Quick, quick.—Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet—throw Roderick Random into the closet—put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man—cram Ovid behind the bolster—there—put The Man of Feeling into your pocket—so, so—now lay Mrs Chapone in sight, and leave Fordyce’s Sermons open on the table.
SHERIDAN
Aristotle often begins his argument with what he calls an Isagoge, a collection of instances which is not, if I understand the matter, intended (like Mill’s induction) to prove a general principle, but merely to open our eyes to it. The following instances are meant to form such an isagoge.
1. Not many years ago a lady whose studies I was attempting to supervise, propounded a literary theory of general application which I found myself unable to accept. Applying the elenchus after my fashion I inquired whether her theory would cover The Tale of Peter Rabbit. After a silence of some minutes, she asked me if I thought there was any use in introducing such an example into a serious literary discussion. I replied that Peter Rabbit was a book and certainly not so bad a book that it could be left outside the classification ‘literature’. The lady, who is as honest as she is learned (and whom I mention here with all respect), was not prepared to call Peter Rabbit ‘bad’. ‘Trivial’ was the word she finally fixed on. But she was quite sure that doctrines about ‘literature’ need not apply to it.
2. I have heard of a preparatory school where the library regulations divide the contents of the library into two classes: Good Books and Books. The boys are allowed to take out two Good Books for every one Book. To read a Good Book is meritorious, to read a Book only tolerable. At the same time, those responsible for the regulations have hesitated to label as ‘bad’ the books which they thus contrast with the ‘good’.
3. I have heard the Head of a great college* praise the novels of Anthony Hope and conclude by declaring with enthusiasm, ‘They are the best “bad” books I’ve ever read.’ Here, it will be seen, the word ‘bad’ is actually used but used in a sense which admits, inside the class Bad, distinctions of good, better, and best.
4. I have often heard—and who has not?—a plain man praise even to rapture the delightful merits of some favourite story and end with the humble reservation, ‘Of course, I know it’s not real literature.’
I trust that these four instances are already making clear to you what it is I want to discuss. In all of them we see a distinction made between two kinds of book, to the one of which a certain honour is attached, and to the other a certain note of ignominy. Yet in spite of this there is a reluctance to identify this distinction with the plain distinctions of good from bad or better from worse. Those who uphold the distinction prefer to call the inferior class popular, common, commercial, cheap, trashy, or the like, and the superior class literary, classical, serious, or artistic. In our own time the two odious adjectives Lowbrow and Highbrow have been introduced as the names of the two classes and bid fair to oust all their rivals. There will also be noticed in the first, third, and fourth of my instances a suggestion that the lowbrow works are so different in kind from the highbrow that they have a goodness and badness of their own, a servile virtue and servile vice peculiar to themselves, that they are to be judged by peculiar standards, and that what is said of literature simpliciter is not said of them.
Now it seems to me that in this popular distinction there is some confusion between degrees and kinds of merit. If the lowbrow books are really a special kind of book I do not see how they can be inferior to the high. You cannot be beaten by a man unless you enter the same competition with him, nor overtaken by a man (as Chesterton observes) unless you both run in the same direction. At present the distinction is certainly used to allow us the satisfaction of despising certain authors and readers without imposing on us the labour of showing that they are bad. It is also used, I find, to allow people to enjoy lowbrow art without gratitude on the one hand or shame on the other, and those who would hesitate to say, ‘Let’s go and see something bad’ will cheerfully say ‘Let’s go to a lowbrow film.’ The whole distinction seems to be made in order to enable us to have it both ways.
In the following paper I propose two questions. (1) Is the class of lowbrow books (or ‘books’ simply as at the Preparatory School) really the class of bad books? (2) If not, is the distinction useful in some other way?1
As soon as we approach the first question we notice that even if all the lowbrow books—which I am going to call Class A—are in fact bad, even so the distinction between lowbrow and highbrow—or between class A and class B—will not coincide with the distinction between bad books and good books, for the very obvious reason that class B contains bad books too. Gorbuduc and Glover’s Leonidas and Dyer’s Fleece, Gabriel Harvey’s hexameters and Johnson’s Irene, Tennyson’s tragedies and Southey’s epics—all these are classical enough, serious enough, and literary enough, in all conscience. If they entered the school library it would certainly be as Good Books, not as Books. And it will hardly be denied that some of them are bad. In fact, as soon as we look at the question from this point of view, it becomes apparent that class A is not simply the class of bad books. Mere failure does not infallibly give the right of entry to it. If all the books in it are bad it must be with some special sort of badness—an A badness.
But are they all bad? As I have not read the novels of Anthony Hope, I cannot, though my third instance invites me, select them for analysis; but perhaps Rider Haggard will do as well, for his books are certainly in the A class and, in my opinion, some of them are good—are therefore ‘good “bad” books’ as the Head of that college would say. And of his books I select She. If I ask myself why it is that I have more than once read She with enjoyment, I find that there is every reason why I should have done so. In the first place the story makes an excellent approach; the central theme is suffered, in the first chapters, to woo us across great distances of space and time. What we are presently to see at close quarters is seen at first, as it were, through the wrong end of the telescope. This is a fine exercise in the art of alluring—you may see the same thing at work in the opening of the Utopia, in the second act of Prometheus Unbound, and in the early books of the Odyssey. In the second place it is a quest story, which is an attractive thing. And the object of the quest combines two strong appeals—it is the ‘fountain of youth’ theme and the princesse lointaine in one. Finally, the withdrawal or conclusion, which is always the difficulty in quest stories, is effected by unexpected means which are nevertheless, on the author’s suppositions, sufficiently plausible. In the conduct of the story the detail is mostly convincing. The characters who are meant to be amiable are amiable and those who are meant to be sinister are sinister. The goodness of She is grounded, as firmly as that of any book whatever, on the fundamental laws of the imagination. But there is badness in it as well as goodness. Two things deter us from regarding it as a quite satisfactory romance. One of them is the continuous poverty of the style, by which, of course, I do not mean any failure to conform to certain a priori rules, but rather a sloth or incompetence of writing whereby the author is content always with a vague approximation to the emotion, the reflection, or the image he intends, so that a certain smudging and banality is spread over all. The other fault is the shallowness and folly of the things put into the mouth of She herself and offered us for wisdom. That She, in her secular loneliness, should have become a sage, is very proper, and indeed essential to Haggard’s story, but Haggard has not himself the wisdom wherewith to supply her. A poet of Dante’s depth could have given her things really wise to say; a poet of Shakespeare’s address would have made us believe in her wisdom without committing himself.
If my analysis is correct, She is not a ‘good “bad” book’ in the sense of being a good specimen of a bad kind; it is simply good and bad, like many other books, in the sense that it is good in some respects and bad in others. And those who have read it with enjoyment have been enjoying real literary merits, and merits which it shares with the Odyssey or The Life and Death of Jason. Certainly, it is not a very good book, but since its vices are not sufficient to overwhelm its virtues (as the experience of many wiser readers than I has proved) it is better, say, than Leonidas or the Epic of Hades. In other words, this book of the A class is better than some books of the B class. It is better by every test; it shows more skill in the author and produces more pleasure in the reader; it is more in touch with the permanent nature of our imagination; it leaves those who have read it richer. And with this, the attempt to identify the classes A and B with the classes bad and good or worse and better has surely collapsed.2
We must now cast about for some other possible definition of the two classes; and it comes at once into my mind that the lady in my first instance ruled Peter Rabbit out as ‘trivial’. Perhaps the A class consists of trivial, and the B class of grave, or weighty, or momentous books. I think that those who use the A–B antithesis very often have something of this sort in their mind, but it is difficult to fix the exact sense of any of the words they use to express it. It is clear that the contrast cannot be simply between comic and serious, for then the stories in our Parish Magazine would be labelled B and Le Misanthrope, A. It might be argued, no doubt, that Molière’s play, though comic, is momentous as touching life at many points and dealing with the depths of our nature, and this might furnish the ground for a restatement of the distinction—B books being ‘momentous’ in the sense just suggested, while A books touch us only superficially, or concern only highly specialized areas of our consciousness. But this would make The Importance of Being Earnest an A. Nor is it clear that all the books already in the A class are thus superficial. They are often accused of being ‘sentimental’; and this charge, on inspection, often conceals an admission that their appeal is to emotions very basic and universal—to the same emotions that are concerned in great tragedies. Even Dr Richard’s Boosey Ballad,* which is not only A but bad simply, has a theme that Petrarch might not have disdained. Indeed, the more I look into it the more I am convinced that any contrast of weighty and frivolous, solid and slight, deep and shallow, must cut right across the A and B distinction. How many of the most perfect things are, after all, trifles! The weighty and frivolous are kinds of literature, and in each kind we shall find good A’s, bad A’s, good B’s, and bad B’s. This is not what we are looking for.
Among the lowbrows themselves I find that the distinction is often based on style. When the plain man confesses that the books he delights in are not ‘real Literature’ he will often, if pressed, explain this by saying that they ‘haven’t got style’ or ‘style and all that’. And when the plain man has been captured and made into a pathetically willing and bewildered university student he will sometimes praise the great works which he has dutifully read and not enjoyed, for the excellence of their style. He has missed the jokes in the comedy, remained unmoved by the tragedy, failed to respond to the suggestions of the lyric, and found the episodes of the romance uninteresting; utterly at a loss to explain the value traditionally set on what has proved to him so tedious, he hands it over to the thing he knows least about, to a mysterious entity called Style, which is to him merely what occult forces were to the old scientists—an asylum ignorantiae. He does so because he has a radically false conception of style. He thinks of it not as the linguistic means by which the writer produces whatever results he desires but as a sort of extra—an uncovenanted pedantry tacked on to the book proper, to gratify some specifically ‘literary’ or ‘critical’ taste which has nothing to do with the ordinary pleasures of the imagination. It is for him a meaningless addition which, by a convention, gives access to a higher rank—like the letters Esq. after a man’s name on an envelope. Now it must be confessed that the highbrows sometimes talk of style in a way which gives their weaker brethren some excuse for such misconceptions; but I think that most of them, in a cool hour, would admit that ‘Style’, in the sense in which the lowbrow uses the word, does not exist. When we say that the descriptions of country in She are marred by their deficiency of style, we do not mean (as the ignorant suppose) that they are good as descriptions but lacking in some abstractly ‘literary’ and undescriptive grace which might have been superadded; we mean that they are imperfect descriptions; and we call their imperfection ‘stylistic’ because it is due not to faults in the author’s conception but to his careless or insensitive language. A better choice of epithets, and those distant mountains would have stood out sharper on the horizon; a well chosen metaphor, and the whole picture, now dimly discerned through seas of wasteful words, would have printed itself for ever on the inner eye; a nobler rhythm, and the sense of space and movement would have been given us, not left, as it now is, for us to infer. Turn from She to almost any page in Eōthen, and you will soon see what style in a descriptive passage means. There is no class of books which can be ‘good in their own way’ without bothering about style. There are books in which what the author is saying imperfectly, partly failing to say, is sufficiently interesting to keep us reading in spite of his failure. Though he has done only half his work, we are content to do some of it for him. Such books are books defective in style. And they do not come only in class A. Scott, Dickens, Byron, Spenser, Alanus, and Apuleius have detestable faults of style, but they are usually put in class B. St Paul, despite some passages of striking beauty, seems to me to write badly, but he is hardly an A; and I have found in the style of Donne, Chapman, Meredith, Saintsbury, and others, obstacles to the enjoyment of what they have to give me as great as those I find in Rider Haggard. It is not important here that any reader should agree with the instances I am choosing; what matters is the recognition that badness of style (like triviality) will be found in B books. It cannot be made the basis of a dichotomy between two kinds of book.
Another common way of using the distinction tends to fix on ‘popular’ as the best adjective for class A. ‘Popular’ art is supposed to aim at mere entertainment, while ‘real’ or ‘serious’ art aims at some specifically ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ or even ‘spiritual’ satisfaction. This is an attractive view because it would give those who hold it a ground for maintaining that popular literature has its own good and bad, according to its own rules, distinct from those of Literature proper. The popular novel aiming only at passing the reader’s time, the popular comedy content to raise a laugh, and be forgotten, the popular tragedy which only wants to give us ‘a good cry’, would have their low, separate, legitimate places. And since I observe that many of my highest-browed acquaintances spend much of their time in talking of the vulgarity of popular art, and therefore must know it well, and could not have acquired that knowledge unless they enjoyed it, I must assume that they would welcome a theory which justified them in drinking freely of that fountain without forfeiting their superiority. But there is a troublesome difficulty in this form of the distinction. We know, without going to look, that the Good Books in that preparatory school library would include the novels of Scott and Dickens. But these, in their own day, were popular entertainment, best sellers. Some of the contemporary highbrows may retort that they ought never to have been allowed into the B class. I do not agree, but let us concede it. Let us even concede the same about Scott’s poems, and about Byron, which were also once A’s and are now B’s. But what of Fielding, of Malory, of Shakespeare and all his colleagues? Of the metrical romances? Of Ovid, scribbled on the walls at Pompeii? What of Molière, finding the best judge of his work in the old woman who never failed to laugh in the same place as the audience—the audience whom he wrote to please? What, in another art, of Mozart’s operas? It is not sufficient to say that a work designed for the popular market may sometimes, by a happy freak, outshoot its mark. The thing has happened too often to be called a freak. What survives from most ages is chiefly either the work that had some religious or national appeal, or else the popular, commercial work produced for entertainment. I say ‘chiefly’ because the work of the ‘pure’ artists is not always ephemeral; a little, a very little, of it survives. But the great mass of literature which now fills class B is the work of men who wrote either piously, to edify their fellows, or commercially, to earn their living by ‘giving the public what it wanted’.
This leads to the very interesting conclusion that the B’s of one age have most often been the A’s of another. We are sometimes warned by the supporters of difficult new movements in literature not to imitate our fathers in stoning the prophets; those who dislike Pound or Joyce are told ‘so you would have disliked Wordsworth and Shelley if you had lived then’. The warning may be useful, but clearly it should be supplemented by another—‘Beware how you scorn the best sellers of today; they may be classics for the intelligentsia of the Twenty-Third Century.’
If our age is known to posterity not as that of Eliot and Auden but as that of Buchan and Wodehouse (and stranger things have come to pass), Buchan and Wodehouse will then be B’s and little boys will get good marks for reading them. Shakespeare and Scott, once A’s, are now B’s. If we could find what it is that the mere passage of time does to a book, we should have found out something about the real nature of the A and B distinction. And surely, it is obvious that what time does to a book is to make it difficult. There are indeed other operations of time. It makes a book more widely known or spreads on it that rich patina we now enjoy in Virgil or Malory; but neither of these would furnish the basis for a B class since this is to include contemporary books as well. We want a quality which some books have at once but which mere time can confer on books that originally lacked it; and difficulty seems to be the quality required. It would be amusing if difficulty turned out to be the real criterion of Literature, Good Books, or classics—if a comedy which was mere commercial art as long as every one could see the jokes became aesthetic and spiritual as soon as you need commentators to explain them. Yet I think this comes much nearer to the ground of the distinction actually made than any of the hypotheses we have yet discussed.
A distinction simply between easy and difficult books is a reasonable one; and it is certainly better to be able to enjoy both kinds than to be limited to the easy. A man who has hitherto relished only the easy and now learns to relish the difficult as well, may properly be said to have improved his taste, for enlargement, other things being equal, is improvement. But there is a great difference between improvement in this sense—the mere enlargement of a taste which may already have been perfectly good within its own limits—and improvement in the sense of correction or of conversion from the bad to the good. There is also a great difference between the easy and the bad. No book can be bad because it is easy or good because it is hard: a book may be bad because it is hard. If ease and difficulty is the real anti-thesis behind the A and B distinction, then the distinction is being widely misused and from the true premise ‘it is better to advance to the difficult books (without leaving the easy ones) if you can’ some draw the false conclusions that the difficult books are better and that you can advance to them only by leaving the easy ones behind. We shall see presently the psychological causes of this error.
Closely connected with this form of the distinction is that other which makes ‘vulgarity’ the criterion of an A book. It might be sufficient in answer to this to inquire what sense can possibly be given to the word Vulgar which will apply to the work of Beatrix Potter, John Buchan, George Birmingham, P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Somerville and Ross’, and a dozen more writers of the A class. But Vulgar is a word so difficult and, in our days, so ubiquitous that perhaps we should examine it more closely. It seems to me to have two principal meanings. In its first sense it is a purely privative term meaning ‘not refined’, ‘not subtle or delicate or many-sided’. What is vulgar in this sense (cf. ‘the vulgar tongue’) may be perfectly good: to lack refinement or subtlety when refinement or subtlety are not required is no blemish. Thus the line
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty3
is, in its context, good and yet ‘vulgar’ because it expresses a conception of love neither elevated nor discriminating, and this is all that the song requires. The very same line would be vulgar in a bad sense if any one were absurd enough to put it into the mouth of Launcelot addressing Guinevere after he has broken the bars or Zeus addressing Danae as he merges from the shower of gold. From this point of view we might admit that all A literature is and ought to be irreproachably ‘vulgar’. It ought to deal strongly and simply with strong, simple emotions: the directness, the unelaborate, downright portraiture of easily recognizable realities in their familiar aspects, will not be a fault unless it pretends to be something else. If it essays, without delicacy, that which demands delicacy, it will then become faultily vulgar; but the whole art of good A writers stands upon not doing so. But there is a second sense of Vulgar; it may be used to mean something essentially and, in the long run, morally, bad: the base, the mean, the ignoble. These terms themselves are ambiguous, but perhaps an example will make the matter clear. The best instance I know of Vulgarity in this evil sense occurs in Chapman’s Iliad. Homer has said of the old men on the wall,
Οἱ δ’ ὡς οὖν εἴδονθ ‘Ελένην ἐπὶ πύργον ἰοῦσαν,
ἦκα πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἔπεα πτερόεντ’ ἀγόρευον.4
Chapman translates
when they sawe the powre
Of beautie, in the Queene ascend; euen those cold-spirited Peeres,
Those wise, and almost withered men, found this heate in their yeares,
That they were forc’t (though whispering) to say, &c.5
I do not mean, of course, that the suggestion of senile eroticism which Chapman has foisted on the original is in itself and necessarily vulgar; a man might make good lines, whether comic or tragic, even on this subject. But to have let it creep in here of all places, to be unaware of gulfs of difference between this and anything Homer need be supposed to have meant, argues an ungentle heart and a bestial ignorance of the whole hierarchy of human feelings. It is something more than lack of delicacy where delicacy is required (though of course it is that too); it is a fatal, unconscious welcome held out to the lower when the lower has offered to usurp the place of the higher, ‘a downward appetite to mix with mud’. And we cannot here avoid such words as Lower and Higher, for Vulgar, in its deeper sense, is really a term of moral reproof. It has nothing to do with the distinction of popular and classic. It is low hearts and not low brows that are vulgar.*
We have now made a fairly determined effort to find some useful meaning for the separation of literature into the two classes of classical and popular, Good Books and Books, literary and commercial, highbrow and lowbrow, and we have failed. In fact, the distinction rests upon a confusion between degrees of merit and differences of kind. Our map of literature has been made to look like an examination list—a single column of names with a horizontal line drawn across it, the honour candidates above that line, and the pass candidates below it. But we ought rather to have a whole series of vertical lines representing different kinds of work, and an almost infinite series of horizontal lines crossing these to represent the different degrees of goodness in each kind. Thus ‘Simple Adventure Story’ is a vertical line with the Odyssey at the top and Edgar Wallace at the bottom; Rider Haggard, R. L. Stevenson, Scott, William Morris will be placed on horizontal lines crossing ‘Adventure Story’ at such heights as we may decide. ‘Psychological Story’ is a separate column, with its own top (Tolstoy or another) and its own bottom. With such a picture in our minds we should avoid the confusion of those who say to a boy, ‘You should not read trash like King Solomon’s Mines. Try Meredith.’ Such an exhortation urges him at once to move horizontally, from one kind to another, and vertically, from the less good to the better. But you are also doing something worse; you are instilling into his mind a notion (often henceforward indelible) that the pleasure he already has in not very good books is of a quite different nature from anything he is to expect in ‘real literature’—that the latter is something to be read ‘in school’, an affair of marks and School Certificates and conceit and self-improvement.
I believe that this misconception is likely to grow and to be one day no longer confined to schoolboys. There are many circumstances which encourage it. Until quite modern times the reading of imaginative literature in a man’s own tongue was not regarded as meritorious. The great authors of the past wrote to entertain the leisure of their adult contemporaries, and a man who cared for literature needed no spur and expected no good conduct marks for sitting down to the food provided for him. Boys at school were taught to read Latin and Greek poetry by the birch, and discovered the English poets as accidentally and naturally as they now discover the local cinema. Most of my own generation, and many, I hope, of yours, tumbled into literature in that fashion. Of each of us some great poet made a rape when we still wore Eton collars. Shall we be thought immodest if we claim that most of the books we loved from the first were good books and our earliest loves are still unrepented? If so, that very fact bears witness to the novelty of the modern situation; to us, the claim that we have always liked Keats is no prouder than the claim that we have always liked bacon and eggs.
For there are changes afoot. The growth of English Schools at Universities, the School Certificate, and the Educational Ladder—all excellent things—may yet produce unexpected results. I foresee the growth of a new race of readers and critics to whom, from the very outset, good literature will be an accomplishment rather than a delight,6 and who will always feel, beneath the acquired taste, the backward tug of something else which they feel merit in resisting. Such people will not be content to say that some books are bad or not very good; they will make a special class of ‘lowbrow’ art which is to be vilified, mocked, quarantined, and sometimes (when they are sick or tired) enjoyed. They will be sure that what is popular must always be bad, thus assuming that human taste is naturally wrong, that it needs not only improvement and development but veritable conversion. For them a good critic will be, as the theologians say, essentially a ‘twice-born’ critic, one who is regenerate and washed from his Original Taste. They will have no conception, because they have had no experience, of spontaneous delight in excellence. Their ‘good’ taste will have been acquired by the sweat of their brows, its acquisition will often (and legitimately) have coincided with advancement in the social and economic scale, and they will hold it with uneasy intensity. As they will be contemptuous of popular books, so they will be naïvely tolerant of dullness and difficulty in any quack or sloven who comes before them with lofty pretensions; all literature having been as hard to them as that, so much an acquired taste, they will not see the difference. They will be angry with a true lover of literature who does not take pains to unravel the latest poetical puzzle, and call him a dilettante. Having obtained the freedom of Parnassus at a great price, they will be unable to endure the nonchalance of those who were free-born.
The cure for this is not to remove the Educational Ladder, the English Schools, nor the Certificate examinations. If the danger is recognized it can be combated by teaching and by criticism at every point. Those in the predicament I have described can combat it in themselves if they will. A very little attention will soon discover in any ‘lowbrow’ book what is really good and really bad, and will show us the very same kinds of goodness and badness in books that are lowbrow. A little patience, a little humility, and all will be well. It is the vanity of new acquisitions and the lazy desire for over-simplification which threatens to impound a hundred books, some irredeemably bad, some excellently good, in a class which can be dismissed from criticism. A man ought not to be ashamed of reading a good book because it is simple and popular, and he ought not to condone the faults of a bad book because it is simple and popular. He should be able to say (altering the names to suit his own judgement), ‘I read Buchan and Eliot for the same reason, because I think them good; I leave Edgar Wallace and Ezra Pound unread for the same reason, because I think them bad.’ It is by no means for the protection of bad books that I wish the distinction of high- and lowbrow abolished. That distinction itself protects bad books. As it robs excellent A books of deserved praise, it teaches its victims to tolerate bad A books. Why was Dr Richards reading a bad book when he had influenza?* Was it not that in his illness he needed an easy book, and having lumped all easy books together as contemptible, he made no further distinctions? That is the usual result of having a pariah class. Slavery, while depressing the slave of noble character, allows the vile slave liberties never conceded to the free servant. Those who most despise the class from which prostitutes are recruited are not necessarily those who abstain from fornication. And indeed, I am often shocked at what slips out sometimes about the recreational reading, the off-duty intellectual amusements, of those who are sternest in their contempt for popular art and demand least pleasure of the art they approve.*