Part 1 (1/2)
Visions and Revisions.
by John Cowper Powys.
PREFACE
What I aim at in this book is little more than to give complete reflection to those great figures in Literature which have so long obsessed me. This poor reflection of them pa.s.ses, as they pa.s.s, image by image, eidolon by eidolon, in the flowing stream of my own consciousness.
Most books of critical essays take upon themselves, in unpardonable effrontery, to weigh and judge, from their own petty suburban pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest experiences of ”dangerous living” have been squalid philanderings with their neighbours' wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate niches?
Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these, in tiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating of new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters before our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite _personal_ articulation, as to how these great things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our guard--when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical gramaphones.
My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader to whatever ”opinions” I may have formulated in the course of my spiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such ”opinions,” and in pure, pa.s.sionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great dead artists.
There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated people who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must be ”constructive.” O that word ”constructive”! How, in the name of the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a wors.h.i.+p, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to b.u.t.tress up such poor wretches as these are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral security and refuge.
No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.
Who wants to know what Professor So-and-so's view of Life may be?
We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own natural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction of his tedious, formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a natural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically _different_ from other men, he is an interesting spectacle, as he comes under the influence first of one great artist and then another, while as a silly, little, preaching school-master, he is only a blot upon the world-mirror!
It is thus that I, moi qui vous parle, claim my humble and modest role. If, in my reaction from Rabelais, for instance, I find myself responding to his huge laughter at ”love” and other things, and a moment later, in my reaction from Thomas Hardy, feeling as if ”love” and the rest were the only important matters in the Universe; this psychological variability, itself of interest as a curious human phenomenon, has made it possible to get the ”reflections,” each absolute in its way, of the two great artists as they advance and recede.
If I had tried to dilute and prune and ”correct” the one, so as to make it ”fit in” with the other, in some stiff, ethical theory of my own, where would be the interest for the reader? Besides, who am I to ”improve” upon Rabelais?
It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for ”variable reaction” that there are so few good critics. But we are all, I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be ”constructive,” that makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the ”pluralistic” angle; but there must be something of such ”pluralism” in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few!
Let it be quite plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great genius halfway. It is a case of all or nothing. If you lack the courage, or the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different masters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become, perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be a clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to draw out from the great writers one loves certain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions.
But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be foisted on one's readers as anything ”ex cathedra.” One such test is the test of what has been called ”the grand style”--that grand style against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the ”grand style” into an academic ”narrow way,”
through which I would force every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists never come near it.
And yet--what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it, after the ”wallowings” and ”rhapsodies,” the agitations and prost.i.tutions, of those who have it not!
It is--one must recognize that--the thing, and the only thing, that, in the long run, _appeals._ It is because of the absence of it that one can read so few modern writers _twice!_ They have flexibility, originality, cleverness, insight--but they lack _distinction_--they fatally lack distinction.
And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this ”grand style”?
Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things that _cannot_--because of something essentially ephemeral in them--be dealt with in the grand style.
Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of s.e.x. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists--what you will--and we may be able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter!
Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We can be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in this particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the ”great style,”
because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such discussion and remain unaffected by it.
Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over the particular s.e.x conventions that existed in their age, they might be attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the ”great style.”
Matthew Arnold may argue eloquently about the true modernistic interpretation of the word ”Elohim,” and very cleverly and wittily give his reasons for translating it ”the Eternal” or ”the s.h.i.+ning One”; but into what a different atmosphere we are immediately transported when, in the midst of such discussion, the actual words of the Psalmist return to our mind: ”My soul is athirst for G.o.d--yea! even for the living G.o.d! When shall I come to appear before the presence of G.o.d?”
The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human a.s.sociation. It is, at bottom, nothing but human a.s.sociation that makes the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon centuries, been a.s.sociated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be expressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous--like Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs.