‘Pure criticism’: whatever that misleading phrase might mean, it is generally agreed that William Empson must be one of its best representatives. No other critic has been so consistently celebrated, or so impatiently dismissed, for the sheer virtuoso display of critical technique. The bravura, crossword-solving ingenuity of his readings finds more multiplicity of meaning in lines of poetry, in single words, than other critics ever do—more, it is sometimes alleged, than is really there. For some, his very fertility is, like that of the old woman who lived in a shoe, his downfall: the reader becomes lost in a showroom of dazzling exhibits that seem to have become ends in themselves, not contributing to any larger interpretation or appreciation. And so Empson—without question one of the two or three most significant English critics in the twentieth century—seems to present the greatest challenge to the enterprise of this book. Here, surely, is ahistorical criticism, a form of creative over-reading that takes its specimens from various sources while parading a showy insouciance about period or context. Professional historians have never had cause to attend to Empson, and nor, it would appear, did he much attend to them.
However, in this chapter I shall argue that the assumption that Empson’s work is ahistorical and contains nothing to interest historians is a mistake, though I would concede at the outset that Empson is the most improbable, or at least most challenging, candidate for inclusion here. But I take comfort from the fact that when he mock-disparaged his own 1935 book Some Versions of Pastoral as not intended to be ‘a solid piece of sociology’, one of his most admiring and sympathetic readers, the American scholar Roger Sale writing in the 1960s, responded by saying: ‘It is in its way a hugely solid work on English history.’1 This chapter will be devoted to trying to make sense of that surprising description in respect of Empson’s work as a whole. My account of the historical assumptions in play in Empson’s criticism will, nonetheless, reveal him to be the odd man out in a different way. Most of the figures I have discussed thus far encouraged, in one form or another, a declinist view and a self-conscious repudiation of the claims of Whig history. Empson, as we shall see, though he unquestionably belongs alongside the other critics I am discussing, does not share these attitudes, and that is not the least of the reasons for thinking that intellectual historians of the period need to take his measure.
It was not Empson’s way to make a fuss about the business of criticism. Whenever he was driven to any meta-critical statement, it usually amounted to little more than a variant on the injunction to ‘get on with it’. And so it is with the place of history in his criticism, starting with Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930 when he was just 24.2 His very first literary example in the first pages of the first chapter of his first book—‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73—is plonked rather matter-of-factly into what is assumed to be a familiar history. Taking the line to refer to, among other things, monastery choirs, he briskly mentions elements that contribute to its richness of meaning, including, as he puts it, ‘various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism) which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions’.3 The itemized reasons may seem to be the small change of textbook history, though the choice of ‘fear of puritanism’ as a way of gesturing towards the most relevant aspects of the 1590s setting may already indicate a characteristically Empsonian twist. But the very briskness suggests that these are to be taken as shared historical commonplaces, and that the need to assume or refer to such historical circumstances was so obvious and indisputable a feature of literary interpretation that it did not require comment. Finding his reading challenged by later critics, Empson fell back on the self-evidence of his point: the example ‘was mainly meant to illustrate the familiar process of putting in a little historical background; a reader in Shakespeare’s time could easily think of actual ruined choirs’.4
This air of cheerfully taking a lot for granted pervades the opening chapter of Seven Types. Its first section is taken up with a polemic against those who understand poetry as being ‘pure sound’ or ‘all about atmosphere’, independent of verbal meaning. For the most part, the level of the discussion tends towards abstraction without quite being theoretical. And then, suddenly, we are offered what seems to be intended as a historical explanation:
Interest in ‘atmospheres’ is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century; this may tell us something about them, and in part explain why they are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned. For a variety of reasons, they found themselves living in an intellectual framework with which it was very difficult to write poetry, in which poetry was rather improper, or was irrelevant to business, especially the business of becoming Fit to Survive, or was an indulgence of one’s lower nature in beliefs the scientists knew were untrue. On the other hand, they had a large public which was as anxious to escape from this intellectual framework, on holiday, as they were themselves. Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically … 5
We cannot help but wonder how seriously we are being asked to take this as an ‘explanation’. It may be seen, at one level, as yet another sub-Eliotic denunciation of the ‘romanticism’ of the Victorians, a view that had great currency during Empson’s student years in 1920s Cambridge. It sees nineteenth-century poetry as a form of escapism from a society assumed to be less congenial to poetry than those that had preceded it. Commerce, Social Darwinism, Science: these are the dark monsters that drive poor poets to scuttle back to the warmth of childhood, and these are understood to be the dominant, and distinctively modern, features of the Victorian period. But are these anything more than the truisms of textbook history? It all has a rather knockabout quality, and, as he goes on, the hint of Wildean superbia is frequently detectable (‘as for Keats’ desire for death and his mother, it has become a byword among the learned’). Having slain most of the leading nineteenth-century poets with a phrase each, he concludes: ‘Browning and Meredith, who did write from the world they lived in, affect me as novel-writers of merit with no lyrical inspiration at all’—which surely recalls Wilde’s epigram: ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.’6
In such a passage, it can be hard to separate the hint of playful excess in the descriptions from the summary despatch characteristic of a writer quickly running over familiar reference points. Yet the paragraph also has some of the forensic vigour associated with conducting a convincing argument, the rhythm of inference culminating in a ‘therefore’ designed to present the final, rather bizarre, claim as the natural, only-to-be-expected outcome of the conditions guyed in the previous sentences. This note is very characteristic of Empson, especially of his earliest work, and is part of what makes it difficult to know quite how to take—how much, as it were, to credit—the various offhand historical assertions we encounter along the way. Nonetheless, I suggest there is a unifying narrative thread, even though it is only intermittently visible.
Much of what delights Empson about ‘ambiguity’ in poetry depends, in effect, upon the fast-developing nature of early modern English and the ubiquity of the conceit in everyday language at that time. As double meanings move, in later centuries, towards being deliberate or explicit, as in the pun, they lose most of their poetic force. Thus, he says of his third ‘type’ of ambiguity:
its most definite examples are likely to be found, in increasing order of self-consciousness, among the seventeenth-century mystics who stress the conscious will, the eighteenth-century stylists who stress rationality, clarity, and satire, and the harmless nineteenth-century punsters who stress decent above-board fun.7
These summarizing remarks clearly presuppose a larger literary history, a fairly conventional one apart from his dismissive smirking at the nineteenth century. But they also hint at the ways in which a sequence can start to become a narrative.
Considered in this way, Seven Types of Ambiguity can be read as, implicitly, a history of increasing self-consciousness about multiplicity of meaning. For the Elizabethans, especially Shakespeare, ambiguity was a natural property of the language. The Metaphysicals deliberately cultivated it, but no great self-consciousness was required on the part of the reader for such conceits to succeed. In the eighteenth century these effects were more contrived, and part of their success lay in the reader’s awareness of, and admiration for, the element of contrivance, which nonetheless contributed to the meaning. By the nineteenth century, the language had lost much of this natural richness, and anyway the prevailing poetic was against it, preferring sincerity, so double meanings tended to occur as deliberate puns, always a poor relation. In seeking to account for the nineteenth century’s relative poverty in these respects, he says:
it may spring from their respect for logical punctuation, from their admiration for simple ecstasies (it was no longer courtiers and administrators who wrote poetry), from their resulting admiration of smoothness of lyrical flow, and from the fact that the language had become less fluid, a less subtle mirror of the mind (though a more precise mirror of the scientific world) since the clarifying labours of the eighteenth century.8
This curious sentence runs together very different types of ‘explanation’—changes in the language, in aesthetic ideals, in the sociology of writers, in theories of the relation of language and reality, and so on. The suggested explanations also vary greatly in persuasiveness—it is not, for example, altogether clear why full-time poets should cultivate ‘simple ecstasies’ in their verse more than, say, ‘courtiers’ do. Insofar as there is a chronological focus here, it is a change located in the eighteenth century, seen in traditional terms as the rationalist product of the Scientific Revolution. It is worth remarking that, when locating a major turning-point in cultural and literary history in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Empson, unlike so many of his contemporaries, here makes no mention of the transformation allegedly effected by the Industrial Revolution.
Throughout the book, Empson implicitly relies on the fact that English is a largely uninflected language that depends on word order for meaning, so that the poets’ disruption of ‘normal’ word order could be one fruitful source of ‘ambiguity’. Reflecting on this in a more general and extended way in his final chapter, he acknowledges that ‘people are accustomed to judge automatically the forces that hold together a variety of ideas’ in expression, and that the communication of meaning relies upon this kind of tacit knowledge. He then gives this point a historical twist by observing how the English language has come to abandon many of its former grammatical markers, with the result that ‘it is growing liable to mean more things and less willing to stop and exclude the other possible meanings’. Communication is still effective because various speech communities each have their own form of the necessary tacit knowledge. ‘English is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in connection with one another, which yet have many words in common, so that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom the author is writing.’9
Empson is not dismayed by this development; he believes that the implied grammar of, say, the compacted noun sequences of newspaper headlines can yield a rich semantic field in themselves. ‘It is possible that a clear analysis of the possible modes of statement, and a fluid use of grammar which sets out to combine them as sharply as possible into the effect intended, may yet give back something of the Elizabethan energy to what is at present a rather exhausted language.’10 The hope expressed here prevents this ungainly sentence from falling into a familiar form of cultural pessimism, but it is nonetheless uncharacteristic of Empson to throw around such a slack, and unsustainable, cliché as ‘a rather exhausted language’, a description generated more by the contrast implied in the commonplace idea of Elizabethan English as a high point of fertility and creativity than by any systematic linguistic survey of contemporary usage. In any event, while this tacitly regulated Babel may be a peculiarly modern situation, the model underlying it—where ‘meaning’ is understood as ‘intended uptake’, how the author intended the relevant public to understand—is applied to all periods.
Thus far, the historical consciousness present in the opening chapters of Seven Types may not seem to provide much evidence of Empson’s being, as Leavis had described him in his review, ‘as alive as [Eliot and Richards] to the exciting strangeness of the present phase of human history’.11 For Leavis, the marginal place of poetry in a world supposedly dominated by commercialism and machinery was one symptom of the strangeness of this phase. Leavis suggested that the importance of ‘a mind that is fully alive in this age’ was ‘brought home particularly in the last chapter’ of Seven Types, but perhaps here he was a little hasty in recruiting Empson to this familiar form of interwar cultural alarmism, for the final chapter of Seven Types is a curious performance, an offhand justification of the practice of close analysis. It is couched in very general, though hardly theoretical, terms, yet it, too, is implicitly historical in interesting ways. The circuit around which meaning has been mercilessly harried throughout the book passes from the critic through the poet and on to the reader. But the reader is, in effect, doubly represented, because the key regulator of the meanings that the critic and his readers may agree upon is the meaning that it is presumed the poet intended his immediate audience to apprehend. The critic could, in principle, identify all possible meanings and the mechanisms by which they operate, so the key question in practice, Empson suggests, is how far it is ‘profitable’ to attend to the possible ambiguities that such syntactical implicitness generates. His initial answer to this is less permissive than one might have expected. ‘Clearly, the critical principles of the author and of the public he is writing for will decide this to a considerable degree’, and he goes on to emphasize the different conventions of different periods in this respect. The meanings it will be ‘profitable’ to pursue, his elaborations suggest, seem to be those that the author could have intended his original audience to apprehend.
Empson did not, in the first half of his career, labour this historicist claim; he appears, rather, to take it (along with so much else) as almost self-evident. He recognizes that concentration on what the author could have intended may be ‘very interesting to the biographer, but … have nothing to do with the enjoyment of the poem’, but he counsels against taking this distinction too absolutely—‘those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers’.12 This is not an assertion one might expect to hear from an Eliot-inspired young critic in 1930, though it could perhaps find a warrant in some of Eliot’s critical practice. The contemporary reader needs some appreciation of ‘what was likely to happen in a reader’s mind’ in the poem’s original setting, and Empson takes a purely pragmatic view of how extensive or how limited might be the steps that the critic needs to take to help prompt that appreciation.
In the course of the chapter, he moves on to the question of whether the reader needs to share the beliefs of the poet if he is to ‘understand his sensibility’, and again his answer is an implicitly historical one. Since ‘we’ obviously do not share all the beliefs of poets from previous centuries,
it becomes puzzling that we should be able to enjoy so many poets. The explanation seems to be that in the last few generations literary people have been trained socially to pick up hints at once about people’s opinions, and to accept them, while in the company of their owners, with as little fuss as possible. … It is for reasons of this sort that the habit of reading a wide variety of different sorts of poetry, which has, after all, only recently been contracted by any public as a whole … [makes people less sure of their interpretations] and makes it necessary to be able to fall back on some intelligible process of interpretation.13
Whether the remarks about the social ‘training’ and being ‘in the company’ of the owners of the opinions should be taken literally as referring to ordinary social interactions, or more ironically as a description of an education in ways of reading, may not matter. What matters much more is Empson’s sense that the general scheme of analysis that his book promotes meets a distinctively modern need. The relevant readers here are ‘literary people’, but, unlike literary people of centuries past, they have, presumably as a result of changes in both education and publishing, become used to reading and appreciating the poetry of various periods. In talking about ‘any public as a whole’, he seems to be gesturing towards the expansion of the terrain of reading, and the availability of cheap reprints of earlier work to meet that expanded market, that is commonly dated from the late nineteenth century.
Empson was, of course, aware that ‘many people’ would think his ingenious analyses were excessive, as indeed they did and do. His first move in self-defence was to insist that he was remedying a local lack: those objectors need to remember ‘that English literary critics have been so unwilling to appear niggling and lacking in soul that upon these small technical points the obvious, even the accepted, has been said culpably seldom’. One way to read this is as a complaint against the belletrist tradition of criticism that held pretty undisputed sway in English literary culture until after the First World War. Empson here puts on his lab coat, or perhaps even his engineer’s overalls: he is the man who knows which levers and which valves make the thing work, whereas ‘English literary critics’ have tended to write as admirers, making a bit of a display of their exquisite sensibilities. But then, repeating that dialectical rhythm that punctuates the whole chapter, he rounds on himself and puts the case for such appreciative criticism:
the position of a literary critic is far more a social than a scientific one. There is no question of dealing finally with the matter, because, in so far as people are always reading an author, he is always being read differently. It is the business of the critic to extract for his public what it wants; to organise, what indeed he may create, the taste of his period.14
He is not entirely reneging on his more scientific enterprise, but this may at first seem to strike a largely concessive note. Those bellettrist critics were—it would be a reasonable inference from the popularity and longevity of the type—giving their public what it wanted.
But does his historicism here work for him more than against him, perhaps? His terms acknowledge the temporal and located nature of criticism, the pragmatic and tactical character of its transactions. A point that Empson was to reiterate several times later in his career was that the critic, in order to decide what needs to be said to enhance his readership’s understanding, has to have a good idea of its current level of apprehension. It may then be said that, in the climate of uncertainty and relativism about literary value allegedly current at the time, Empson’s readership needs precisely the kind of ‘scientific’ demonstration of how meaning works that he provides. His own remark about the need ‘to bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom the author is writing’ has, mutatis mutandis, an application here. We may now feel that his target readership is assumed to be improbably well read in earlier English poetry and to have a notably scholarly cast of mind, with interests in past social conventions, the history of the language, and much else besides, as well as a very high tolerance for critical self-consciousness. It is hard not to think that this category was best represented in Empson’s mind by that small circle of contemporaries whose company he had enjoyed at Cambridge. Certainly, in the first decade after the book’s publication, it did not appear to find large numbers of other readers.
In any event, it is the needs of this distinctively modern category that provide the rationale for his book. In its closing pages he restates his historical premise:
It is only recently that the public, as a whole, has come to admire a great variety of different styles of poetry, requiring a great variety of critical dogmas, simultaneously, so as to need not so much a single habit for the reading of poetry as a sort of understanding that enables one to jump neatly from one style to another.15
The contemporary reader needs, more than readers of previous generations, the general reassurance that poetry is susceptible of analysis. Without this, the confidence to take pleasure in any particular poem can be sapped, producing a generalized anxiety about possible failure of response and interpretation, which in turn leads to ‘a sterility of emotion’. Demonstrating the power of analysis, as a general practice, is, therefore, not the enemy of a properly emotional response to poetry, but its necessary backdrop. And that is the chief justification for his book and what he concedes (or affects to concede) are its ‘many niggling pages’.16
Seven Types of Ambiguity makes no reference to the work of historians, not even literary historians—but, then, it makes practically no reference to scholarly work of any kind. Such historical allusions as it offers are treated as nods to familiar, common possessions not in need of support. Empson’s second book, Some Versions of Pastoral (published in 1935), maintains the offhand manner and the lack of scholarly apparatus, but it, I suggest, is making a more fundamentally historical case. The clue here is, once again, given by Sale when he says that the ‘subject’ of the book is not the individual works Empson discusses, but ‘the history that can be made by considering the works in sequence’.17
Reading Some Versions of Pastoral can be a dizzying experience as one comes to realize that, while ostensibly discussing a limited, and indeed very dated, literary convention, Empson is uncovering something so fundamental in the relationship between writer and reader that he is identifying a dynamic that is at work in some form in all literature and all criticism. These larger claims are gestured to in the almost unintelligibly condensed opening chapter on ‘Proletarian literature’, which must rank as one of the most puzzling and unintroductory first chapters ever written. The situation is scarcely eased by the fact that the subsequent chapters, each devoted to a single work or single subgenre, are self-contained, with little by way of cross reference or cumulative argument. Nonetheless, Sale’s comment points us in the right direction: the sequence of chapters gives us not just the larger argument of the book but its specific contribution as a kind of history.
Putting this part of my argument in its most provocative form, I suggest that Some Versions of Pastoral gives us an oblique history of class relations in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Part of what made the genre of pastoral workable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Empson implies, was the acceptance of the fixed gulf between the aristocrats and the shepherds. Classical pastoral depended on the pretence that, though the shepherds lived simpler uncluttered lives that enabled them to show up the vanities of their social superiors, they could put forward their philosophical reflections about existence in a form of highly elaborate educated speech without any attention being drawn to the incongruity of this procedure. Indeed, acceptance of the clash between their lowly social position and their elevated rhetorical style was part of what made the convention so powerful, creating the sense that the truths expressed applied to everyone. As Empson puts it: ‘To make the clash work in the right way (not become funny) the writer must keep up a firm pretence that he was unconscious of it.’18 Empson’s reference to ‘pretence’ here raises some awkward questions. If ‘the essential trick of the old pastoral’ depended upon a kind of connivance by all parties not to find the artificiality ‘risible’, was even the old pastoral a form of mock-pastoral? For Empson the key seems to lie in whether the artificiality is in some way acknowledged in the literary genre itself: mock-pastoral trades on just this acknowledgement, whereas the old pastoral manages to exclude it.
In any event, ‘pretence’ is at the heart of the genre: the shepherds are and are not ‘real’ or ‘ordinary’ shepherds (the genre depends on the you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know relation). The shepherds can also have their representative function reinforced by comparing their ruling of sheep to monarchs or bishops ruling over men, so that in effect they become part of an extended metaphor. ‘Such a pretence no doubt makes the characters unreal, but not the feelings expressed or even the situation described; the same pretence is often valuable in real life.’ So the contrivance or artifice is not necessarily a drawback: what seems essential is that the reader should not find it jarring or ludicrous, and for this to be the case there has to be not merely acceptance of the genre but unembarrassed acceptance of the different mores of the various social ranks.
It is at this point that Empson casually introduces a very important historical claim (using, characteristically, a metaphor that knowingly evokes English class behaviour), when he writes: ‘I should say that it was over this fence that pastoral came down in England after the Restoration.’19 But what, exactly, is ‘this fence’? It looks as though it has something to do with keeping up the pretence without feeling that something silly or comic is involved. After the mid-seventeenth century, he seems to suggest, people became less willing to connive in this fiction. Those philosophic swains came to seem pretentious as well as implausible. Puritanism was hostile to such antique affectations, ‘and’, he writes, ‘Puritanism, suspicious of the arts, was only not strong among the aristocracy’. So the ‘harsh and unreal’ criticism of cultivation came to ‘make the polite pretence of pastoral seem necessarily absurd’.
At one level, there is a kind of Fall built into his story, and, as so often in early Empson, Puritanism is one of the main villains of the piece (as his career goes on, this comes to be broadened into an aggressive attack on Christianity more generally). What changed, his account suggests, is not the actual position of social classes (their ‘objective situation’, as the comrades of the 1930s would call it): both pre- and post-seventeenth-century England were dramatically class divided—indeed, the stock characters of pastoral necessarily reflect these vast disparities in rank and social position. What changed was the increasing unwillingness to ignore the incongruity of the expression by ordinary people of lofty sentiments in high-flown language. ‘Even so’, he continues, ‘there was a successful school of mock-pastoral for so long as the upper and lower classes were consciously less Puritan than the middle. When that goes the pastoral tricks of thought take refuge in child-cult.’20 These two phases clearly correspond to the last two chapters of the book, on the Beggar’s Opera and on the Alice books respectively, which seem to chart steps in a retreat from the world. Initially, therefore, the class basis of the mock-pastoral seems to have something to do with the unspoken bond between rogues and aristocrats: it is ‘mock’ because its knowingness puts it at one remove from the innocence of the true pastoral relation, but it is still a form of pastoral in that a mirror to life is held up by the lowest of the lower orders, on the margins of respectable society, where their life of vice is not unconnected to that of the aristocracy. And when even that model is no longer usable, the truths have to be put in the mouth of a child.
So this pastoral machinery always involves, as Empson puts it in a celebrated passage, a ‘double attitude’ of ‘the complex man to the simple one (“I am in one way better, in another not so good”), and this may well recognize a permanent truth about the aesthetic situation’.21 That’s to say, the writer or artist belongs to a ‘higher’ social stratum and engages in a more sophisticated kind of labour; but the characters he or she creates, though lower in social station, are implied to be possessed of a greater native dignity or natural understanding of the human situation. And, since all characters in literature are in some sense ‘representative’, we may say that all literature has a pastoral dimension.
This line of thought enables Empson to return to his critique of ‘proletarian literature’, a category of writing much lauded on the left in the 1930s: ‘To produce pure proletarian art’, he writes, ‘the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public’. In other words, proletarian literature is, above all, a form of literature: by the very fact that the author writes it, he or she cannot simply be one among the characters described in it. The writer has in some sense to stand apart from life to describe it. ‘It is for reasons like these that the most valuable works of art so often have a political implication which can be pounced on and called bourgeois,’ he writes, reflecting the endless discussions along these lines by 1930s Marxism, and then continues: ‘My own difficulty about proletarian literature is that when it comes off I find I am taking it as pastoral literature; I read into it, or find that the author has secretly put into it, these more subtle, more far-reaching, and I think more permanent, ideas.’22 Seen thus, Empson’s chapter, indeed his whole book, becomes a brilliant demonstration of how the reach of literary analysis can undercut the assumed primacy of political categories.
Reading Empson in this way inevitably raises a further question: is Some Versions of Pastoral itself an example of the pastoral ‘form’? Although I have not seen this suggestion developed anywhere, we may come close to it in an observation by the American critic Arthur Mizener, reviewing Some Versions of Pastoral (under its misleading American title English Pastoral Poetry) in Partisan Review in 1938. Mizener observed that Empson’s style of criticism carried some of the same risks as are involved in having to explain a joke.
If he explains too much he appears to condescend foolishly to his readers, and if he explains too little, his tacit assumption that his special knowledge is commonplace has the effect of making him appear in the end, not humble, but supercilious. Mr Empson has, how consciously it is difficult to say, taken the latter course by adopting a sophisticated version of the very device he is analyzing: he presents himself to his readers by a pastoral device; he is the revolutionary critic in the guise of a correspondent of The Times Literary Supplement.23
I take Mizener to be suggesting that Empson treats his significant new insights as though they were the familiar coin of critical exchange. This could be considered a form of ‘putting the complex in the simple’, or (adapting one of Empson’s own subtitles) ‘the TLS critic as swain’, the cultivation of a kind of faux innocence.
Pastoral, we might say—deliberately superimposing a modern on an ancient category—is a form of social criticism. The vanities, excesses, and corruptions endemic to the life of the well-born are exposed by contemplation of the simple goodness and satisfactions of the shepherds’ existence. But is there, in turn, a sense in which all social criticism retains an ineliminable element of pastoral? In asking this, I am not referring to the largely rural or pre-industrial character of so many of the ideals looked back to by, say, nineteenth-century critics of industrialism. I have in mind the manner in which the social critic portrays the corruption or unnaturalness of the present from a standpoint that implicitly claims to be in touch with more fundamental, and perhaps more universal, human interests, as encountered in those from a lowly social position.
How far these are given any concrete instantiation varies according to the literary tactics of the critic, but it is certainly noticeable that many of the classics of twentieth-century English social criticism do find some such touchstone in the alleged simplicities of working-class life, suggesting that a kind of pastoral sensibility is at work. Something of this kind might be claimed about, say, Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. Such critiques do not, in any obvious sense, romanticize a bygone rural age. But in their celebrations of the solidarities of working-class life, their admiration for the hardiness and endurance of the poor, their respect for the directness of the human relations, and the simplicity of the pastimes characteristic (or allegedly characteristic) of working-class communities—indeed, in their very evocation of the idea of ‘community’ as opposed to the atomized selfishness of market society—these works, too, hold a mirror of simplicity up to the painted shows of the dominant social form. And in doing so, they cannot altogether escape the hovering idea that such simplicities represent the eternal verities of human existence.
Some Versions of Pastoral cannot, in any simple sense, be said to stand alongside these works: for one thing, it says nothing directly about the present, and, for another, its focus is almost wholly literary. But what it does offer is an oblique commentary on the genre of social criticism itself. For what it may be said to reveal is the extent to which such works share a formal structure with the literary genre recognized as pastoral. In this respect, Empson’s book can be seen as a vindication of the claims of literary criticism. It is his response to the political challenge issued by his more straightforwardly ‘committed’ contemporaries in the 1930s. Where they hold up proletarian literature as the one politically acceptable form of literary production, he shows that it is, precisely, a form. When it works, it works as a form of pastoral. And pastoral is about the positioning of the author in relation to the reader and about degrees of knowingness shared by author and reader, matters that it takes the peculiar attentiveness of literary criticism to identify.
Returning to the phrase from Roger Sale with which I started—that Some Versions of Pastoral is ‘a hugely solid work on English history’—it now seems worth calling attention to the preposition: a work on, not of, English history. It is certainly not a work of history in any conventional sense, but it surely is a kind of meditation on aspects of English history, as well as on the perspective on human existence that we cannot throw off even when attending to such historical matters. Empson is, as so often, the odd man out among the critics discussed here, but, however we might characterize his distinctiveness, it certainly cannot be by claiming that he ignored history.
To describe one of the major works by one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated critics as a terra incognita may seem a particularly vulgar attempt to shill for trade, conjuring up promises of a radical revisionism that are not, in the nature of the case, likely to be redeemed. But Empson’s third major work, The Structure of Complex Words, published in 1951, has become one of the great unvisited monuments of English literary criticism—or, at least, visited only rarely, perhaps by readers who have enjoyed other work by its architect, or occasionally by those who have heard rumours of untold riches piled in its deserted rooms. Even ardent admirers of Empson—of whom there were many in the middle decades of the twentieth century and a smaller but deeply devoted band from the 1970s onwards—have responded to what is much his longest book with a mixture of selective praise and puzzled respect.
And with some reason. At first meeting, the book can seem deliberately uninviting. One way to describe its structure would be to say that an outer ring of barbed wire surrounds an inner ring of ditches and ha-has, at the heart of which there is a labyrinth. It requires more than the usual readerly effort and commitment to come to terms with The Structure of Complex Words, but few works of criticism offer such rewards in return. I shall argue that among the many things to be got from this difficult, brilliant work are not only a general method that should be of interest to all intellectual and cultural historians, but also a series of substantive interpretations of phases of English, and indeed European, history. More provocatively, I want to suggest that Empson should be regarded as an idiosyncratic but unusually interesting historian of English ethical life.
At its most ambitious, The Structure of Complex Words is an enquiry into how meaning happens. Its focus is not on the grammar of sentences but on what Empson calls the ‘grammar’ of individual words, especially those ‘vague, rich, intimate words’ through which human relations are primarily negotiated. He contends that the co-presence of multiple senses within many words, at certain stages of their history, takes the form of a structure or an assertion of relation between the senses, which allows the word to carry what he calls, with his usual camp exaggeration, a ‘doctrine’. The reader may miss or misinterpret the meaning and force of given statements unless the interaction of senses within such words at a particular period of their use can be identified.
As Empson brilliantly demonstrates, the OED, always the first resource, almost entirely fails to capture this essential component of meaning as a result of its rigid policy of identifying only what it regards as distinct ‘senses’ of a word and then tying its illustrative quotations to those separate senses. Empson’s interest, by contrast, was in what he called his ‘equations’—that is, the way in which the relation between senses buried in a complex word at a particular moment in its history carried an implicit assertion. When the Victorian matron says to the potential suitor: ‘You can’t take Amelia for long walks Mr Jones; she’s delicate’, Empson unpacks the work done by the adjective ‘delicate’ as carrying the equation ‘refined girls are sickly’, and its italicized compactness is intended to carry the further reproach ‘as you ought to know’.24 The structure of senses in a ‘complex word’, therefore, is not a pun or deliberate play on meanings by an artful individual, but part of the established verbal currency, the common possession of a community of language-users in a particular period.
Empson later described The Structure of Complex Words as a ‘sandwich’ in which chapters devoted to individual words within particular works of literature provide the filling between two outer layers of theoretical chapters.25 What, in effect, the central chapters illustrate is that there can be no adequate recovery of meaning without the kind of attentiveness to tone and responsiveness to individual voice that characterizes the work of the literary critic. But, at the same time, they also show how any adequate interpretation of a passage in a literary text will necessarily be informed by a more extensive historical semantics, drawing on evidence of usage from beyond literary texts. Empson does not parade his own learning, or indeed provide any systematic record of his sources; his habit of quoting from memory scarcely conformed to MLA guidelines (Ian Parsons, his editor at Chatto, found that when the quotations in Empson’s typescript were checked in-house, ‘about 90% needed corrections—some of a major order’).26 But something of the ambition of his approach is conveyed by his characteristically offhand assertion that ‘to give all the structures of all words would only mean writing the history of opinion in the most prolix possible manner’.27 More appealing to Empson, in both its economy and its focus on rich literary texts, was what may look like the reverse of this laborious enterprise: ‘I should think indeed’, he writes, ‘that a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a simple lyric’.28
The playfully titled chapter on ‘The English Dog’ contains some memorable illustrations of the ways in which changes in the use of everyday terms encapsulate larger shifts in social and moral attitudes. One of the most telling is the passage discussing Dr Johnson’s commendation of a young Scottish laird as a ‘dog’, as in the teasing-cum-admiring usage of calling a scampish friend ‘You dog!’. It is striking, argues Empson, that a lot of the thought of a man like Dr Johnson was
not carried on his official verbal machinery but on colloquial phrases like the one about dogs; phrases that he would have refused to analyse on grounds of dignity, even if he had been able to. No doubt you need to know a great many other things before you can understand the working of a society; but there is a claim to be made for the branch of study I am touching on here. You need to know, as well as the serious opinions of a man in the society, how much weight he would allow, when making a practical decision, to some odd little class of joke phrases, such as excite, he would feel, sentiments obvious to any agreeable person, and yet such as carry doctrines more really complex than the whole structure of his official view of the world.29
Though the phrasing is concessive and ostensibly cautious, the actual claims made here are far from modest. The goal is nothing less than understanding ‘the working of a society’, and the yield from attending to such uses of language is ‘doctrines more really complex than the whole structure of [a person’s] official view of the world’. At the very least, this seems to propose a supplementary way of doing intellectual or cultural history. One of the small, but perhaps significant, changes between the essay and book versions comes where the passage refers to ‘the branch of study I am touching on here’; in 1938 he had merely written ‘this sort of essay’. The change may have felt called for simply by the place of the chapter in the larger context of the book, but it may also indicate that he now wished to press the academic or disciplinary implications of his approach a little more. The passage (and, indeed, the chapter as a whole) is also an expression of affinity on Empson’s part, since his sympathy with the worldly, anti-Puritan uses he surveys is palpable.
The Structure of Complex Words does not endorse or even overtly engage with either Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ or Leavis’s ‘organic community’. But it does, I want to suggest, propose its own reading of English history in the form of an account of some of the main shifts in ethical attitudes from, roughly, the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Empson’s narrative of moral change has to be pieced together from hints and asides, but it is a story with two main turning points. First, beginning in the mid- to late sixteenth century, there was the displacement of the largely feudal code of honour by the earnest ethics of Protestant Christianity. And, second, beginning in the mid- to late seventeenth century, there was the challenge to Puritanism and its legacy by a more worldly code of self-assertion. The more obviously literary-critical chapters that make up the middle of the ‘sandwich’ are, simultaneously, brilliant essays on individual works such as Lear or Othello, or Pope’s Essay on Criticism, and, through their discussion of terms such as ‘wit’ ‘fool’, ‘dog’, honest’, and ‘sense’, an informal intellectual history of everyday attitudes to truth-telling between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries.
In a history written in terms of what he nicely called a ‘shrubbery of smaller ideas’—those ‘vague rich intimate words’ that inform human relations so much more pervasively than the ‘clear words of [the] official language’30—a central place is assigned to the Restoration and the ‘Augustan settlement’ that eventually followed from it. Empson’s seventeenth century turns not on such conventional moments as 1603 or 1641 or 1688, but rather on the subterranean processes that allowed the phrase ‘You dog!’, used in commendation of a friend, to mean: ‘That’s a bit naughty, but you are openly displaying human appetites which, let’s be frank, we do all share.’ (Incidentally, this use of direct-speech paraphrase, which I have here parodied, is one of Empson’s most characteristic critical strategies, one that has the effect of staging meaning as part of a communicative encounter.)
The notions expressed in such everyday terms functioned, Empson proposes, as ‘a half-conscious protest against the formulae’ of the official beliefs of a society, ‘a means of keeping them at bay’. He then spells out this function for the present group of words in revealing terms:
The web of European civilization seems to have been slung between the ideas of Christianity and those of a half-secret rival, centring perhaps (if you made it a system) round honour; one that stresses pride rather than humility, self-realization rather than self-denial, caste rather than either the communion of saints or the individual soul; while the words I want to look at here, whether in their hearty or their patronizing versions, come somewhat between the two, for they were used both to soften the assertion of class and to build a defence against Puritanism.31
Such passages as this offer, in effect, a manifesto for a kind of informal intellectual history, one which, instead of focusing on the doctrines announced in formal statements of belief, attends to the attitudes and appraisals embedded in the richness of everyday speech. But, in addition to this methodological commitment, the passage announces a historically substantive interpretation as well. It turns on European society of this period having kept alive a set of beliefs that implicitly held up a different set of ideals for human beings to aspire to than those endorsed by the established religious creeds. The subtlety of his identification of the range of senses of this group of words lies in his not turning them into a rival set of ‘formulae’ but recognizing the ways in which they only partially evoke or rely upon this alternative conception of life ‘to soften the assertion of class and to build a defence against Puritanism’. It will already be obvious that Empson is implicitly endorsing the sympathy with ordinary human appetites expressed in these terms, suggesting, in effect, that we all live in the shrubbery much of the time.
Over and over again the Restoration turns out to be the key period in Empson’s history of ethical attitudes. One reason for this is touched on early in the chapter on ‘The English Dog’. Reflecting on the way ‘roguish’ approval had installed itself in the Restoration libertine’s use of ‘You dog!’, he remarks that
there were plenty of people under Victoria inventing slang phrases of this sort, but there was not a general political revolt against Puritanism to make it catch on. The point for the linguist is not that the Restoration gentry were unusually roguish, but that during the Restoration a fairly permanent way of feeling had enough influence to affect certain words.32
This is a reminder that Empson’s linguistic reconstructions presupposed and drew upon a conventional body of political and social history that he nowhere spells out.
Critics, like other people, absorb a good deal of history without knowing it. Often, what is absorbed earliest endures longest, lying dormant for decades, unobtrusively directing one’s attention or shaping one’s responses, occasionally resurfacing, immune to correction by later scholarship, a bedrock of assumption, prejudice, and identity. In the decade after 1945, when Empson’s form of ‘verbal analysis’ attracted a growing volume of comment both in Britain and the United States, the method’s alleged ahistoricism was, as I have already suggested, a frequent topic of reproach. One of Empson’s own later reflections on this matter runs as follows: ‘When I returned to England from [living in] Communist China in 1952, I was frequently told that I obviously didn’t know any history, so I have had to look into the evidence for the opinions I was taught at school, and I found every time that they stand up like a rock.’33 Empson, of course, always liked épater les professeurs, and reducing the required level of historical learning to ‘the opinions I was taught at school’ suited his teasing habits. Still, one is bound to wonder just how much of the historical or chronological framework of Empson’s later thinking actually had been laid down by such teaching and reading of history as came his way in the 1920s, first as a boy specializing in the science side of a notably intellectual, Classics-dominated public school, and then as a maths student at Cambridge dabbling in various other literary and cultural activities.
Do we perhaps encounter an instance of the rocklike solidity of such early opinions in this passage, written some thirty-five years later? It comes from Milton’s God, published in 1961, where Empson is reflecting on the possibility that his attitude to Christianity will seem out of date, and that such hostility is no longer necessary. Insofar as that is the case, he maintains, it is because ‘Christians have been kept under a fair amount of restraint for about two hundred years’, thanks to a rise in scepticism from the late sixteenth century onwards, which slowly led to a decline in their cherished practice of burning people alive for heretical beliefs. ‘Buckle’s History of Civilization (1857–61)’, he affirms, ‘contains so far as I know the best examination of how the change occurred’, and then he goes on:
I read the book as an undergraduate because it was praised by a character in a novel of Aldous Huxley, and was much impressed by the ample detail; it excites a sickened loathing for Christians when they are let loose which I have continued to feel. So I was interested recently to come across a scholarly re-edition by J. M. Robertson, who had checked the references of Buckle (1904). He scolds the author a good deal in footnotes for errors of theory, but decides the facts are correct, and he was well competent to check them. … It so happened that this bit of casual reading put me a month or two ahead of the Centenary of Buckle, which was celebrated by two Lives reviewed in all the weeklies. The reviewers were professional historians, quite certain that history teaches nothing whatever; they treated him with contempt for having any theories about history at all. It felt to me as if night had descended; only a hundred years, and the historians genuinely no longer had any idea even of what the question was that he had been discussing. And yet it is still a practical question.34
Milton’s God itself, along with so much of Empson’s writing in his last three decades, amply attests to the strength of his conviction that Buckle’s was ‘still a practical question’—essentially, the question of the harmful consequences of Christian doctrine and the continued desirability of free thought to liberate mankind from this pernicious system. But what is, I think, notable in this passage is not just the attitude Empson evinces towards professional historians, but the way in which he relates himself to a phase in history. Empson never shared Leavis’s obsessive rage against the corruption of standards in ‘the weeklies’: he took them as an important index of current educated opinion. In this case, the reception of the biographies of Buckle by the reviewers, writing for this educated general readership in 1957, showed how professional historians had fallen into either a familiar form of Eliotic nostalgia or else a kind of neutered agnosticism about the lessons of the past, leading them to patronize Buckle for his demonstration of what was, Empson agreed with Buckle (in the face of contemporary professional historical opinion), a decisive progressive step in the increasing civilization of Europe. The sturdy Victorian rationalist had, Empson believed, grasped a truth that his scholarly descendants a century later had lost sight of.
In addition, the passage suggests a brief intellectual genealogy for part of Empson’s own mind. The undergraduate of fashionably advanced opinions in the science-animated Cambridge of the 1920s reads Aldous Huxley, the very emblem of progressive thought among the young at the time (the importance of Empson’s early reading of Huxley is attested at various points in his writing, ranging from his admiration for Antic Hay in 1928 to his championing of The Perennial Philosophy in the mid-1960s35). Huxley’s character reads Buckle, a byword, even among Victorians inclined to optimistic readings of the universe, for having the most unrelentingly intellectualist (and thus anti-religious) theory of progress of them all. The older Empson then reads the edition by Robertson, himself a didactic popular historian (termed by Eliot—see Chapter 1—a Whig) who was a pillar of turn-of-the-century rationalism. These names bespeak an intellectual milieu confident in the powers of the human mind, especially as methodized by science, to make advances by identifying and eliminating error. And chief among these errors, a relic of an earlier and more benighted stage of European history, was belief in Christianity.
Insofar as a historical story can be intermittently glimpsed through the cannon-smoke of Milton’s God, it bears no relation to ‘the loss of the organic community’ or ‘the rise of capitalism’, or any of the other meta-historical accounts familiar from the literary criticism of the mid-century. The premise of Empson’s story is, as he puts it, the ‘tragedy that Europe got saddled with such a very corrupting religion’. His assessment of Milton’s Paradise Lost is set within this framework:
The poem really does survey the Western half of civilization and express the conflict which arose from the introduction of Christianity into this great area. … The root of [Milton’s] power is that he could accept and express a downright horrible conception of God and yet keep somehow alive, underneath it, all the breadth and generosity, the welcome to every noble pleasure, which had been prominent in European history just before his time.36
It is possible to hear an almost Nietzschean sentiment at work in this last sentence, an invocation of the larger, essentially aristocratic code of living that had its roots in ancient paganism, a more generous ethic that had not been altogether eliminated by the moralizing ressentiment at the core of Christianity. But the chronology hinted at here is a reminder that Empson always seems especially exercised by the appallingness of Protestant Christianity, for all his antipathy to the fanaticism and persecution endemic to the medieval Catholic form of the religion. After all, ‘just before’ Milton’s time was hardly the heyday in Europe of a creed of Classical hedonism, though it may have been a period, in England at least, when aristocratic values were not yet wholly subordinated to the censoriousness of righteous Puritanism.
In pursuing the question of Empson’s wider historical allegiances, I want to return to the slightly tetchy response he wrote a few years later, in 1967, to what had actually been a very appreciative and generous assessment of his work by the American scholar Roger Sale, which I quoted earlier. Empson complained that Sale treated him as ‘not being such a fool as to believe in history, but just cracking jokes about it’, and he grumbled that such a dismissive attitude towards history was one of Eliot’s unfortunate legacies. Empson then went on (in the passage also cited earlier about the situation he encountered on his return to England in 1952 after some years teaching in China):
A history of some sort had to be fubbed up to support [Eliot’s] ‘tradition’, but was sure to fall down at a touch. … Of course a lot of professional historians became neo-historians to suit this fashion, but they are getting a bit ashamed of it. The Whig Interpretation of History is the correct one, and it is remarkable that the book given that title offers no single reason to think otherwise, being merely a fashion report of some High Table giggles. Anything I print about the past, ignorant as I know myself to be, is intended as real truth about the past which I think worth fighting over.37
One of Empson’s own favoured terms of praise is ‘sturdy’, and we cannot help but be struck by the sturdy liberalism of this passage. The movement of his mind through these sentences says a lot about where he saw himself in terms of contemporary cultural politics. Eliot’s attempt to ‘fub up’ a history to underwrite his poetics is what starts him off, with Empson moving on to register his sense that on his return to England in 1952 he found this sort of Eliotic history to be dominant, at least in Eng Lit circles. Counterposing ‘the opinions I was taught at school’ bears its own impish intent, but also has the effect of suggesting that once upon a time an alternative historical story was simply a common possession, ‘what every schoolboy knew’ (at least, every precocious schoolboy who had been at Winchester in the early 1920s). One would like to know more about the ‘evidence’ he had more recently ‘looked into’ to confirm the truth of these opinions: but, however sceptical we may be on this point, we register that Empson wishes us to believe that he has done a good deal of reading in the latest authorities.
Not that some of those authorities weren’t guilty of falling in behind cultural fashion. A ‘neo-historian’, presumably, is someone who endorses the meta-historical cultural declinism associated with Eliot, a phrase suggesting a deliberate parallel to ‘neo-Christian’, one of Empson’s favoured terms of abuse. And then comes the ringingly sturdy assertion that ‘the Whig Interpretation of History is the correct one’. Since he goes on to refer, however dismissively, to Butterfield’s book, we have to consider the sense in which he uses this phrase. The original ‘Whig interpretation’, of course, was a story, parliamentarian rather than royalist in its allegiances, about the continuity of English constitutional development from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, in which liberty, as the hallowed phrase had it, ‘broadened down from precedent to precedent’. As I suggested in the Introduction, by the end of the nineteenth century this sense had undergone some expansion to become a story of political and moral progress more generally, albeit with English liberties still at its heart. In his book, Butterfield had extended this sense much further still to refer to any narrative in which the earlier stages of the story are understood in terms of their contribution to the later (desirable) outcome. It seems pretty clear that it was the moderately expanded historical sense, rather than either the narrower original sense or Butterfield’s greatly-expanded figurative sense, that Empson was declaring allegiance to. His scorn for Butterfield’s book, published a year after Seven Types, suggests he was unmoved by the larger methodological concern that animates that famous polemic, finding in its (admittedly skimpy) analysis no reason to change his mind about the traditional story of progress. And that story still had, for Empson, its militant purchase on the present: it was a story, as he puts it, ‘worth fighting for’.
Another way to draw out Empson’s distinctiveness when compared to his immediate critical peers is by observing the relative unimportance to him of Matthew Arnold’s literary and cultural criticism. The mantle of Arnold sat heavily on the shoulders of Eliot, Richards, and Leavis and constrained their movements. Less burdened by anxieties about cultural decline, Empson was less drawn to the idea of literature’s secular mission (of course, in time Eliot, Richards, and Leavis each distanced themselves from the Arnoldian conception, but even so the struggle had a formative influence on them all).38 Indeed, Empson was not, at bottom, close to Arnold even on the topic on which they seemed at first sight to concur—namely, the enormous importance of Puritanism in English life. Where Arnold saw the legacies of Puritanism and Benthamism as the twin faces of English philistinism, both equally in need of the corrective power of culture, Empson took Benthamism to be the enemy of Puritanism, the properly rationalist antidote to the latter’s malign mixture of moralism and superstition.
As I suggested earlier, it may be hard to recall now just how much literary discussion in mid-twentieth-century Britain took place within a framework derived from Eliot’s throwaway remarks about the seventeenth century’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Empson, of course, was very much part of this milieu intellectually and socially, and Eliot is undoubtedly a brooding presence for him in his early work—or, as he put it: ‘I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him.’39 But, exceptionally, Empson did not structure his historical assumptions around the Eliotic scheme, and he became more overtly hostile to it as he grew older. As he put it, with characteristic downrightness, in a letter late in life: ‘I don’t believe, and never have believed, that a social and literary “dissociation of sensibility” ever occurred. I don’t even believe that everything is getting worse and worse. … I think a great deal of progress has gone on since then, pretty steadily.’40 Empson’s sturdy rationalism may not appeal to all later readers, but it should at least be recognized as part of a consciously and pervasively historical understanding—one resting on a distinctive method of linguistic analysis to which, even now, historians might with profit pay closer attention.