was a fib. a

It is true that, when he is writing a poem, it seems to a poet as if there were two people involved, his conscious self and a Muse whom he has to woo or an Angel with whom he has to wrestle, but, as in an ordinary wooing or wrestling match, his role is as important as Hers. The Muse, like Beatrice in Much Ado, is a spirited girl who has as little use for an abject suitor as she has for a vulgar brute. She appreciates chivalry and good manners, but she despises those who will not stand up to her and takes a cruel delight in telling them nonsense and lies which the poor little things obediently write down as ‘inspired’ truth.

When I was writing the chorus in G Minor, I suddenly dipped my pen into the medicine bottle instead of the ink; I made a blot, and when I dried it with sand (blotting paper had not been invented then) it took the form of a natural, which instantly gave me the idea of the effect which the change from G minor to G major would make, and to this blot all the effect—if any— is due. (Rossini to Louis Engel)

Such an act of judgment, distinguishing between Chance and Providence, deserves, surely, to be called an inspiration.

To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an

a See note, p. 338 above.

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irreverent buffoon, and even perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.

In the course of many centuries a few laboursaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc.—but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.c.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts. Much as I loathe the typewriter, I must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript. When it comes to a poem by somebody else, the severest test I know of is to write it out in longhand. The physical tedium of doing this ensures that the slightest defect will reveal itself; the hand is constantly looking for an excuse to stop.

‘Most artists are sincere and most art is bad, though some insincere (sincerely insincere) works can be quite good' (Stravinsky). Sincerity is like sleep. Normally, one should assume that, of course, one will be sincere, and not give the question a second thought. Most writers, however, suffer occasionally from bouts of insincerity as men do from bouts of insomnia. The remedy in both cases is often quite simple: in the case of the latter, to change one’s diet, in the case of the former, to change one’s company.

The schoolmasters of literature frown on affectations of style as silly and unhealthy. Instead of frowning, they ought to laugh indulgently. Shakespeare makes fun of the Euphuists a in Love's Labour's Lost and in Hamlet, but he owed them a great deal and he knew it. Nothing, on the face of it, could have been more futile than the attempt of Spenser, [Gabriel] Harvey, and others to be good little humanists and write English verse in classical metres, yet, but for their folly, many of Campion’s most beautiful songs and the choruses in Samson Agonistes would never have been written. In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.

A mannered style, that of Gongora^ or Henry James, for example, is like eccentric clothing: very few writers can carry it off, but one is enchanted by the rare exception who can.

When a reviewer describes a book as ‘sincere’, one knows immediately that it is (a) insincere (insincerely insincere) and (b) badly written. Sincerity in the proper sense of the word, meaning authenticity, is, however, or ought to be, a writer’s chief preoccupation. No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but

a Imitators of the elaborately patterned and allusive prose style used by John Lyly (1554-1606) in his romance Euphues (1578-80).

b The Spanish poet Don Luis de Gongora y Argote (1561-1627) used a mannered style comparable to Lyly’s ‘euphuism’.

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certainly in a short while, whether something he has written is authentic—in his handwriting—or a forgery.

The most painful of all experiences to a poet is to find that a poem of his which he knows to be a forgery has pleased the public and got into the anthologies. For all he knows or cares, the poem may be quite good, but that is not the point; he should not have written it.

The work of a young writer—[Goethe’s] W erther is the classic example— is sometimes a therapeutic act. Ffe finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests and sympathies, and the only way by which he can be rid of them forever is by surrendering to them. Once he has done this, he has developed the necessary antibodies which will make him immune for the rest of his life. As a rule, the disease is some spiritual malaise of his generation. If so, he may, as Goethe did, find himself in an embarrassing situation. What he wrote in order to exorcise certain feelings is enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries because it expresses just what they feel but, unlike him, they are perfectly happy to feel in this way; for the moment they regard him as their spokesman. Time passes. Having gotten the poison out of his system, the writer turns to his true interests which are not, and never were, those of his early admirers, who now pursue him with cries of ‘Traitor!’

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work. (Yeats)

This is untrue; perfection is possible in neither. All one can say is that a writer who, like all men, has his personal weaknesses and limitations, should be aware of them and try his best to keep them out of his work. For every writer, there are certain subjects which, because of defects in his character and his talent, he should never touch.

What makes it difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities. The reader does not have to share the beliefs expressed in a poem in order to enjoy it. Knowing this, a poet is constantly tempted to make use of an idea or a belief, not because he believes it to be true, but because he sees it has interesting poetic possibilities. It may not, perhaps, be absolutely necessary that he believe it, but it is certainly necessary that his emotions be deeply involved, and this they can never be unless, as a man, he takes it more seriously than as a mere poetic convenience.

The integrity of a writer is more threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity. It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a travelling salesman than by a bishop.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behaviour; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Docs not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master’s commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too ‘personal’ style.

‘Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? ... But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?” ... I’m sure I’m not Ada ... for her hair goes in such long ringlets and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh ! she knows such a very little! Besides she's she and I’m I and— oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to

know ’ Her eyes filled with tears ... : ‘I must be Mabel after all, and I

shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh !—ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it: if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here!’

(Alice in Wonderland)

At the next peg the Queen turned again and this time she said: ‘Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn your toes out as you walk—and remember who you are.’

(Through the Looking Glass )

Most writers, except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification are either Alices or Mabels. For example:

‘Orthodoxy,’ said a real Alice of a bishop, ‘is reticence.’

Except when used as historical labels, the terms classical and romantic are misleading terms for two poetic parties, the Aristocratic and the Democratic, which have always existed and to one of which every writer belongs, though he may switch his party allegiance or, on some specific issue, refuse to obey his Party Whip.

The Aristocratic Principle as regards subject matter:

No subject matter shall be treated by poets which poetry cannot digest. It defends poetry against didacticism and journalism.

The Democratic Principle as regards subject matter:

No subject matter shall be excluded by poets which poetry is capable of digesting. It defends poetry against limited or stale conceptions of what is ‘poetic’.

The Aristocratic Principle as regards treatment:

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No irrelevant aspects of a given subject shall be expressed in a poem which

treats it. It defends poetry against barbaric vagueness.

The Democratic Principle as regards treatment:

No relevant aspect of a given subject shall remain unexpressed in a poem

which treats it. It defends poetry against decadent triviality.

Every work of a writer should be a first step, but this will be a false step unless, whether or not he realize it at the time, it is also a further step. When a writer is dead, one ought to be able to see that his various works, taken together, make one consistent oeuvre.

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.

Only a minor talent can be a perfect gentleman; a major talent is always more than a bit of a cad. Hence the importance of minor writers—as teachers of good manners. Now and again, an exquisite minor work can make a master feel thoroughly ashamed of himself.

The poet is the father of his poem; its mother is a language: one could list poems as race horses are listed —out of L by P.

A poet has to woo, not only his own Muse but also Dame Philology, and, for the beginner, the latter is the more important. As a rule, the sign that a beginner has a genuine original talent is that he is more interested in playing with words than in saying something original; his attitude is that of the old lady, quoted by E. M. Forster—‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’ It is only later, when he has wooed and won Dame Philology, that he can give his entire devotion to his Muse.

Rhymes, metres, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk, and dishonest.

The poet who writes ‘free’ verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor—dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

There are some poets, Kipling for example, whose relation to language reminds one of a drill sergeant: the words are taught to wash behind their ears, stand properly at attention, and execute complicated manoeuvres, but at the cost of never being allowed to think for themselves. There are others, Swinburne, for example, who remind onje more of Svengali^: under their hypnotic suggestion, an extraordinary performance is put on, not by raw recruits, but by feeble-minded schoolchildren.

Due to the Curse of Babel, poetry is the most provincial of the arts, but today, when civilization is becoming monotonously the same all the world over,

°The evil genius of George du Maurier's popular novel Trilby (1894).

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one feels inclined to regard this as a blessing rather than a curse: in poetry, at least, there cannot be an ‘International Style’.

‘My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin’ (Karl Kraus). It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes. In modern societies where language is continually being debased and reduced to nonspeech, the poet is in constant danger of having his ear corrupted, a danger to which the painter and the composer, whose media are their private property, are not exposed. On the other hand he is more protected than they from another modern peril, that of solipsist subjectivity; however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people. Even the language of Finnegans Wake was not created by Joyce ex nihilo; a purely private verbal world is not possible.

The difference between verse and prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of the difference between poetry and prose. Frost’s definition of poetry as the untranslatable element in language looks plausible at first sight but, on closer examination, will not quite do. In the first place, even in the most rarefied poetry, there are some elements which are translatable. The sound of the words, their rhythmical relations, and all meanings and association of meanings which depend upon sound, like rhymes and puns, are, of course, untranslatable, but poetry is not, like music, pure sound. Any elements in a poem which are not based on verbal experience are, to some degree, translatable into another tongue, for example, images, similes, and metaphors which are drawn from sensory experience. Moreover, because one characteristic that all men, whatever their culture, have in common is uniqueness—every man is a member of a class of one—the unique perspective on the world which every genuine poet has survives translation. If one takes a poem by Goethe and a poem by Holderlin and makes literal prose cribs of them, every reader will recognize that the two poems were written by two different people. In the second place, if speech can never become music, neither can it ever become algebra. Even in the most ‘prosy’ language, in informative and technical prose, there is a personal element because language is a personal creation. Ne pas se pencher an dehors has a different feeling tone from Nichthinauslehnen. a A purely poetic language would be unlearnable, a purely prosaic not worth learning.

Valery bases his definitions of poetry and prose on the difference between the gratuitous and the useful, play and work, and uses as an analogy the difference between dancing and walking. But this will not do either. A commuter may walk to his suburban station every morning, but at the same time he may enjoy the walk for its own sake; the fact that his walk is necessary does not exclude the possibility of its also being a form of play. Vice versa, a dance does not cease to be play if it is also believed to have a useful purpose like promoting a good harvest.

a‘Do not lean out’, in French and German respectively.

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If French poets have been more prone than English to fall into the heresy of thinking that poetry ought to be as much like music as possible, one reason may be that, in traditional French verse, sound effects have always played a much more important role than they have in English verse. The English-speaking peoples have always felt that the difference between poetic speech and the conversational speech of everyday should be kept small, and, whenever English poets have felt that the gap between poetic and ordinary speech was growing too wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again. In English verse, even in Shakespeare's grandest rhetorical passages, the ear is always aware of its relation to everyday speech. A good actor must—alas, today he too seldom does—make the audience hear Shakespeare’s lines as verse not prose, but if he tries to make the verse sound like a different language, he will make himself ridiculous.

But French poetry, both in the way it is written and the way it is recited, has emphasized and gloried in the difference between itself and ordinary speech; in French drama, verse and prose arc different languages. Valery quotes a contemporary description of Rachel’s^ powers of declamation; in reciting she could and did use a range of two octaves, from F below Middle C to F in alt; an actress who tried to do the same with Shakespeare as Rachel did with Racine would be laughed off the stage.

One can read Shakespeare to oneself without even mentally hearing the lines and be very moved; indeed, one may easily find a performance disappointing because almost anyone with an understanding of English verse can speak it better than the average actor and actress. But to read Racine to oneself, even, I fancy, if one is a Frenchman, is like reading the score of an opera when one can hardly play or sing; one can no more get an adequate notion of Phedre without having heard a great performance, than one can of Tristan und Isolde if one has never heard a great Isolde like Leider or Flagstad.

(Monsieur St fohn Perse tells me that,* when it comes to everyday speech, it is French which is the more monotonous and English which has the wider range of vocal inflection.)

I must confess that French classical tragedy strikes me as being opera for the unmusical. When I read the Hippolytus, I can recognize, despite all differences, a kinship between the world of Euripides and the world of Shakespeare, but the world of Racine, like the world of opera, seems to be another planet altogether. Euripides’ Aphrodite is as concerned with fish and fowl as she is with human beings; Racine’s Venus is not only unconcerned with animals, she takes no interest in the Lower Orders. It is impossible to imagine any of Racine’s characters sneezing or wanting to go to the bathroom, for in his world there is neither weather nor nature. In consequence, the passions by which his characters are consumed can only exist, as it were, on stage, the creation of the magnificent speech and the grand gestures of the actors and actresses who endow them with flesh and blood. This is also the case in opera, but no speaking voice, however magnificent, can hope to compete, in expressiveness through sound, with a great singing voice backed by an orchestra. a Elisa Rachel (1821-58), French actress celebrated for her performances in tragic roles.

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‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else' (Oscar Wilde). The only kind of speech which approximates to the symbolist's poetic ideal is polite tea table conversation, in which the meaning of the banalities uttered depends almost entirely upon vocal inflections.

Owing to its superior power as a mnemonic, verse is superior to prose as a medium for didactic instruction. Those who condemn didacticism must disapprove a fortiori of didactic prose; in verse, as the Alka-Seltzer advertisements testify, the didactic message loses half its immodesty. Verse is also certainly the equal of prose as a medium for the lucid exposition of ideas; in skilful hands, the form of the verse can parallel and reinforce the steps of the logic. Indeed, contrary to what most people who have inherited the romantic conception of poetry believe, the danger of argument in verse—Pope's Essay on Man is an example—is that the verse may make the ideas too clear and distinct, more Cartesian than they really are.

On the other hand, verse is unsuited to controversy, to proving some truth or belief which is not universally accepted, because its formal nature cannot but convey a certain scepticism about its conclusions.

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November

is valid because nobody doubts its truth. Were there, however, a party who passionately denied it, the lines would be powerless to convince him because, formally, it would make no difference if the lines ran:

Thirty days hath September,

August, May, and December.

Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disin-toxicate.

The unacknowledged legislators of the world' 0 describes the secret police, not the poets.

Catharsis is properly effected, not by works of art, but by religious rites. It is also effected, usually improperly, by bull-fights, professional football matches, bad movies, military bands, and monster rallies at which ten thousand girl guides form themselves into a model of the national flag.

The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: ‘For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages', what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: ‘You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines.’ And the poor patient in his delirium cries: ‘Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona.’

a Shelley's description of poets in his Defence of Poetry .

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes (b. 1915) studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris, and taught French at universities in Romania and Egypt before joining the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique to work in the fields of sociology and linguistics. In 1947 Barthes began to publish a number of articles on literary criticism which formed the basis of his first book of criticism, Le Degre zero de Vecriturc (Paris, 1953) [Writing Degree Zero (1967)]. His subsequent publications include books and articles on Racine, the French ‘new novel’ and semiology—the theory of signs, verbal and non-verbal, which is Barthes’s specialism in his present position as Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. (See Elements de Semiologie (Paris, 1964) [Elements of Semiology (1967)]. Semiology, in Barthes’s terms, is a development of the linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, which also influenced the social anthropologist Levi-Strauss. Barthes, therefore, belongs to that inter-disciplinary intellectual movement, especially associated with France, known as ‘structuralism’ (see introductory note on Levi-Strauss above, p. 545).

‘Criticism as Language’ was originally published in the second of two special issues of The Times Literary Supplement (1963) in which distinguished English, American, and Continental critics were invited to state their intellectual credos. The essays were later collected into a volume, The Critical Moment (1964). It is not necessary, however, to read Barthes’s essay in this context to recognize the ways in which it affronts the orthodox assumptions behind most Anglo-American criticism. The majority of English and American critics, whether primarily interested in evaluation or in interpretation, would think of themselves as pursuing the truth about the works of art with which they are concerned, even if they do not expect to arrive at it in an absolute and final sense. Barthes’s brusque denial that criticism is concerned with ‘truth’ in any sense, his brilliant logical demonstration that criticism consists not in discovering something previously unperceived in the work, but in covering, or fitting together, the language of the artist with the language of the critic, and his assertion (hat criticism, like logic, is ultimately tautological—these are all arguments profoundly disconcerting to the orthodox assumptions of literary criticism, in France as elsewhere.

CROSS references : 6. T. S. Eliot (‘The Function of Criticism’)

18. John Crowe Ransom

26. W. K. Wimsatt Jnr. and Monroe C. Beardsley

646

Barthes Criticism as language

41. Rene Wellek 49. Susan Sontag

commentary : Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Structures of truth: the

premises of the French new criticism’ in The Word In the Desert (Critical Quarterly 10th Anniversary No.) (1968), ed. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson

Criticism as language

It is always possible to promulgate certain major critical principles in the light of contemporary ideology, especially in France, where theoretical formulations carry great weight, no doubt because they give the practising critic the assurance that he is, at one and the same time, taking part in a fight, making history and exemplifying a philosophical system. We can say that, during the last fifteen years French criticism has developed, with various degrees of success, with four great ‘philosophies’. There is, first of all, Existentialism, or what is generally so called, although the appropriateness of the term is debatable; it has produced Sartre’s critical works, his studies of Baudelaire and Flaubert, his shorter articles on Proust, Mauriac, Giraudoux, and Ponge, and above all his outstanding book on Genet. Next Marxism; it is well known by now (the matter was thrashed out long ago) that orthodox Marxism has proved critically sterile through offering a purely mechanical explanation of works of literature and providing slogans rather than criteria of value. It follows that the most fruitful criticism has to be looked for, as it were, on the frontiers of Marxism, not at its recognized centre. The work of Lucien Goldmann on Racine, Pascal, the ‘New Novel’, the avant-garde theatre, and Malraux owes a large and explicit debt to Lukacs, and it would be difficult to imagine a more flexible and ingenious form of criticism based on political and social history. Then there is psychoanalysis; at the moment, the best representative of Freudian psycho-analytical criticism is Charles Mauron, who has written on Racine and Mallarme. But here again, ‘marginal’ activities have proved more fruitful. Gaston Bachelard, starting from an analysis of substances rather than of works and tracing the dynamic distortions of imagery in a great many poets, founded a whole critical school which is, indeed, so prolific that present-day French criticism in its most flourishing aspect can be said to be Bachelardian in inspiration (G. Poulet, J. Starobinski, J.-P. Richard). Lastly, there is structuralism (which, if reduced to extremely simple, perhaps excessively simple, terms, might be called formalism): the movement has been important, one might almost say fashionable, in France since Claude Levi-Strauss brought it into the social sciences and philosophical reflection. So far, it has produced very few critical works, but such works are in preparation and they will no doubt show the influence of the

Barthes Criticism as language

linguistic model worked out by de Saussure and elaborated by Roman Jakobson (who, in his earlier years, belonged to a literary critical movement, the Russian formalist school). It would seem possible, for instance, to develop a variety of literary criticism on the basis of the two rhetorical categories established by Jakobson, metaphor and metonymy.

As can be seen, this French criticism is both ‘national' (it owes little or nothing to Anglo-American, Spitzerian or Crocian^ criticism) and up to date or— if the expression seems preferable—‘unfaithful to the past' (since it belongs entirely to an aspect of contemporary ideology, it can hardly consider itself as being indebted to any critical tradition, whether founded by Sainte-Beuve, Taine, or Lanson). However, the last-named type of criticism raises a particular problem in this connection. Lanson^ was the prototype of the French teacher of literature and, during the last fifty years, his work, method, and mentality, as transmitted by innumerable disciples, have continued to govern academic criticism. Since the principles, or at least the declared principles, of this kind of criticism are accuracy and objectivity in the establishment of facts, it might be thought that there would be no incompatibility between Lansonianism and the various forms of ideological criticism, which are all interpretative. But although most presentday French critics (I am thinking of those who deal with structure, not those concerned with current reviewing) are themselves teachers, there is a certain amount of tension between interpretative and positivistic (academic) criticism. The reason is that Lansonianism is itself an ideology; it is not simply content to demand the application of the objective rules of all scientific research, it also implies certain general convictions about man, history, literature, and the relationship between the author and his work. For instance, Lansonian psychology is quite out of date, since it consists fundamentally of a kind of analogical determinism, according to which the details of a given work must resemble the details of the author's life, the characters the innermost being of the author, and so on. This makes it a very peculiar ideology because, since it was invented, psychology has, among other things, imagined the opposite relationship of negation between the work and the author. Of course, it is inevitable that an ideology should be based on philosophical postulates; the argument against Lansonianism is not that it has assumptions, but that instead of admitting them, it drapes them in a moral cloak of rigorous and objective investigation; it is as if ideology were being smuggled surreptitiously into the scientific approach.