On Stories
Page 13
But there is a profound misunderstanding here. These well-meaning educationalists are quite right in thinking that literary appreciation is a delicate thing. What they do not seem to see is that for this very reason elementary examinations on literary subjects ought to confine themselves to just those dry and factual questions which are so often ridiculed. The questions were never supposed to test appreciation; the idea was to find out whether the boy had read his books. It was the reading, not the being examined, which was expected to do him good. And this, so far from being a defect in such examinations is just what renders them useful or even tolerable.
Let us take an example from a higher sphere. A plain, factual examination in Scripture is, at the very worst, a harmless affair. But who could endure an examination which tried to find out whether the candidates were ‘saved’ and demanded 60 per cent for a Credit Pass in Sanctity? The situation in literary subjects bears a certain analogy to this. Tell the boy to ‘mug up’ a book and then set questions to find out whether he has done so. At best, he may have learned (and, best of all, unconsciously) to enjoy a great poem. At second best he has done an honest piece of work and exercised his memory and reason. At worst, we have done him no harm: have not pawed and dabbled in his soul, have not taught him to be a prig or a hypocrite. But an elementary examination which attempts to assess ‘the adventures of the soul among books’ is a dangerous thing. What obsequious boys, if encouraged, will try to manufacture, and clever ones can ape, and shy ones will conceal, what dies at the touch of venality, is called to come forward and perform, to exhibit itself, at that very age when its timid, half-conscious stirrings can least endure such self-consciousness.
How easily such false reverence can defeat itself may be seen in the Norwood Report.1 The makers of that Report want external examinations in English to be abolished at schools. Their reason is that literature is such a ‘sensitive and elusive thing’ that these examinations touch only its ‘coarse fringe’. If they stopped here, though I fail to see why the coarsest part of a thing should be least touched, I might have some sympathy with them. There is a good deal to be said for excluding literature from school curricula altogether. I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be to forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you. But that is not at all what the Report intends. It wants literary appreciation to be taught. It even wants the teaching to be tested: but not by outsiders. ‘The teacher’s success’, it says, ‘can be gauged by himself or by one of his immediate colleagues who knows him well.’
Something like examination is, then, to continue. The two reforms are (a) that it should deal with the ‘sensitive and elusive’ core, instead of the ‘coarse fringe’ (b) that it must be all in the family, so to speak. The masters are to ‘gauge’ their own success or one another’s success. I am quite at a loss to understand what we should hope from the second novelty. The whole purpose of external examinations in any subject is to get an impartial criticism from a learned outsider who can have no prejudices either about the boys or about the teachers. In direct opposition to this the Norwood Report desires as an examiner not only the teacher’s colleague, but a colleague ‘who knows him well’. I suppose this must be connected with the fact that the subject is ‘sensitive and elusive’. But I can’t, for the life of me, see how. They cannot mean that because the subject is specially unamenable to objective tests it should therefore (alone of all subjects) be tested under conditions which make objectivity ideally difficult. Mr A (just down from reading English with Dr Leavis at Cambridge) pours out his personality—in pure non-factual Appreciation to his form. The naughty boys rag and the ‘good’ boys lap it all up and reproduce it. There is a result sufficiently difficult for anyone to judge objectively. But the solution is to hand judgement over to Mr B who has been living cheek by jowl with Mr A for thirteen weeks and who learned his kind of Appreciation from W. P. Ker at London. And meanwhile no one has found out whether the boys actually understand the words the author wrote, for that is only the ‘coarse fringe’. Yet that could have been tested with tolerable accuracy by any number of people and the boys would have been spared doing spiritual gymnastics under their examiners’ eyes. The old kind of examination was better.
Of course we meet many people who explain to us that they would by now have been great readers of poetry if it had not been ‘spoiled for them’ at school by ‘doing’ it for examinations of the old kind. It is theoretically possible. Perhaps they would by now have been saints if no one had ever examined them in Scripture. Perhaps they would have been strategists or heroes if they had never been put into the school O.T.C. It may be so: but why should we believe that it is. We have only their word for it; and how do they know?
XVII
PERIOD CRITICISM
Opening The Listener a few days ago I came upon an article on Chesterton by Mr James Stephens—an article which seemed to me ungenerous and even unjust.1 There were two main charges made against Chesterton; the one, that he was too public (for in Mr Stephens’s view poetry is a very private affair) and the other, that he was ‘dated’. The first need not, perhaps, be discussed here at very great length. Mr Stephens and I find ourselves on opposite sides of a very well-known fence, and Mr Stephens’s side is, I must confess, the popular one at present. It still seems to me that the burden of proof rests on those who describe as ‘private’ compositions which their authors take pains to have multiplied by print and which are advertised and exposed for sale in shops. It is an odd method of securing privacy. But this question can wait. It certainly would not have worried Chesterton. Nor would the maxim that any poetry which is immediately and widely acceptable (like that of Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Tennyson) must be merely ‘peasant’ poetry have offended a man who desired nothing so much as the restoration of the peasantry. But the question of ‘dating’ remains.
It is very difficult here to resist turning the tables, to ask what writer smells more unmistakably of a particular period than Mr Stephens himself. That peculiar mixture of mythology and theosophy—Pan and Aengus, leprechauns and angels, re-incarnation and the sorrows of Deirdre—if this does not carry a man back into the world of Lady Gregory, A.E., the middle Yeats, and even Mr Algernon Blackwood, then the word period really has no meaning. Hardly any book written in our century would be so nearly dated by internal evidence as The Crock of Gold.2 Even Mr Stephens’s curious suggestion that detective stories (of which Chesterton was notoriously guilty) somehow helped to produce the first German war could be retorted. It would be just as plausible to trace the Nazi ideology to the orgiastic elements in Mr Stephens’s own work; to the cult of Pan, the revolt against reason (symbolised by the Philosopher’s journey, imprisonment, and rescue), or the figure of the Uglist Man. And it might easily be maintained that the theological background of Chesterton’s imaginative books has dated a good deal less than the blend of Celtic Twilight and serious occultism (Yeats claimed to be a practising magician) which we cannot help surmising for Mr Stephens.
But though this would be easy it would not be worth doing. To prove that Mr Stephens had dated would not be to prove that Chesterton was perennial. And there is, for me, another reason for not answering Mr Stephens with this argumentum ad hominem. I still like Mr Stephens’s books. He holds in my private pantheon a place inferior to Chesterton’s but quite as secure. It is inferior because the proportion of dead wood in The Crock of Gold, The Demi-Gods, and Here Are Ladies (there is no dead wood in Deirdre) seems to me higher than in the White Horse, The Man Who Was Thursday, or The Flying Inn.3 I think the long paragraphs of what used, at Boston, to be called ‘Transcendentalism’ which we find in Mr Stephens are bad, sometimes even nonsensical. But then they always were bad: dates have nothing to do with it. On the other hand the gigantic (and, in the proper sense, Rabelaisian) comic effects—the arrest of the Philosopher or the postmortal adventures of O’Brien and the threepenny bit
—are inexhaustible. So is the character of that admirable picaro Patsy MacCann. So is the Ass. So is the painting of nature; the trees that stood holding their leaves tightly in the wind, or the crow that said ‘I’m the devil of a crow’. I cannot give up Mr Stephens. If anyone writes a silly, spiteful article to say that Mr Stephens was only a ‘period’ talent, I will fight on that issue as long as there is a drop of ink in my pen.
The truth is that the whole criticism which turns on dates and periods, as if age-groups were the proper classification of readers, is confused and even vulgar. (I do not mean that Mr Stephens is vulgar. A man who is not a vulgar man may do a vulgar thing: you will find this explained in Aristotle’s Ethics.) It is vulgar because it appeals to the desire to be up to date: a desire only fit for dressmakers. It is confused because it lumps together the different ways in which a man can be ‘of his period’.
A man may be of his period in the negative sense. That is to say he may deal with things which are of no permanent interest but only seemed to be of interest because of some temporary fashion. Thus Herbert’s poems in the shape of altars and crosses are ‘dated’; thus, perhaps, the occultist elements in the Celtic school are ‘dated’. A man is likely to become ‘dated’ in this way precisely because he is anxious not to be dated, to be ‘contemporary’: for to move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go. On the other hand a man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers are often the most dated. No one is more unmistakably ancient Achaean than Homer, more scholastic than Dante, more feudal than Froissart, more ‘Elizabethan’ than Shakespeare. The Rape of the Lock is a perfect (and never obsolete) period piece. The Prelude smells of its age. The Waste Land has ‘Twenties’ stamped on every line. Even Isaiah will reveal to a careful student that it was not composed at the court of Louis XIV nor in modern Chicago.
The real question is in which sense Chesterton was of his period. Much of his work, admittedly, was ephemeral journalism: it is dated in the first sense. The little books of essays are now mainly of historical interest. Their parallel in Mr Stephen’s work is not his romances but his articles in The Listener. But Chesterton’s imaginative works seem to me to be in quite a different position. They are, of course, richly composed. The anti-Germanicism in The Ballad of the White Horse belongs to a silly and transitory historical heresy of Mr Belloc’s—always, on the intellectual side, a disastrous influence on Chesterton. And in the romances, the sword-sticks, the hansom cabs, the anarchists, all go back both to a real London and to an imagined London (that of The New Arabian Nights) which have receded from us. But how is it possible not to see that what comes through all this is permanent and dateless? Does not the central theme of the Ballad—the highly paradoxical message which Alfred receives from the Virgin—embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are left them and win? Hence in the very nadir of the late war a very different, and exquisite, poet (Miss Ruth Pitter) unconsciously and inevitably struck exactly the same note with the line:
All but divine and desperate hopes go down and are no more.
Hence in those quaking days after the fall of France a young friend of mine (just about to enter the R.A.F.) and I found ourselves quoting to one another stanza after stanza of the Ballad. There was nothing else to say.
So in the stories. Read again The Flying Inn. Is Lord Ivywood obsolete? The doctrinaire politician, aristocratic yet revolutionary, inhuman, courageous, eloquent, turning the vilest treacheries and most abominable oppressions into periods that echo with lofty magnanimity—is this out of date? Are the withers of any modern journalist quite unwrung when he reads of Hibbs However? Or read again The Man Who Was Thursday. Compare it with another good writer, Kafka. Is the difference simply that the one is ‘dated’ and the other contemporary? Or is it rather that while both give a powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each one of us encounters in his (apparently) single-handed struggle with the universe, Chesterton, attributing to the universe a more complicated disguise, and admitting the exhilaration as well as the terror of the struggle, has got in rather more; is more balanced: in that sense, more classical, more permanent?
I will tell Mr Stephens what that man is like who can see nothing in these stories but an Edwardian ‘period’ piece. He is like a man who should look into Mr Stephens’s Deirdre (the one unmistakably great and almost perfect book among its author’s many good books) and having seen the names (Connohar, Deirdre, Fergus, Naoise) should mutter ‘All the old Abbey Theatre stuff’ and read no more. If Mr Stephens is too modest to reply that such a man would be a fool, I will do it for him. Such a man would be a very notable fool: a fool first for disliking the early Yeats; second, for assuming that any book on the same theme must be like the early Yeats; and a fool thirdly for missing some of the finest heroic narrative, some of the most disciplined pathos, and some of the cleanest prose which our century has seen.
XVIII
DIFFERENT TASTES IN LITERATURE
I have been thinking once again about the troublesome problem of differences in what is called Taste, though the implications of the word Taste, if taken seriously, would leave us with no problem. If we really thought that a man’s choice between Miss Ruby M. Ayres and Tolstoy were quite on all fours with his choice between mild and bitter beer, we should not discuss it, or not seriously. But, in fact, we do not really think so. We may say so, in the heat of argument, but we don’t believe it. The idea that some preferences in art are really better than others cannot be got rid of: and this idea, brought into conflict with the fact that there seem to be no objective tests, engenders the problem.
Now, without supposing that I am going to solve that problem in an article, I have been seriously wondering of late, whether we do not make it unnecessarily difficult by an initial mis-statement. Again and again, one finds a writer assuming at the outset that some people like bad art in just the same way as others like good art. This is what I question. I am going to submit that, in a certain recognisable sense, bad art never succeeds with anyone.
But I must first explain what I mean by bad art. If by bad art you mean, say, The Niblung’s Ring, Marmion, and Sullivan, then admittedly the theory I am going to advance will not work. You must pitch your standard a good deal lower than that. You must mean by bad art the things which are not even considered among people who discuss the question seriously at all but which blare from every radio, pour from every circulating library, and hang on the wall of every hotel. The mis-statement I am attacking is the statement that those things are, by some people, enjoyed as much as good art is enjoyed by others—things like the poetry of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox or the latest popular hit in music. I would include certain posters but by no means all.
There is, of course, no doubt that these things are liked in some way. The wireless is turned on, the novels circulate, the poems are bought. But have we evidence that they fill in anyone’s life the place that good art fills in the lives of those who love it? Look at the man who enjoys bad music, while he is enjoying it. His appetite is indeed hearty. He is prepared to hear his favourite any number of times a day. But he does not necessarily stop talking while it is going on. He joins in. He whistles, beats time with his feet, dances round the room, or uses his cigarette or mug as a conductor’s baton. And when it is over, or before it is over, he will be talking to you about something else. I mean when the actual performance is over; when it is ‘over’ in another sense, when that song or dance has gone out of fashion, he never thinks of it again except perhaps as a curiosity.
In literature the characteristics of the ‘consumer’ of bad art are even easier to define. He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible.
The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday’s newspaper. One may have some hopes of a man who has never read the Odyssey, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick: but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells you he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not (it gravitates suspiciously towards the spare bedroom) I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening’s talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming, or (more probably) ‘nice’. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again.
In all this, surely, we find the symptoms of a real want for bad art, but of a want which is not even in the same species with men’s want for good art. What the patrons of the bad art clearly desire—and get—is a pleasant background to life, a something that will fill up odd moments, ‘packing’ for the mental trunk or ‘roughage’ for the mental stomach. There is really no question of joy: of an experience with a razor’s edge which re-makes the whole mind, which produces ‘the holy spectral shiver’, which can make a man (as the ‘wind musique’ made Pepys) feel ‘really sick—just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’. The pleasure in bad art is not an occurrence, in unfortunate context, of the same pleasure men take in good art. The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker’s desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.