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Alfred Hower

Rutgers University

New Brunswick, N. J.

Theory of Literature

BY RENE WELLEK

Kant in England ( 1 93 1 ) The Rise of English Literary History ( 1 94 1 )

BY AUSTIN WARREN

Pofe as Critic and Humanist (1929)

The Elder Henry James (1934)

Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (1939)

Rage for Order (1948)

THEORY

OF

LITERATURE

By RENE WELLEK and AUSTIN WARREN

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

New York

JBWgSSCTY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES

COPYRIGHT, 1942, 1947, 1949, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Preface

The naming of this book has been more than ordinarily diffi- cult. Even a proper "short title," "Theory of Literature and Methodology of Literary Study," would be too cumbersome. Before the nineteenth century one might have managed, for then a full, analytic title could have covered the title-page while the spine bore the inscription "Literature."

We have written a book which, so far as we know, lacks any close parallel. It is not a textbook introducing the young to the elements of literary appreciation nor (like Morize's Aims and Methods) a survey of the techniques employed in scholarly research. Some continuity it may claim with Poetics and Rhet- oric (from Aristotle down through Blair, Campbell, and Karnes), systematic treatments of the genres of belles-lettres and stylistics, or with books called Principles of Literary Criticism. But we have sought to unite "poetics" (or literary theory) and "criticism" (evaluation of literature) with "scholarship" ("re- search") and "literary history" (the "dynamics" of literature, in contrast to the "statics" of theory and criticism). It comes nearer to certain German and Russian works, Walzel's Gehalt und Gestalt, or Julius Petersen's Die Wissenschajt von der Dichtungy or Tomashevsky's Literary Theory. In contrast to the Germans, however, we have avoided mere reproductions of the views of others and, though we take into account other perspec- tives and methods, have written from a consistent point of view; in contrast to Tomashevsky, we do not undertake to give ele- mentary instruction on such topics as prosody. We are not eclectic like the Germans or doctrinaire like the Russian.

By the standards of older American scholarship, there is some- thing grandiose and even "unscholarly" about the very attempt to formulate the assumptions on which literary study is con- ducted (to do which one must go beyond "facts") and something presumptuous in our effort to survey and evaluate highly special- ized investigations. Every specialist will unavoidably be dissatis-

vi Prejace

fied with our account of his specialty. But we have not aimed at minute completeness: the literary examples cited are always examples, not "proof" ; the bibliographies are "selective." Nor have we undertaken to answer all the questions we raise. We have judged it of central use to ourselves and others to be inter- national in our scholarship, to ask the right questions, to provide an organon of method.

The authors of this book, who first met at the University of Iowa in 1939, immediately felt their large agreement in literary theory and methodology.

Though of differing backgrounds and training, both had fol- lowed a similar pattern of development, passing through histori- cal research and work in the "history of ideas," to the position that literary study should be specifically literary. Both believed that "scholarship" and "criticism" were compatible 5 both refused to distinguish between "contemporary" and past literature.

In 1 941, they contributed chapters on "History" and "Criti- cism" to a collaborative volume, Literary Scholarship, instigated and edited by Norman Foerster, to whose thought and encour- agement they are conscious of owing much. To him (were it not to give a misleading impression of his own doctrine) they would dedicate this book.

The chapters of the present book were undertaken on the basis of existing interests. Mr. Wellek is primarily responsible for chapters 1-2, 4-7, 9-14, and 19, Mr. Warren for chapters 3, 8, and 1 5-1 8 j both shared equally in the concluding chapter. But the book is a real instance of a collaboration in which the author is the shared agreement between two writers. In terminology, tone, and emphasis there remain doubtless, some slight incon- sistencies between the writers ; but they venture to think that there may be compensation for these in the sense of two different minds reaching so substantial an agreement.

It remains to thank Dr. Stevens and the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, without whose aid the book would not have been possible, and the President, the Deans, and the department chairman of the University of Iowa, for their support and generous allotment of time; R. P. Blackmur and J. C. Ransom for their encouragement; Wallace Fowlie, Roman Jakobson, John McGalliard, John C. Pope, and Robert Penn

Prejace vii

Warren for their reading of certain chapters; Miss Alison White for close, devoted assistance throughout the composition of the book.

The authors wish to acknowledge also the kindness of certain editors and publishers in permitting the incorporation of some passages from their earlier writings into the present book: to the Louisiana University Press and Cleanth Brooks, former edi- tor of the Southern Review (for "Mode of Existence of the Literary Work") ; to the University of North Carolina Press (for a portion of "Literary History," in Literary Scholarship, ed. Foerster, 1941); to the Columbia University Press (for passages from "Periods and Movements in Literary History" and "The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts" in the English Institute Annuals, 1940 and 1041s); to the Philosophi- cal Library (for passages from "The Revolt against Positivism" and "Literature and Society," in Twentieth Century English, ed. Knickerbocker, 1946); and to John Palmer, editor of the Sewanee Review for "The Graduate Study of Literature."

Rene Wellek Austin Warren New Haven, May 1, 1948

Contents

Preface

I. DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

I. Literature and Literary Study 3

II. The Nature of Literature 9

III. The Function of Literature 19

IV. Literary Theory, Criticism, and History 29

V. General, Comparative, and National

Literature 3 8

II. PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS

VI. The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 49

III. THE EXTRINSIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

Introduction 6$

VII. Literature and Biography 67

VIII. Literature and Psychology 75

IX. Literature and Society 89

X. Literature and Ideas 107

XI. Literature and the Other Arts 124

IV. THE INTRINSIC STUDY OF LITERATURE

XII. The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art 139

XIII. Euphony, Rhythm, and Meter 159

x Contents

XIV. Style and Stylistics 177

XV. Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth 190

XVI. The Nature and Modes of Narrative Fiction 219

XVII. Literary Genres 235

XVIII. Evaluation 248

XIX. Literary History 263

V. THE ACADEMIC SITUATION

XX. The Study of Literature in the Graduate

School 285

Notes 299

Bibliography 347

Index 389

I

Definitions and Distinctions

CHAPTER I

Literature and Literary Study

We must first make a distinction between literature and lit- erary study. The two are distinct activities: one is creative, an art j the other, if not precisely a science, is a species of knowledge or of learning. There have been attempts, of course, to obliterate this distinction. For instance, it has been argued that one cannot understand literature unless one writes it, that one cannot and should not study Pope without trying his own hand at heroic couplets or an Elizabethan drama without himself writing a drama in blank verse.1 * Yet useful as the experience of literary creation is to him, the task of the student is completely distinct. He must translate his experience of literature into intellectual terms, assimilate it to a coherent scheme which must be rational if it is to be knowledge. It may be true that the subject matter of his study is irrational or at least contains strongly unrational elements ; but he will not be therefore in any other position than the historian of painting or the musicologist or, for that matter, the sociologist or the anatomist.

Clearly, some difficult problems are raised by this relationship. The solutions proposed have been various. Some theorists would simply deny that literary study is knowledge and advise a "second creation," with results which to most of us seem futile today — Pater's description of Mona Lisa or the florid passages in Symonds or Symons. Such "creative criticism" has usually meant a needless duplication or, at most, the translation of one work of art into another, usually inferior. Other theorists draw rather different skeptical conclusions from our contrast between literature and its study: literature, they argue, cannot be "stud- ied" at all. We can only read, enjoy, appreciate it. For the rest, we can only accumulate all kinds of information "about" litera-

* For the notes, cf. pp. 299-346.

3

4 Theory of Literature

ture. Such skepticism is actually much more widespread than one might suppose. In practice, it shows itself in a stress on environ- mental "facts" and in the disparagement of all attempts to go beyond them. Appreciation, taste, enthusiasm are left to the private indulgence as an inevitable, though deplorable, escape from the austerity of sound scholarship. But such a dichotomy into "scholarship" and "appreciation" makes no provision at all for the true study of literature, at once "literary" and "systematic."

The problem is one of how, intellectually, to deal with art, and with literary art specifically. Can it be done? And how can it be done? One answer has been: it can be done with the methods developed by the natural sciences, which need only be trans- ferred to the study of literature. Several kinds of such transfer can be distinguished. One is the attempt to emulate the general scientific ideals of objectivity, impersonality, and certainty, an attempt which on the whole supports the collecting of neutral facts. Another is the effort to imitate the methods of natural science through the study of causal antecedents and origins -y in practice, this "genetic method" justifies the tracing of any kind of relationship as long as it is possible on chronological grounds. Applied more rigidly, scientific causality is used to explain lit- erary phenomena by the assignment of determining causes to economic, social, and political conditions. Again, there is the introduction of the quantitative methods appropriately used in some sciences, i.e., statistics, charts, and graphs. And finally there is the attempt to use biological concepts in the tracing of the evo- lution of literature.2

Today there would be almost general recognition that this transfer has not fulfilled the expectations with which it was made originally. Sometimes scientific methods have proved their value within a strictly limited area, or with a limited technique such as the use of statistics in certain methods of textual criticism. But most promoters of this scientific invasion into literary study have either confessed failure and ended with skepticism or have com- forted themselves with delusions concerning the future successes of the scientific method. Thus, I. A. Richards used to refer to the future triumphs of neurology as insuring the solutions of all literary problems.3

Literature and Literary Study 5

We shall have to come back to some of the problems raised by this widespread application of natural science to literary study. They cannot be dismissed too facilelyj and there is, no doubt, a large field in which the two methodologies contact or even over- lap. Such fundamental methods as induction and deduction, analysis, synthesis, and comparison are common to all types of systematic knowledge. But, patently, the other solution com- mends itself : literary scholarship has its own valid methods which are not always those of the natural sciences but are nevertheless intellectual methods. Only a very narrow conception of truth can exclude the achievements of the humanities from the realm of knowledge. Long before modern scientific development, phi- losophy, history, jurisprudence, theology, and even philology had worked out valid methods of knowing. Their achievements may have become obscured by the theoretical and practical tri- umphs of the modern physical sciences j but they are nevertheless real and permanent and can, sometimes with some modifications, easily be resuscitated or renovated. It should be simply recog- nized that there is this difference between the methods and aims of the natural sciences and the humanities.

How to define this difference is a complex problem. As early as 1883, Wilhelm Dilthey worked out the distinction between the methods of natural science and those of history in terms of a contrast between explanation and comprehension.4 The scientist, Dilthey argued, accounts for an event in terms of its causal ante- cedents, while the historian tries to understand its meaning. This process of understanding is necessarily individual and even sub- jective. A year later, Wilhelm Windelband, the well-known historian of philosophy, also attacked the view that the historical sciences should imitate the methods of the natural sciences.5 The natural scientists aim to establish general laws while the his- torians try to grasp the unique and non-recurring fact. This view was elaborated and somewhat modified by Heinrich Rickert, who drew a line not so much between generalizing and individ- ualizing methods as between the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture.6 The sciences of culture, he argued, are inter- ested in the concrete and individual. Individuals, however, can be discovered and comprehended only in reference to some scheme of values, which is merely another name for culture. In

6 Theory of Literature

France, A. D. Xenopol distinguished between the natural sciences as occupied with the "facts of repetition" and history as occupied with the "facts of succession." In Italy, Benedetto Croce based his whole philosophy on a historical method which is totally different from that of the natural sciences.7

A full discussion of these problems would involve decision on such problems as the classification of the sciences, the philoso-1 phy of history, and the theory of knowledge.8 Yet a few concrete examples may at least suggest that there is a very real problem which a student of literature has to face. Why do we study Shakespeare? It is clear we are not primarily interested in what he has in common with all men, for we could then as well study any other man, nor are we interested in what he has in common with all Englishmen, all men of the Renaissance, all Eliza- bethans, all poets, all dramatists, or even all Elizabethan drama- tists, because in that case we might just as well study Dekker or Heywood. We want rather to discover what is peculiarly Shake- speare's, what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare 5 and this is ob- viously a problem of individuality and value. Even in studying a period or movement or one specific national literature, the lit- erary student will be interested in it as an individuality with characteristic features and qualities which set it off from other similar groupings.

The case for individuality can be supported also by another argument: attempts to find general laws in literature have always failed. M. Cazamian's so-called law of English literature, the "oscillation of the rhythm of the English national mind" be- tween two poles, sentiment and intellect (accompanied by the further assertion that these oscillations become speedier the nearer we approach the present age), is either trivial or false. It breaks down completely in its application to the Victorian age.9 Most of these "laws" turn out to be only such psycho- logical uniformities as action and reaction, or convention and revolt, which, even if they were beyond doubt, could not tell us anything really significant about the processes of literature. While physics may see its highest triumphs in some general theory reducing to a formula electricity and heat, gravitation and light, no general law can be assumed to achieve the purpose of literary study: the more general, the more abstract and hence

Literature and Literary Study 7

empty it will seem; the more the concrete object of the work of art will elude our grasp.

There are thus two extreme solutions to our problem. One, made fashionable by the prestige of the natural sciences, identi- fies scientific and historical method and leads either to the mere collection of facts or to the establishment of highly generalized historical "laws." The other, denying that literary scholarship is a science, asserts the personal character of literary "understand- ing" and the "individuality," even "uniqueness," of every work of literature. But in its extreme formulation the anti-scientific solution has its own obvious dangers. Personal "intuition" may lead to a merely emotional "appreciation," to complete subjec- tivity. To stress the "individuality" and even "uniqueness" of every work of art — though wholesome as a reaction against facile generalizations — is to forget that no work of art can be wholly "unique" since it then would be completely incomprehensible. It is, of course, true that there is only one Hamlet or even one "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. But even a rubbish heap is unique in the sense that its precise proportions, position, and chemical com- binations cannot be duplicated exactly. Moreover, all words in every literary work of art are, by their very nature, "generals" and not particulars. The quarrel between the "universal" and "particular" in literature has been going on since Aristotle pro- claimed poetry to be more universal and hence more philosophi- cal than history, which is concerned only with the particular, and since Dr. Johnson asserted that the poet should not "count the streaks of the tulip." The Romantics and most modern critics never tire of stressing the particularity of poetry, its "texture," its concreteness.10 But one should recognize that each work of literature is both general and particular, or — better, possibly — is both individual and general. Individuality can be distinguished from complete particularity and uniqueness.11 Like every human being, each work of literature has its individual characteristics; but it also shares common properties with other works of art, just as every man shares traits with humanity, with all members of his sex, nation, class, profession, etc. We can thus generalize con- cerning works of art, Elizabethan drama, all drama, all litera- ture, all art. Literary criticism and literary history both attempt to characterize the individuality of a work, of an author, of a

8 Theory of Literature

period, or of a national literature. But this characterization can be accomplished only in universal terms, on the basis of a literary theory. Literary theory, an organon of methods, is the great need of literary scholarship today.

This ideal does not, of course, minimize the importance of sympathetic understanding and enjoyment as preconditions of our knowledge and hence our reflections upon literature. But they are only preconditions. To say that literary study serves only the art of reading is to misconceive the ideal of organized knowledge, however indispensable this art may be to the student of literature. Even though "reading" be used broadly enough to include critical understanding and sensibility, the art of reading is an ideal for a purely personal cultivation. As such it is highly desirable, and also serves as a basis of a widely spread literary culture. It cannot, however, replace the conception of "literary scholarship," conceived of as super-personal tradition.

CHAPTER II

The Nature of "Literature

The first problem to confront us is, obviously, the subject matter of literary scholarship. What is literature? What is not literature? What is the nature of literature? Simple as such questions sound, they are rarely answered clearly.

One way is to define "literature" as everything in print. We then shall be able to study the "medical profession in the four- teenth century" or "planetary motion in the early Middle Ages" or "Witchcraft in Old and New England." As Edwin Greenlaw has argued, "Nothing related to the history of civilization is be- yond our province" ; we are "not limited to belles lettres or even to printed or manuscript records in our effort to understand a period or civilization," and we "must see our work in the light of its possible contribution to the history of culture." x Ac- cording to Greenlaw's theory, and the practice of many scholars, literary study has thus become not merely closely related to the history of civilization but indeed identical with it. Such study is literary only in the sense that it is occupied with printed or written matter, necessarily the primary source of most history. It can be, of course, argued in defense of such a view that histo- rians neglect these problems, that they are too much preoccupied with diplomatic, military, and economic history, and that thus the literary scholar is justified in invading and taking over a neighboring terrain. Doubtless nobody should be forbidden to enter any area he likes, and doubtless there is much to be said in favor of cultivating the history of civilization in the broadest terms. But still the study ceases to be literary. The objection that this is only a quibble about terminology is not convincing. The study of everything connected with the history of civiliza- tion does, as a matter of fact, crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions fall; extraneous criteria are introduced into lit- erature; and, by consequence, literature will be judged valuable

9

IO Theory of Literature

only so far as it yields results for this or that adjacent discipline. The identification of literature with the history of civilization is a denial of the specific field and the specific methods of literary study.

Another way of defining literature is to limit it to "great books," books which, whatever their subject, are "notable for literary form or expression." Here the criterion is either aesthetic worth alone or aesthetic worth in combination with general intel- lectual distinction. Within lyric poetry, drama, and fiction, the greatest works are selected on aesthetic grounds; other books are picked for their reputation or intellectual eminence together with aesthetic value of a rather narrow kind: style, composition, general force of presentation are the usual characteristics singled out. This is a common way of distinguishing or speaking of lit- erature. By saying that "this is not literature," we express such a value judgment; we make the same kind of judgment when we speak of a book on history, philosophy, or science as belonging to "literature." Studies are written with such an assumption be- hind them: Henry Hallam's Introduction to the Literary His- tory of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries dis- cusses books on theology, logic, and jurisprudence, and even mathematics; only — and for unaccountable reasons — historiog- raphy is left out.

Though Hallam's dividing line may seem peculiarly arbi- trary, most literary histories do include treatment of philoso- phers, historians, theologians, moralists, politicians, and even some scientists. It would, for example, be difficult to imagine a literary history of eighteenth-century England without an extended treatment of Berkeley and Hume, Bishop Butler and Gibbon, Burke and even Adam Smith. The treatment of these authors, though usually much briefer than that of poets, play- wrights, and novelists, is rarely limited to their strictly aesthetic merits. In practice, we get perfunctory and inexpert accounts of these authors in terms of their speciality. Quite rightly, Hume cannot be judged except as a philosopher, Gibbon except as a historian, Bishop Butler as a Christian apologist and moralist, and Adam Smith as a moralist and economist. But in most lit- erary histories these thinkers are discussed in a fragmentary fashion without the proper context, — the history of their subject

The Nature of Literature 1 1

of discourse — without a real grasp, that is, of the history of philosophy, of ethical theory, of historiography, of economic theory. The literary historian is not automatically transformed into a proper historian of these disciplines. He becomes simply a compiler, a self-conscious intruder.

The study of isolated "great books" may be highly com- mendable for pedagogical purposes. We all must approve the idea that students — and even beginning students — should read great or at least good books rather than compilations or historical curiosities.2 We may, however, doubt that the principle is worth preserving in its purity for the sciences, history, or any other accumulative and progressing subject. Within the history of imaginative literature, limitation to the great books makes in- comprehensible the continuity of literary tradition, the develop- ment of literary genres, and indeed the very nature of the lit- erary process, besides obscuring the background of social, lin- guistic, ideological, and other conditioning circumstances. In his- tory, philosophy, and similar subjects, it actually introduces an excessively "aesthetic" point of view. There is obviously no other reason than stress on expository "style" and organization for singling out Thomas Huxley from all English scientists as the one worth reading. It is further to be remarked that this criterion must, with very few exceptions, favor popularizers over the great originators: it will, and must, prefer Huxley to Newton, Berg- son to Kant.

The term "literature" seems best If we limit it to the art of literature, that is, to imaginative literature. There are certain difficulties with so employing the term; but, in English, the possible alternatives, such as "fiction" or "poetry," are either already pre-empted by narrower meanings or, like "imaginative literature" or belles lettres> are clumsy and misleading. One of the objections to "literature" is its suggestion (in its etymology from Utera) of limitation to written or printed literature; for, clearly, any coherent conception must include "oral literature." In this respect, the German term Wortkunst and the Russian slovesnost have the advantage over their English equivalent.

The main distinctions to be drawn are between the literary, the everyday, and the scientific uses of language. A recent dis- cussion of this point by Thomas Clark Pollock, The Nature of

1 2 Theory of Literature

Literature? though true as far as it goes, seems not entirely satisfactory, especially in defining the distinction between literary and everyday language. The problem is crucial and by no means simple in practice, since literature, in distinction from the other arts, has no medium of its own and since many mixed forms and subtle transitions undoubtedly exist. It is fairly easy to distin- guish between the language of science and the language of lit- erature. The mere contrast between "thought" and "emotion" or "feeling" is, however, not sufficient. Literature does contain thought, while emotional language is by no means confined to literature: witness a lovers' conversation or an ordinary argu- ment. Still, the ideal scientific language is purely "denotative": it aims at a one-to-one correspondence between sign and referent. The sign is completely arbitrary, hence can be replaced by equiv- alent signs. The sign is also transparent ; that is, without draw- ing attention to itself, it directs us unequivocally to its referent.

Thus scientific language tends toward such a system of signs as mathematics or symbolic logic. Its ideal is such a universal language as the characteristica universalis which Leibniz had begun to plan as early as the late seventeenth century. Compared to scientific language, literary language will appear in some ways deficient. It abounds in ambiguities ; it is, like every other his- torical language, full of homonyms, arbitrary or irrational cate- gories such as grammatical gender; it is permeated with histori- cal accidents, memories, and associations. In a word, it is highly "connotative." Moreover, literary language is far from merely referential. It has its expressive side; it conveys the tone and attitude of the speaker or writer. And it does not merely state and express what it says; it also wants to influence the attitude of the reader, persuade him, and ultimately change him. There is a further important distinction between literary and scientific language: in the former, the sign itself, the sound symbolism of the word, is stressed. All kinds of techniques have been invented to draw attention to it, such as meter, alliteration, and patterns of sound.

These distinctions from scientific language may be made in different degrees by various works of literary art: for example, the sound pattern will be less important in a novel than in certain lyrical poems, impossible of adequate translation. The expressive

The Nature of Literature 1 3

element will be far less in an "objective novel," which may dis- guise and almost conceal the attitude of the writer, than in a "personal" lyric. The pragmatic element, slight in "pure" poetry, may be large in a novel with a purpose or a satirical or didactic poem. Furthermore, the degree to which the language is intel- lectualized may vary considerably: there are philosophical and didactic poems which cannot be excluded from literature, which yet approximate, at least occasionally, the scientific use of lan- guage. Still, whatever the mixed modes apparent upon an exami- nation of concrete literary works of art, the distinctions between the literary use and the scientific use seem clear: literary language is far more deeply involved in the historical structure of the language j it stresses the awareness of the sign itself ; it has its expressive and pragmatic side which scientific language will always want so far as possible to minimize.

More difficult to establish is the distinction between everyday and literary language. Everyday language is not a uniform con- cept: it includes such wide variants as colloquial language, the language of commerce, official language, the language of re- ligion, the slang of students. But obviously much that has been said about literary language holds also for the other uses of language excepting the scientific. Everyday language also has its expressive function, though this varies from a colorless of- ficial announcement to the passionate plea roused by a moment of emotional crisis. Everyday language is full of the irrationali- ties and contextual changes of historical language, though there are moments when it aims at almost the precision of scientific description. Only occasionally is there awareness of the signs themselves in everyday speech. Yet such awareness does ap- pear— in the sound symbolism of names and actions. No doubt, everyday language wants most frequently to achieve results, to influence actions and attitudes. But it would be false to limit it merely to communication. A child's talking for hours without a listener and an adult's almost meaningless social chatter show that there are many uses of language which are not strictly, or at least primarily, communicative.

It is thus quantitatively that literary language is first of all to be differentiated from the varied uses of every day. The re- sources of language are exploited much more deliberately and

1 4 Theory of Literature

systematically. In the work of a subjective poet, we have mani- fest a "personality" far more coherent and all-pervasive than persons as we see them in everyday situations. Certain types of poetry will use paradox, ambiguity, the contextual change of meaning, even the irrational association of grammatical cate- gories such as gender or tense, quite deliberately. Poetic lan- guage organizes, tightens, the resources of everyday language, and sometimes does even violence to them, in an effort to force us into awareness and attention. Many of these resources a writer will find formed, and preformed, by the silent and anonymous workings of many generations. In certain highly developed lit- eratures, and especially in certain epochs, the poet merely uses an established convention: the language, so to speak, poeticizes for him. Still, every work of art imposes an order, an organiza- tion, a unity on its materials. This unity sometimes seems very loose, as in many sketches or adventure stories j but it increases to the complex, close-knit organization of certain poems, in which it may be almost impossible to change a word or the posi- tion of a word without impairing its total effect.

The pragmatic distinction between literary language and everyday language is much clearer. We reject as poetry or label as mere rhetoric everything which persuades us to a definite outward action. Genuine poetry affects us more subtly. Art im- poses some kind of framework which takes the statement of the work out of the world of reality. Into our semantic analysis we thus can reintroduce some of the common conceptions of aesthet- ics: "disinterested contemplation," "aesthetic distance," "fram- ing." Again, however, we must realize that the distinction between art and non-art, between literature and the non-literary linguistic utterance, is fluid. The aesthetic function may extend to linguistic pronouncements of the most various sort. It would be a narrow conception of literature to exclude all propaganda art or didactic and satirical poetry. We have to recognize transitional forms like the essay, biography, and much rhetorical literature. In different periods of history the realm of the aesthetic function seems to expand or to contract : the personal letter, at times, was an art form, as was the sermon, while today, in agreement with the contemporary tendency against the confusion of genres, there appears a narrowing of the aesthetic function, a marked

The Nature of Literature 1 5

stress on purity of art, a reaction against pan-aestheticism and its claims as voiced by the aesthetics of the late nineteenth century. It seems, however, best to consider as literature only works in which the aesthetic function is dominant, while we can recognize that there are aesthetic elements, such as style and composition, in works which have a completely different, non-aesthetic pur- pose, such as scientific treatises, philosophical dissertations, politi- cal pamphlets, sermons.

But the nature of literature emerges most clearly under the referential aspect. The center of literary art is obviously to be found in the traditional genres of the lyric, the epic, the drama. In all of them, the reference is to a world of fiction, of imagina- tion. The statements in a novel, in a poem, or in a drama are not literally true 5 they are not logical propositions. There is a cen- tral and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey "information" about actual happenings, and the same informa- tion appearing in a book of history or sociology. Even in the sub- jective lyric, the "I" of the poet is a fictional, dramatic "I." A character in a novel differs from a historical figure or a figure in real life. He is made only of the sentences describing him or put into his mouth by the author. He has no past, no future, and sometimes no continuity of life. This elementary reflection dis- poses of much criticism devoted to Hamlet in Wittenberg, the influence of Hamlet's father on his son, the slim and young Falstaff in Maurice Morgann's absurdly overpraised essay, "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines," the question of "how many children had Lady Macbeth." 4 Time and space in a novel are not those of real life. Even an apparently most realistic novel, the very "slice of life" of the naturalist, is constructed according to certain artistic conventions. Especially from a later historical perspective we see how similar are naturalistic novels in choice of theme, type of characterization, events selected or admitted, ways of conducting dialogue. We discern, likewise, the extreme conventionality of even the most naturalistic drama not only in its assumption of a scenic frame but in the way space and time are handled, the way even the supposedly realistic dia- logue is selected and conducted, and the way characters enter and leave the stage.5 Whatever the distinctions between The

1 6 Theory of Literature

Tempest and A Doll's House, they share in this dramatic con- ventionality.

If we recognize "nationality," "invention," or "imagination" as the distinguishing trait of literature, we think thus of literature in terms of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Keats rather than of Cicero or Montaigne, Bossuet, or Emerson. Admittedly, there will be "boundary" cases, works like Plato's Republic to which it would be difficult to deny, at least in the great myths, passages of "invention" and "fictionality," while they are at the same time primarily works of philosophy. This conception of literature is descriptive, not evaluative. No wrong is done to a great and influential work by relegating it to rhetoric, to philosophy, to political pamphleteering, all of which may pose problems of aesthetic analysis, of stylistics and composition, simi- lar or identical to those presented by literature, but where the central quality of fictionality will be absent. This conception will thus include in it all kinds of fiction, even the worst novel, the worst poem, the worst drama. Classification as art should be distinguished from evaluation.

One common misunderstanding must be removed. "Imagina- tive" literature need not use images. Poetic language is per- meated with imagery, beginning with the simplest figures and culminating in the total all-inclusive mythological systems of a Blake or Yeats. But imagery is not essential to fictional state- ment and hence to much literature. There are good completely imageless poems j there is even a "poetry of statement." Imagery, besides, should not be confused with actual, sensuous, visual image-making. Under the influence of Hegel, nineteenth- century aestheticians such as Vischer and Eduard von Hartmann argued that all art is the "sensuous shining forth of the idea," while another school (Fiedler, Hildebrand, Riehl) spoke of all art as "pure visibility." 6 But much great literature does not evoke sensuous images, or, if it does, it does so only incidentally, oc- casionally, and intermittently.7. In the depiction even of a fic- tional character the writer may not suggest visual images at all. We scarcely can visualize any of Dostoevsky's or Henry James's characters, while we learn to know their states of mind, their motivations, evaluations, attitudes, and desires very completely.

At the most, a writer suggests some schematized outline or

The Nature of Literature I J

one single physical trait — the frequent practice of Tolstoy or Thomas Mann. The fact that we object to many illustrations, though by good artists and, in some cases (e.g., Thackeray's), even by the author himself, shows that the writer presents us only with such a schematized outline as is not meant to be filled out in detail.

If we had to visualize every metaphor in poetry we would become completely bewildered and confused. While there are readers given to visualizing and there are passages in literature where such imaginings seem required by the text, the psycho- logical question should not be confused with analysis of the poet's symbolic devices. These devices are largely the organiza- tion of mental processes which occur also outside of literature. Thus metaphor is latent in much of our everyday language and overt in slang and popular proverbs. The most abstract terms, by metaphorical transfer, derive from ultimately physical rela- tionships {comprehend, define, eliminate, substance, subject, hy- pothesis}. Poetry revives and makes us conscious of this meta- phorical character of language, just as it uses the symbols and myths of our civilization: Classical, Teutonic, Celtic, and Christian.

All these distinctions between literature and non-literature which we have discussed — personal expression, realization and exploitation of the medium, lack of practical purpose, and, of course, fictionality — are restatements, within a framework of semantic analysis, of age-old aesthetic terms such as "unity in variety," "disinterested contemplation," "aesthetic distance," "framing," and "invention," "imitation." Each of them de- scribes one aspect of the literary work, one characteristic feature of its semantic directions. None is itself satisfactory. At least one result should emerge: a literary work of art is not a simple object but rather a highly complex organization of a stratified character with multiple meanings and relationships. The usual terminology, which speaks of an "organism," is somewhat mis- leading, since it stresses only one aspect, that of "unity in va- riety," and leads to biological parallels not always relevant. Furthermore, the "identity of content and form" in literature, though the phrase draws attention to the close interrelationships within the work of art, is misleading in being overfacile. It en-

1 8 Theory of Literature

courages the illusion that the analysis of any element of an arti- fact, whether of content or of technique, must be equally useful, and thus absolves us from the obligation to see the work in its totality. "Content" and "form" are terms used in too widely different senses for them to be, merely juxtaposed, helpful ; in- deed, even after careful definition, they too simply dichotomize the work of art. A modern analysis of the work of art has to begin with more complex questions: its mode of existence, its system of strata.8

CHAPTER III

The Function of Literature

The nature and the function of literature must, in any co- herent discourse, be correlative. The use of poetry follows from its nature: every object or class of objects is most efficiently and rationally used for what it is, or is centrally. It acquires a sec- ondary use only when its prime function has lapsed: the old spinning wheel becomes an ornament, or a specimen in a mu- seum; the square piano, no longer capable of music, is made into a useful desk. Similarly, the nature of an object follows from its use: it is what it does. An artifact has the structure proper to the performance of its function, together with whatever acces- sories time and materials may make it possible, and taste may think it desirable, to add. There may be much in any literary work which is unnecessary to its literary function, though inter- esting or defensible on other grounds.

Have conceptions of the nature and the function of literature changed in the course of history? The question is not easy to answer. If one goes far enough back, one can say yes 3 one can reach a time when literature, philosophy, and religion exist un- differentiated: among the Greeks, Aeschylus and Hesiod would perhaps be instances. But Plato can already speak of the quarrel between the poets and the philosophers as an ancient quarrel and mean by it something intelligible to us. We must not, on the other hand, exaggerate the difference made by doctrines of "art for art's sake" at the end of the nineteenth century or more recent doctrines of "foesie 'pure? The "didactic heresy," as Poe called the belief in poetry as an instrument of edification, is not to be equated with the traditional Renaissance doctrine that the poem pleases and teaches or teaches through pleasing.

On the whole, the reading of a history of aesthetics or poetics leaves one with the impression that the nature and the function of literature, so far as they can be put into large general con-

19

20 Theory of Literature

ceptual terms, for comparison and contrast with other human activities and values, have not basically changed.

The history of aesthetics might almost be summarized as a dialectic in which the thesis and counterthesis are Horace's dulce and utile: poetry is sweet and useful. Either adjective separately represents a polar heresy with regard to the function of poetry — probably it is easier to correlate dulce et utile on the basis of function than on that of nature. The view that poetry is pleasure (analogous to any other pleasure) answers to the view that poetry is instruction (analogous to any textbook).1 The view that all poetry is, or should be, propaganda is answered by the view that it is, or should be, pure sound and image — arabesque without reference to the world of human emotions. The op- posing theses reach their subtlest versions, perhaps, in the views that art is "play" and that it is "work" (the "craft" of fiction, the "work" of art). Neither view, in isolation, can possibly seem acceptable. Told that poetry is "play," spontaneous amusement, we feel that justice has been done neither to the care, skill, and planning of the artist nor to the seriousness and importance of the poem 5 but told that poetry is "work" or "craft," we feel the violence done to its joy and what Kant called its "purpose- lessness." We must describe the function of art in such a way as to do justice at once to the dulce and the utile.

The Horatian formula itself offers a helpful start if, remem- bering that precision in the use of critical terms is very recent, we give the Horatian terms an extension generous enough to encompass Roman and Renaissance creative practice. The use- fulness of art need not be thought to lie in the enforcement of such a moral lesson as Le Bossu held to be Homer's reason for writing the Iliad , or even such as Hegel found in his favorite tragedy, Antigone. "Useful" is equivalent to "not a waste of time," not a form of "passing the time," something deserving of serious attention. "Sweet" is equivalent to "not a bore," "not a duty," "its own reward."

Can we use this double criterion as a basis of definition of literature, or is it rather a criterion of great literature? In older discussions, the distinctions between great, good, and "sublit- erary" literature rarely appear. There may be real doubt whether subliterary literature (the pulp magazine) is "useful"

The Function of Literature 2 1

or "instructive." It is commonly thought of as sheer "escape" and "amusement." But the question has to be answered in terms of subliterary readers, not in those of readers of "good litera- ture." Mortimer Adler, at least, would find a noetic element in the interest of the least intellectual novel reader. And as for "escape," Kenneth Burke has reminded us how facile a charge that may become. The dream of escape may "assist a reader to clarify his dislike of the environment in which he is placed. The artist can . . , become 'subversive' by merely singing, in all innocence, of respite by the Mississippi." 2 In answer to our question, it is probable that all art is "sweet" and "useful" to its appropriate users: that what it articulates is superior to their own self-induced reverie or reflection; that it gives them pleas- ure by the skill with which it articulates what they take to be something like their own reverie or reflection and by the release they experience through this articulation.

When a work of literature functions successfully, the two "notes" of pleasure and utility should not merely coexist but coalesce. The pleasure of literature, we need to maintain, is not one preference among a long list of possible pleasures but is a "higher pleasure" because pleasure in a higher kind of activity, i.e., non-acquisitive contemplation. And the utility — the serious- ness, the instructiveness — of literature is a pleasurable serious- ness, i.e., not the seriousness of a duty which must be done or of a lesson to be learned but an aesthetic seriousness, a seriousness of perception. The relativist who likes difficult modern poetry oan always shrug off aesthetic judgment by making his taste a personal preference, on the level of crossword puzzles or chess. The educationist may falsely locate the seriousness of a great poem or novel, as in the historical information it purveys or the helpful moral lesson.

Another point of importance: Has literature a function, or functions? In his Primer for Critics, Boas gaily exposits a plural- ism of interests and corresponding types of criticism; and, at, the end of his Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot sadly, or at least wearily, insists on the "variety of poetry" and the variety of things the kinds of poetry may do at various times. But these are exceptions. To take art, or literature, or poetry seriously is, ordinarily at least, to attribute to it some use proper

22 Theory of Literature

to itself. Considering Arnold's view that poetry could supersede religion and philosophy, Eliot writes: ". . . nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else. . . ." 3 That is, no real category of value has a real equivalent. There are no real substitutes. In practice, literature can obviously take the place of many things — of travel or sojourn in foreign lands, of direct experience, vicarious life; and it can be used by the his- torian as a social document. But has literature a work, a use, which nothing else does as well? Or is it an amalgam of philos- ophy, history, music, and imagery which, in a really modern economy, would be distributed? This is the basic question.

The defenders of literature will believe that it is not an archaic survival but a permanence, and so will many who are neither poets nor teachers of poetry and who therefore lack the profes- sional interest in survival. The experience of unique value in literature is basic to any theory concerning the nature of the value. Our shifting theories attempt to do progressively better justice to the experience.

One contemporary line asserts the use and seriousness o£ poetry by finding that poetry conveys knowledge — a kind of knowledge. Poetry is a form of knowledge. Aristotle had seemed to say something like that in his famous dictum that poetry is more philosophical than history, since history "relates things which have happened, poetry such as might happen," the general and probable. Now, however, when history, like literature, ap- pears a loose, ill-defined discipline, and when science, rather, is the impressive rival, it is, rather, contended that literature gives a knowledge of those particularities with which science and philosophy are not concerned. While a neoclassical theorist like Dr. Johnson could still think of poetry in terms of the "grandeur of generality," modern theorists, of many schools (e.g., Gilby, Ransom, Stace), all stress the particularity of poetry. Says Stace, the play Othello is not about jealousy but about Othello's jeal- ousy, the particular kind of jealousy a Moor married to a Venetian might feel.4

The typicality of literature or the particularity: literary theory and apologetics may stress one or the other; for literature, one may say, is more general than history and biography but more particularized than psychology or sociology. But not only are

The Function of Literature 23

there shifts in the stress of literary theory. In literary practice, the specific degree of generality or particularity shifts from work to work and period to period. Pilgrim and Everyman undertake to be mankind. But Morose, the "humorist" of Jonson's Epi- coene, is a very special and idiosyncratic person. The principle of characterization in literature has always been defined as that of combining the "type" with the "individual" — showing the type in the individual or the individual in the type. The attempts at interpreting this principle, or specific dogmas derived from it, have not been very helpful. Literary typologies go back to the Horatian doctrine of decorum, and to the repertory of types in Roman comedy (e.g., the bragging soldier, the miser, the spend- thrift and romantic son, the confidential servant). We recognize the typological again in the character books of the seventeenth century and in the comedies of Moliere. But how to apply the concept more generally? Is the nurse in Romeo and Juliet a type? If so, of what? Is Hamlet a type? Apparently, for an Elizabethan audience, a melancholiac, something as described by Dr. Timothy Bright. But he is many other things also, and his melancholy is given a particular genesis and context. In some sense, the character which is an individual as well as a type is so constituted by being shown to be many types: Hamlet is also a lover, or former lover, a scholar, a connoisseur of the drama, a fencer. Every man is a convergence or nexus of types — even the simplest man. So-called character types are seen "flat," as all of us see people with whom we have relations of a single kind ; "round" characters combine views and relations, are shown in different contexts — public life, private, foreign lands.5

One cognitive value in the drama and novels would seem to be psychological. "The novelists can teach you more about human nature than the psychologists" is a familiar kind of assertion. Horney recommends Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Balzac as inexhaustible sources. E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel) speaks of the very limited number of persons whose inner life and motivations we know, and sees it as the great service of the novel that it does reveal the introspective life of the characters.6 Presumably the inner lives he assigns his char- acters are drawn out of his own vigilant introspection. One might maintain that the great novels are source books for psychologists,

24 Theory of Literature

or that they are case histories (i.e., illustrative, typical examples). But here we seem to come back to the fact that psychologists will use the novel only for its generalized typical value: they will draw off the character of Pere Goriot from the total setting (the Maison Vauquer) and context of characters.

Max Eastman, himself a minor poet, would deny that the "literary mind" can, in an age of science, lay claim to the dis- covery of truth. The "literary mind" is simply the unspecialized, amateur mind of prescientific days attempting to persist and tak- ing advantage of its verbal facility to create the impression that it is uttering the really important "truths." Truth in literature is the same as truth outside of literature, i.e., systematic and pub- licly verifiable knowledge. The novelist has no magic short cut to that present state of knowledge in the social sciences which con- stitutes the "truth" against which his "world," his fictional real- ity, is to be checked. But then, believes Eastman, the imaginative writer — and especially the poet — misunderstands himself if he thinks of his prime office as that of discovering and communi- cating knowledge. His real function is to make us perceive what we see, imagine what we already, conceptually or practically, know.7

It is difficult to draw the line between views of poetry as realization of the given and views of poetry as "artistic insight." Does the artist remind us of what we have ceased to perceive or make us see what, though it was there all the time, we had not seen? One remembers the black and white drawings in which there are concealed figures or faces composed of dots and broken lines: they were there all the time, but one did not see them as wholes, as designs. In his Intentions, Wilde cites Whistler's discovery of aesthetic value in fog, of the Pre-Raphaelite discov- ery of beauty in types of women hitherto not seen as beautiful or as types. Are these instances of "knowledge" or "truth"? We hesitate. They are discoveries of new "perceptual values," we say, of new "aesthetic qualities."

One sees generally why aestheticians hesitate to deny "truth" as a property and a criterion of art: 8 partly, it is an honorific term, and one registers one's serious respect for art, one's ap- prehension of it as one of the supreme values, by the attribution; and partly, one is illogically fearful that if art isn't "true" it is

The Function of Literature 25

a "lie," as Plato, in violence, called it. Imaginative literature is a "fiction," an artistic, verbal "imitation of life." The opposite of "fiction" is not "truth" but "fact" or "time and space exist- ence." "Fact" is stranger than the probability with which litera- ture must deal.9

Among the arts, literature, specifically, seems also to claim "truth" through the view of life (W eltanschauung) which every artistically coherent work possesses. The philosopher or critic must think some of these "views" truer than others (as Eliot thinks Dante's truer than Shelley's or even than Shakespeare's) 3 but any mature philosophy of life must have some measure of truth — at any event it lays claim to it. The truth of literature, as we are now considering it, seems to be the truth in literature — the philosophy which exists, in systematic conceptual form, out- side of literature but may be applied to or illustrated by or em- bodied in literature. In this sense, the truth in Dante is Catholic theology and scholastic philosophy. Eliot's view of poetry in its relation to "truth" seems essentially of this sort. Truth is the province of systematic thinkers ; and artists are not such thinkers, though they may try to be if there are no philosophers whose work they can suitably assimilate.10

The whole controversy would appear, in large measure, se- mantic. What do we mean by "knowledge," "truth," "cogni- tion," "wisdom"? If all truth is conceptual and propositional, then the arts — even the art of literature — can't be forms of truth. Again: if positivist reductive definitions are accepted, limiting truth to that which can be methodically verified by any- one, then art can't be a form of truth experimentally. The alternative to these seems some bi-modal or pluri-modal truth: there are various "ways of knowing" 5 or there are two basic types of knowledge, each of which uses a language system of signs: the sciences, which use the "discursive" mode, and the arts, which use the "presentational." X1 Are these both truth? The former is what philosophers have ordinarily meant, while the latter takes care of religious "myth" as well as poetry. We might call the latter "true" rather than "the truth." The adjec- tival quality would express the distinction in center of balance: art is substantively beautiful and adjectively true (i.e., it doesn't conflict with the truth). In his "Ars Poetica," MacLeish at-

26 Theory of Literature

tempts to adjust the claims of literary beauty and philosophy by the formula, a poem is "equal to: not true": poetry is as serious and important as philosophy (science, knowledge, wis- dom) and possesses the equivalence of truth, is truth-like.

Mrs. Langer stresses the plastic arts and, still more, music, rather than literature, in her plea for presentational symbolism as a form of knowledge. Presumably she thinks of literature as in some way a mixture of "discursive" and "presentational." But the mythic element, or archetypal images, of literature would correspond to her presentational. "Men who follow the sea," she writes, "have often a deep love for that hard life. But in their dangerous calling they feel secure; in their comfortless quarters they are at ease. Waters and ships, heaven and storm and harbor, somehow contain the symbols through which they see meaning and sense in the world. . . ." 12

From views that art is revelation or insight into the truth we should distinguish the view that art — specifically literature — is propaganda, the view, that is, that the writer is not the discov- erer but the persuasive purveyor of the truth. The term "propa- ganda" is loose and needs scrutiny. In popular speech, it is applied only to doctrines viewed as pernicious and spread by men whom we distrust. The word implies calculation, intention, and is usually applied to specific, rather restricted doctrines or pro- grams.13 So limiting the sense of the term, one might say that some art (the lowest kind) is propaganda, but that no great art, or good art, or Art, can possibly be. If, however, we stretch the term to mean "effort, whether conscious or not, to influence readers to share one's attitude toward life," then there is plausi- bility in the contention that all artists are propagandists or should be, or (in complete reversal of the position outlined in the preceding sentence) that all sincere, responsible artists are morally obligated to be propagandists.

According to Montgomery Belgion, the literary artist is an " 'irresponsible propagandist.' That is to say, every writer adopts a view or theory of life. . . . The effect of the work is always to persuade the reader to accept that view or theory. This per- suasion is always illicit. That is to say, the reader is always led to believe something, and that assent is hypnotic — the art of the presentation seduces the reader. . . ." Eliot, who quotes Bel-

The Function of Literature 27

gion, replies by distinguishing "poets whom it is a strain to think of as propagandists at all" from irresponsible propagandists, and a third group who, like Lucretius and Dante, are "particularly conscious and responsible" propagandists 5 and Eliot makes the judgment of responsibility depend on both auctorial intention and historic effect.14 "Responsible propagandist" would seem to most people a contradiction in terms ; but, interpreted as a tension of pulls, it makes a point. Serious art implies a view of life which can be stated in philosophical terms, even in terms of systems.15 Between artistic coherence (what is sometimes called "artistic logic") and philosophical coherence there is some kind of cor- relation. The responsible artist has no will to confuse emotion and thinking, sensibility and intellection, sincerity of feeling with adequacy of experience and reflection. The view of life which the responsible artist articulates perceptually is not, like most views which have popular success as "propaganda," simple; and an adequately complex vision of life cannot, by hypnotic suggestion, move to premature or naive action.

It remains to consider those conceptions of the function of literature clustered about the word "catharsis." The word — Aristotle's Greek, in the Poetics — has had a long history. The exegesis of Aristotle's use of the word remains in dispute; but what Aristotle may have meant, an exegetical problem of inter- est, need not be confounded with the problems to which the term has come to be applied. The function of literature, some say, is to relieve us — either writers or readers — from the pressure of emotions. To express emotions is to get free of them, as Goethe is said to have freed himself from Weltschmerz by composing The Sorrows of Werther. And the spectator of a tragedy or the reader of a novel is also said to experience release and relief. His emotions have been provided with focus, leaving him, at the end of his aesthetic experience, with "calm of mind." 16

But does literature relieve us of emotions or, instead, incite them? Tragedy and comedy, Plato thought, "nourish and water our emotions when we ought to dry them up." Or, if literature relieves us of our emotions, are they not wrongly discharged when they are expended on poetic fictions? As a youth, St. Augustine confesses, he lived in mortal sin; yet "all this I wept not, I who wept for Dido slain. . . ." Is some literature in-

28 Theory of Literature

citory and some cathartic, or are we to distinguish between groups of readers and the nature of their response? 17 Again: should all art be cathartic? These are problems for treatment under "The Relation of Literature to Psychology" and "The Relation of Literature to Society" ; but they have, preliminarily, to be raised now.

That, for proper readers, literature does not and should not incite the emotions is our hypothetical answer. Emotions repre- sented in literature are, neither for writer nor for reader, the same as emotions in "real life"; they are "recollected in tran- quillity" ; they are "expressed" — that is, released — by analysis ; they are the feelings of emotions, the perceptions of emotions.

To conclude: the question concerning the function of literature has a long history — in the Western world, from Plato down to the present. It is not a question instinctively raised by the poet or by those who like poetry; for such, "Beauty is its own excuse, for being," as Emerson was once drawn into saying. The ques- tion is put, rather, by utilitarians and moralists, or by statesmen and philosophers, that is, by the representatives of other special values or the speculative arbiters of all values. What, they ask, is the use of poetry anyhow — cm bono? And they ask the ques- tion at the full social or human dimension. Thus challenged, the poet and the instinctive reader of poetry are forced, as morally and intellectually responsible citizens, to make some reasoned reply to the community. They do so in a passage of an Ars Poetica. They write a Defense or Afology for poetry: the lit- erary equivalent of what is called in theology "apologetics." 18 Writing to this end and for this prospective audience, they nat- urally stress the "use" rather than the "delight" of literature; and hence it would be semantically easy today to equate the "function" of literature with its extrinsic relations. But from the Romantic movement on, the poet has often given, when chal- lenged by the community, a different answer: the answer which A. C. Bradley calls "poetry for poetry's sake"; 19 and theorists do well to let the term "function" serve the whole "apologetic" range. So using the word, we say, poetry has many possible functions. Its prime and chief function is fidelity to its own nature.

CHAPTER IV

Literary Theory, Criticism, and History

As we have envisaged a rationale for the study of literature, we must conclude the possibility of a systematic and integrated study of literature. English affords no very satisfactory name for this. The most common terms for it are "literary scholar- ship" and "philology." The former term is objectionable only because it seems to exclude "criticism" and to stress the academic nature of the study ; it is acceptable, doubtless, if one interprets the term "scholar" as inclusively as did Emerson. The latter term, "philology," is open to many misunderstandings. His- torically, it has been used to include not only all literary and linguistic studies but studies of all products of the human mind. Though its greatest vogue was in nineteenth-century Germany, it still survives in the titles of such reviews as Modem Philology, Philological Quarterly, and Studies in Philology. Boekh, who wrote a fundamental Encyklof'ddie und Methodologie der fhi- lologischen Wissenschaften (1877, but based on lectures partly dating back to 1809),1 defined "philology" as the "knowledge of the known" and hence the study of language and literatures, arts and politics, religion and social customs. Practically identical with Greenlaw's "literary history," Boekh's philology is ob- viously motivated by the needs of classical studies, for which the help of history and archaeology seems particularly necessary. With Boekh, literary study is only one branch of philology, understood as a total science of civilization, particularly a science of what he, with German Romanticism, called the "National Spirit." Today, because of its etymology and much of the actual work of specialists, philology is frequently understood to mean linguistics, especially historical grammar and the study of past forms of languages. Since the term has so many and such diver- gent meanings, it is best to abandon it.

Another alternative term for the work of the literary scholar

29

30 Theory of Literature

is "research." But this seems particularly unfortunate, for it stresses the merely preliminary search for materials and draws, or seems to draw, an untenable distinction between materials which have to be "searched for" and those which are easily available. For example, it is "research" when one visits the British Museum to read a rare book, while it apparently involves a different mental process to sit at home in an armchair and read a reprint of the same book. At most, the term "research" sug- gests certain preliminary operations, the extent and nature of which will vary greatly with the nature of the problem. But it ill suggests those subtle concerns with interpretation, characteri- zation, and evaluation which are peculiarly characteristic of lit- erary studies.

Within our "proper study," the distinctions between literary theory, criticism, and history are clearly the most important. There is, first, the distinction between a view of literature as a simultaneous order and a view of literature which sees it pri- marily as a series of works arranged in a chronological order and as integral parts of the historical process. There is, then, the further distinction between the study of the principles and criteria of literature and the study of the concrete literary works of art, whether we study them in isolation or in a chronological series. It seems best to draw attention to these distinctions by describing as "literary theory" the study of the principles of literature, its categories, criteria, and the like, and by differen- tiating studies of concrete works of art as either "literary criti- cism" (primarily static in approach) or "literary history." Of course, "literary criticism" is frequently used in such a way as to include all literary theory ; but such usage ignores a useful distinction. Aristotle was a theorist j Sainte-Beuve, primarily a critic. Kenneth Burke is largely a literary theorist, while R. P. Blackmur is a literary critic. The term "theory of literature" might well include — as this book does — the necessary "theory of literary criticism" and "theory of literary history."

These distinctions are fairly obvious and rather widely ac- cepted. But less common is a realization that the methods so designated cannot be used in isolation, that they implicate each other so thoroughly as to make inconceivable literary theory without criticism or history, or criticism without theory and his-

Literary Theory, Critic'ismy and History 3 1

tory, or history without theory and criticism. Obviously, literary theory is impossible except on the basis of" a study of concrete literary works. Criteria, categories, and schemes cannot be ar- rived at in vacuo. But, conversely, no criticism or history is pos- sible without some set of questions, some system of concepts, some points of reference, some generalizations. There is here, of course, no unsurmountable dilemma: we always read with some preconceptions, and we always change and modify these preconceptions upon further experience of literary works. The process is dialectical: a mutual interpenetration of theory and practice.

There have been attempts to isolate literary history from theory and criticism. For example, F. W. Bateson 2 argued that literary history shows A to derive from B, while criticism pro- nounces A to be better than B. The first type, according to this view, deals with verifiable facts j the second, with matters of opinion and faith. But this distinction is quite untenable. There are simply no data in literary history which are completely neu- tral "facts." Value judgments are implied in the very choice of materials: in the simple preliminary distinction between books and literature, in the mere allocation of space to this or that author. Even the ascertaining of a date or a title presupposes some kind of judgment, one which selects this particular book or event from the millions of other books and events. Even if we grant that there are facts comparatively neutral, facts such as dates, titles, biographical events, we merely grant the possi- bility of compiling the annals of literature. But any question a little more advanced, even a question of textual criticism or of sources and influences, requires constant acts of judgment. Such a statement, for example, as "Pope derives from Dryden" not only presupposes the act of selecting Dryden and Pope out of the innumerable versifiers of their times, but requires a knowl- edge of the characteristics of Dryden and Pope and then a con- stant activity of weighing, comparing, and selecting which is essentially critical. The question of the collaboration of Beau- mont and Fletcher is insoluble unless we accept such an im- portant principle as that certain stylistic traits (or devices) are related to one rather than to the other of the two writers j other-

$2 Theory of Literature

wise we have to accept the stylistic differences merely as matter of fact.

But usually the case for the isolation of literary history from literary criticism is put on different grounds. It is not denied that acts of judgment are necessary, but it is argued that literary history has its own peculiar standards and criteria, i.e., those of the other ages. We must, these literary reconstructionists argue, enter into the mind and attitudes of past periods and accept their standards, deliberately excluding the intrusions of our own pre- conceptions. This view, called "historicism," was elaborated consistently in Germany during the nineteenth century, though even there it has been criticized by historical theorists of such eminence as Ernst Troeltsch.3 It seems now to have penetrated directly or indirectly into the United States, and to it many of our "literary historians" more or less clearly profess allegiance. Hardin Craig, for instance, said that the newest and best phase of recent scholarship is the "avoidance of anachronistic think- ing." 4 E. E. Stoll, studying the conventions of the Elizabethan stage and the expectations of its audience, works on the theory that the reconstruction of the author's intention is the central purpose of literary history.5 Some such theory is implied in the many attempts to study Elizabethan psychological theories, such as the doctrine of humors, or of the scientific or pseudo-scientific conceptions of poets.6 Rosemond Tuve has tried to explain the origin and meaning of metaphysical imagery by reference to the training in Ramist logic received by Donne and his con- temporaries.7

As such studies cannot but convince us that different periods have entertained different critical conceptions and conventions, it has been concluded that each age is a self-contained unity expressed through its own type of poetry, incommensurate with any other. This view has been candidly and persuasively ex- pounded by Frederick A. Pottle in his Idiom of Poetry.3 He calls his position that of "critical relativism," and speaks of pro- found "shifts of sensibility," of a "total discontinuity" in the history of poetry. His exposition is the more valuable as he com- bines it with an acceptance of absolute standards in ethics and religion.

At its finest, this conception of "literary history" requires an

Literary Theory } Criticism, and History 33

effort of imagination, of "empathy," of deep congeniality with a past age or a vanished taste. Successful efforts have been made to reconstruct the general outlook in life, the attitudes, concep- tions, prejudices, and underlying assumptions of many civiliza- tions. We know a great deal about the Greek attitude toward the gods, women, and slaves ; we can describe the cosmology of the Middle Ages in great detail ; and we have attempts to show the very different manner of seeing, or at least the very different artistic traditions and conventions, implied by Byzantine and Chinese art. Especially in Germany there is a plethora of studies, many of them influenced by Spengler, on the Gothic man, the Baroque man — all supposed to be sharply set off from our time, living in a world of their own.

In the study of literature, this attempt at historical recon- struction has led to great stress on the intention of the author, which, it is assumed, can be studied in the history of criticism and literary taste. It is usually assumed that if we can ascertain this intention and can see that the author has fulfilled it, we can also dispose of the problem of criticism. The author has served a contemporary purpose, and there is no need or even possi- bility of further criticizing his work. The method thus leads to the recognition of a single critical standard, that of contemporary success. There are then not only one or two but literally hun- dreds of independent, diverse, and mutually exclusive concep- tions of literature, each of which is in some way "right." The ideal of poetry is broken up in so many splinters that nothing remains of it: a general anarchy or, rather, a leveling of all values must be the result. The history of literature is reduced to a series of discrete and hence finally incomprehensible frag- ments. The extreme form of this historicism is the Chicago Neo- Aristotelianism, which, denying the possibility of a general theory of literature, leaves us with unique and thus incommen- surate and equal works.9 The recommended rhetorical analysis can be carried out indifferently with the Divine Comedy or the trashiest detective novel. A more moderate form is the view that there are polar poetical ideals which are so different that there is no common denominator between them : Classicism and Roman- ticism, the ideal of Pope and of Wordsworth, the poetry of state- ment and the poetry of implication.

34 Theory of Literature

The whole idea that the "intention" of the author is the proper subject of literary history seems, however, quite mis- taken. The meaning of a work of art is not exhausted by, or even equivalent to, its intention. As a system of values, it leads an independent life. The total meaning of a work of art cannot be defined merely in terms of its meaning for the author and his contemporaries. It is rather the result of a process of accretion, i.e., the history of its criticism by its many readers in many ages. It seems unnecessary and actually impossible to declare, as the historical reconstructionists do, that this whole process is irrelevant and that we must return only to its beginning. It is simply not possible to stop being men of the twentieth century while we engage in a judgment of the past: we cannot forget the associations of our own language, the newly acquired attitudes, the impact and import of the last centuries. We cannot become contemporary readers of Homer or Chaucer or members of the audience of the theater of Dionysus in Athens or of the Globe in London. There will always be a decisive difference between an act of imaginative reconstruction and actual participation in a past point of view. We cannot really believe in Dionysus and laugh at him at the same time, as the audience of Euripides' Bacchae seem to have done; 10 and few of us can accept Dante's circles of Hell and mountain of Purgatory as literal truth. If we should really be able to reconstruct the meaning which Hamlet held for its contemporary audience, we would merely impoverish it. We would suppress the legitimate meanings which later generations found in Hamlet. We would bar the possibility of a new interpretation. This is not a plea for arbi- trary subjective misreadings: the problem of a distinction be- tween "correct" and wrong-headed readings will remain, and will need a solution in every specific case. The historical scholar will not be satisfied to judge a work of art merely from the point of view of our own time — a privilege of the practicing critic, who will revaluate the past in terms of the needs of a present-day style or movement. It may be even instructive for him to look at a work of art from the point of view of a third time, contem- poraneous neither with him nor with the author, or to survey the whole history of the interpretation and criticism of a work which will serve as a guide to the total meaning.

Literary Theory , Criticism, and History 35

In practice, such clear-cut choices between the historical and the present-day point of view are scarcely feasible. We must beware of both false relativism and false absolutism. Values grow out of the historical process of valuation, which they in turn help us to understand. The answer to historical relativism is not a doctrinaire absolutism which appeals to "unchanging human nature" or the "universality of art." We must rather adopt a view for which the term "Perspectivism" seems suitable. We must be able to refer a work of art to the values of its own time and of all the periods subsequent to its own. A work of art is both "eternal" (i.e., preserves a certain identity) and "histori- cal" (i.e., passes through a process of traceable development). Relativism reduces the history of literature to a series of discrete and hence discontinuous fragments, while most absolutisms serve either only a passing present-day situation or are based (like the standards of the New Humanists, the Marxists, and the Neo- Thomists) on some abstract non-literary ideal unjust to the his- torical variety of literature. "Perspectivism" means that we rec- ognize that there is one poetry, one literature, comparable in all ages, developing, changing, full of possibilities. Literature is neither a series of unique works with nothing in common nor a series of works enclosed in time-cycles of Romanticism or Classi- cism, the age of Pope and the age of Wordsworth. Nor is it, of course, the "block-universe" of sameness and immutability which an older Classicism conceived as ideal. Both absolutism and rela- tivism are false ; but the more insidious danger today, at least in the United States, is a relativism equivalent to an anarchy of values, a surrender of the task of criticism.

In practice, no literary history has ever been written without some principles of selection and some attempt at characterization and evaluation. Literary historians who deny the importance of criticism are themselves unconscious critics, usually derivative critics, who have merely taken over traditional standards and reputations. Usually, today, they are belated Romanticists who have closed their minds to all other types of art and especially to modern literature. But, as R. G. Collingwood has said very pertinently, a man "who claims to know what makes Shakespeare a poet is tacitly claiming to know whether Miss Stein is a poet, and if not, why not." u

36 Theory of Literature

The exclusion of recent literature from serious study has been an especially bad consequence of this "scholarly" attitude. The term "modern" literature used to be interpreted so widely by academics that scarcely any work after Milton's was considered a quite respectable object of study. Since then, the eighteenth century has been accepted into good and regular standing as conventional literary history and has even become fashionable, since it appears to offer an escape into a more gracious, more stable, and more hierarchic world. The Romantic period and the later nineteenth century are also beginning to receive the attention of the scholars, and there are even a few hardy men in academic positions who defend and practice the scholarly study of contemporary literature.

The only possible argument against the study of living authors is the point that the student foregoes the perspective of the completed work, of the explication which later works may give to the implications of the earlier. But this disadvantage, valid only for developing authors, seems small compared to the ad- vantages we have in knowing the setting and the time and in the opportunities for personal acquaintance and interrogation or at least correspondence. If many second- or even tenth-rate authors of the past are worth study, a first- or even second-rate author of our time is worth studying, too. It is usually lack of perception or timidity which makes academics reluctant to judge for themselves. They profess to await the "verdict of the ages," not realizing that this is but the verdict of other critics and readers, including other professors. The whole supposed im- munity of the literary historian to criticism and theory is thor- oughly false, and that for a simple reason: every work of art is existing now, is directly accessible to observation, and is a solution of certain artistic problems whether it was composed yesterday or a thousand years ago. It cannot be analyzed, char- acterized, or evaluated without a constant recourse to critical principles. "The literary historian must be a critic even in order to be an historian." 12

Conversely, literary history is also highly important for lit- erary criticism as soon as the latter goes beyond the most sub- jective pronouncement of likes and dislikes. A critic who is con- tent to be ignorant of all historical relationships would con-

Literary Theory, Criticism, and History 37

stantly go astray in his judgments. He could not know which work is original and which derivative; and, through his igno- rance of historical conditions, he would constantly blunder in his understanding of specific works of art. The critic possessed of little or no history is inclined to make slipshod guesses, or to indulge in autobiographical "adventures among masterpieces," and, on the whole, will avoid concern with the more remote past, content to hand that over to the antiquarian and the "philologist."

A case in point is medieval literature, especially English medieval literature, which — with the possible exception of Chaucer — has scarcely been approached from any aesthetic and critical point of view. The application of modern sensibility would give a different perspective to much Anglo-Saxon poetry or to the rich medieval lyric, just as, conversely, an introduction of historical points of view and a systematic examination of genetic problems could throw much light on contemporary lit- erature. The common divorce between literary criticism and literary history has been detrimental to both.13

CHAPTER V

General, Comparative, and National 'Literature

Within literary studies, we have distinguished between theory, history, and criticism. Using another basis of division, we shall now attempt a systematic definition of comparative, general, and national literature. The term "comparative" literature is trouble- some and doubtless, indeed, one of the reasons why this im- portant mode of literary study has had less than the expected academic success. Matthew Arnold, translating Ampere's use of "kistoire comparative" was apparently the first to use the term in English (1848). The French have preferred the term used earlier by Villemain, who had spoken of "litterature compare e" (1829), after the analogy of Cuvier's Analomie comparee (1800). The Germans speak of "vergleichende Literaturge- schichte." 1 Yet neither of these differently formed adjectives is very illuminating, since comparison is a method used by all criticism and sciences, and does not, in any way, adequately de- scribe the specific procedures of literary study. The formal com- parison between literatures — or even movements, figures, and works — is rarely a central theme in literary history, though such a book as F. C. Green's Minuet,2 comparing aspects of French and English eighteenth-century literature, may be illu- minating in defining not only parallels and affinities but also divergences between the literary development of one nation and that of another.

In practice, the term "comparative" literature has covered and still covers rather distinct fields of studv and groups of problems. It may mean, first, the study of oral literature, especiallv of folk-tale themes and their migration 5 of how and when they have entered "higher," "artistic" literature. This type of prob- lem can be relegated to folklore, an important branch of learn- ing which is only in part occupied with aesthetic facts, since it studies the total civilization of a "folk," its costumes and customs,

38

General, C omfarative } and National Literature 39

superstitions and tools as well as its arts. We must, however, endorse the view that the study of oral literature is an integral part of literary scholarship, for it cannot be divorced from the study of written works, and there has been and still is a con- tinuous interaction between oral and written literature. Without going to the extreme of folklorists such as Hans Naumann 3 who consider all oral literature as "gesunkenes Kuhurgut" we can recognize that written upper-class literature has profoundly af- fected oral literature. The incorporation into folklore of chivalric romance and troubadour lyric is an indubitable fact. Though this is a view which would have shocked the Romantic believers in the creativity of the folk and the remote antiquity of folk art, nevertheless popular ballads, fairy tales, and legends as we know them are frequently of late origin and upper-class derivation. Yet the study of oral literature must be an important concern of every literary scholar who wants to understand the processes of literary development, the origins and the rise of our literary genres and devices. It is unfortunate that the study of oral lit- erature has thus far been so exclusively preoccupied with the study of themes and their migrations from country to country, i.e., with the raw materials of modern literatures.4 Of late, how- ever, folklorists have increasingly turned their attention to the study of patterns, forms, and devices, to a morphology of lit- erary forms, to the problems of the teller and narrator and the audience of a tale, and have thus prepared the way for a close integration of their studies into a general conception of literary scholarship.5 Though the study of oral literature has its own peculiar problems, those of transmission and social setting,6 its fundamental problems, without doubt, are shared with written literature; and there is a continuity between oral and written literature which has never been interrupted. Scholars in the modern European literatures have neglected these questions to their own disadvantage, while literary historians in the Slavic and Scandinavian countries, where folklore is still — or was till recently — alive, have been in much closer touch with these studies. But "comparative literature" is hardly the term by which to designate the study of oral literature.

Another sense of "comparative" literature confines it to the study of relationships between two or more literatures. This is

40 Theory of Literature

the use established by the flourishing school of French com- faratistes headed by Fernand Baldensperger and gathered around the Revue de Utterature comfaree.1 The school has especially given attention, sometimes mechanically but some- times with considerable finesse, to such questions as the repu- tation and penetration, the influence and fame, of Goethe in France and England, of Ossian and Carlyle and Schiller in France. It has developed a methodology which, going beyond the collection of information concerning reviews, translations, and influences, considers carefully the image, the concept of a particular author at a particular time, such diverse factors of transmission as periodicals, translators, salons, and travelers, and the "receiving factor," the special atmosphere and literary sit- uation into which the foreign author is imported. In total, much evidence for the close unity, especially of the Western European literatures, has been accumulated ; and our knowledge of the "foreign trade" of literatures has been immeasurably increased.

But this conception of "comparative literature" has also, one recognizes, its peculiar difficulties.8 No distinct system can, it seems, emerge from the accumulation of such studies. There is no methodological distinction between a study of "Shakespeare in France" and a study of "Shakespeare in eighteenth-century England," or between a study of Poe's influence on Baudelaire and one of Dryden's influence on Pope. Comparisons between literatures, if isolated from concern with the total national lit- eratures, tend to restrict themselves to external problems of sources and influences, reputation and fame. Such studies do not permit us to analyze and judge an individual work of art, or even to consider the complicated whole of its genesis; instead, they are mainly devoted either to such echoes of a masterpiece as translations and imitations, frequently by second-rate authors, or to the prehistory of a masterpiece, the migrations and the spread of its themes and forms. The emphasis of "comparative literature" thus conceived is on externals; and the decline of "comparative literature" in recent decades reflects the general turning away from stress on mere "facts," on sources and influences.

A third conception obviates, however, all these criticisms, by identifying "comparative literature" with the study of literature

General, Comfarativey and National Literature 41

in Its totality, with "world-literature," with "general" or "uni- versal" literature. There are certain difficulties with these sug- gested equations. The term "world literature," a translation of Goethe's Weltlheratur? is perhaps needlessly grandiose, imply- ing that literature should be studied on all five continents, from New Zealand to Iceland. Existing courses in world literature, like the textbooks and handbooks written for them, often supply us with snippets from famous authors and great books ranging from the Rig-Veda to Oscar Wilde and encourage an indis- criminate smattering, a vague, sentimental cosmopolitanism. The possibly preferable term "general literature" has the disad- vantage that Paul Van Tieghem 10 has tried to capture it for a rather narrow conception in specific contrast to "comparative literature." According to him, "general literature" studies those movements and fashions of literature which transcend national lines. In practice, however, it would be difficult to determine be- forehand which movements are general and thus to draw a line of distinction between the purely national and the general. Most of Van Tieghem's own books are rather conventional investiga- tions of a comparative sort, studying Ossian in France or the international vogue of "graveyard poetry," or are handbooks of external facts and interrelationships.11

Whatever the difficulties into which a conception of universal literary history may run, it is important to think of literature as a totality and to trace the growth and development of litera- ture without regard to linguistic distinctions. The practical result of such thinking will be a general history, especially of the Western tradition. One cannot doubt the continuity between Greek and Roman literatures, the Western medieval world, and the main modern literatures j and, without minimizing the im- portance of Oriental influences, especially that of the Bible, one must recognize a close unity which includes all Europe, Russia, the United States, and the South American literatures. This ideal was envisaged and, within their limited means, fulfilled, by the founders of literary history in the early nineteenth century, such men as the Schlegels, Sismondi, Bouterwek, and Hallam.12 During the later nineteenth century, this ideal was more closely defined and brought nearer to a coherent view through the in- fluence of evolutionism. The first theories of comparative litera-

42 Theory of Literature

ture, the books by Karayev and Posnett,13 were largely under the influence of the sociological conceptions of Herbert Spencer and drew far too close a parallelism between the growth of institu- tions and that of literature. But a return to the ideals and ambi- tions of the great masters of general literary historiography is overdue, whatever modifications we may make today in the de- tails of their methods and however ampler our sources of infor- mation may be. Literary history as a synthesis, literary history on*a supernational scale, will have to be written again. The study of comparative literature in this sense will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widen- ing of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial senti- ments, not easy to achieve. Yet literature is one, as art and humanity are one; and in this conception lies the future of his- torical literary studies.

Within this enormous area — in practice, identical with all lit- erary history — there are, no doubt, subdivisions sometimes run- ning along linguistic lines. There are, first of all, the groups of the three main linguistic families in Europe — the Germanic, the Romance, and the Slavic literatures. The Romance literatures have particularly frequently been studied in close interconnec- tion, from the days of Bouterwek up to Leonardo Olschki's par- tially successful attempt to write a history of them all for the medieval period.14 The Germanic literatures have been com- parably studied, usually, only for the early Middle Ages, when the nearness of a general Teutonic civilization can be still strongly felt.15 Despite the customary opposition of Polish scholars, it would appear that the close linguistic affinities of the Slavic languages, in combination with shared popular traditions extending even to metrical forms, make up a basis for a common Slavic literature.16

The history of themes and forms, devices and genres, is ob- viously an international history. While most of our genres de- scend from the literature of Greece and Rome, they were very considerably modified and augmented during the Middle Ages. Even the history of metrics, though closely bound up with the individual linguistic systems, is international. Furthermore, the great literary movements and styles of modern Europe (the Renaissance, the Baroque, Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Real-

General, Comfarativey and National Literature 43

ism, Symbolism) far exceed the boundaries of one nation, even though there are significant national differences between the workings out of these styles.17 On the whole, the importance of linguistic barriers was quite unduly magnified during the nine- teenth century.

This emphasis was due to the very close association between Romantic (mostly linguistic) nationalism and the rise of mod- ern organized literary history. It continues today through such practical influences as the virtual identification, especially in this country, of the teaching of literature and the teaching of a language. The result, in this country, has been an extraordinary lack of contact between the students of English, German, and French literature. Each of these groups bears a completely dif- ferent imprint and uses different methods. These disjunctions are in part, doubtless, unavoidable, simply because most men live in but a single linguistic medium ; and yet they lead to grotesque consequences when literary problems are discussed only with regard to views expressed in the particular language and only with reference to texts and documents in that language. Though in certain problems of artistic style, meter, and even genre, the linguistic differences between the European literatures will be important, it is clear that for many problems of the history of ideas, including critical ideas, such distinctions are untenable j artificial cross sections are drawn through homogeneous ma- terials, and histories are written concerning ideological echoes by chance expressed in English or German or French. The excessive attention to one vernacular is especially detrimental to the study of medieval literature, since in the Middle Ages Latin was the foremost literary language, and Europe formed a very close intellectual unity. A history of literature during the Middle Ages in England which neglects the vast amount of writings in Latin and Anglo-Norman gives a false picture of England's lit- erary situation and general culture.

This recommendation of comparative literature does not, of course, imply neglecting the study of individual national litera- tures. Indeed, it is just the problem of "nationality" and of the distinct contributions of the individual nations to this general literary process which should be realized as central. Instead of being studied with theoretical clarity, the problem has been

44 Theory of Literature

blurred by nationalistic sentiment and racial theories. To isolate the exact contributions of English literature to general literature, a fascinating problem, might lead to a shift of perspective and an altered evaluation, even of the major figures. Within each national literature there arise similar problems of the exact shares of regions and cities. Such an exaggerated theory as that of Josef Nadler,18 who professes to be able to discern the traits and characteristics of each German tribe and region and its reflections in literature, should not deter us from the considera- tion of these problems, rarely investigated with any command of facts and any coherent method. Much that has been written on the role of New England, the Middle West, and the South in the history of American literature, and most of the writings on regionalism, amounts to no more than the expression of pious hopes, local pride, and resentment of centralizing powers. Any objective analysis will have to distinguish questions concerning the racial descent of authors and sociological questions concern- ing provenience and setting from questions concerning the actual influence of the landscape and questions of literary tradition and fashion.

Problems of "nationality" become especially complicated if we have to decide that literatures in the same language are dis- tinct national literatures, as American and modern Irish as- suredly are. Such a question as why Goldsmith, Sterne, and Sheridan do not belong to Irish literature, while Yeats and Joyce do, needs an answer. Are there independent Belgian, Swiss, and Austrian literatures? It is not very easy to determine the point at which literature written in America ceased to be "colonial English" and became an independent national literature. Is it the mere fact of political independence? Is it the national con- sciousness of the authors themselves? Is it the use of national subject matter and "local color"? Or is it the rise of a definite national literary style?

Only when we have reached decisions on these problems shall we be able to write histories of national literature which are not simply geographical or linguistic categories, shall we be able to analyze the exact way in which each national literature enters into European tradition. Universal and national literatures im- plicate each other. A pervading European convention is modified

Generaly Comparative, and National Literature 45

in each country: there are also centers of radiation in the individ- ual countries, and eccentric and individually great figures who set off one national tradition from the other. To be able to describe the exact share of the one and the other would amount to know- ing much that is worth knowing in the whole of literary history.

II

Preliminary Operations

CHAPTER VI

The Ordering- and Establishing;: of Evidence

One of the first tasks of scholarship is the assembly of its materials, the careful undoing of the effects of time, the exami- nation as to authorship, authenticity, and date. Enormous acumen and diligence have gone into the solution of these problems j yet the literary student will have to realize that these labors are preliminary to the ultimate task of scholarship. Often the im- portance of these operations is particularly great, since without them, critical analysis and historical understanding would be hopelessly handicapped. This is true in the case of a half-buried literary tradition such as that of Anglo-Saxon literature ; but for the student of most modern literatures, concerned with the literary meaning of the works, the importance of these studies should not be overrated. They have either been needlessly ridi- culed because of their pedantry or glorified for their supposed or real exactitude. The neatness and perfection with which certain problems can be solved have always attracted minds which enjoy orderly procedure and the intricacies of manipulation, quite apart from any final significance which they may have. These studies need to be criticized adversely only when they usurp the place of other studies and become a specialty mercilessly imposed on every student of literature. Literary works have been edited meticulously, passages emended and debated in the greatest de- tail which, from a literary or even historical point of view, are not worth discussing at all. Or, if they are worth it, have had only the kind of attention the textual critic gives to a book. Like other human activities, these exercises often become ends in themselves.

Among these preliminary labors one has to distinguish two levels of operations: ( i) the assembling and preparing of a text; and (2) the problems of chronology, authenticity, authorship, collaboration, revision and the like, which have been frequently

49

50 Theory of Literature

described as "higher criticism," a rather unfortunate term de- rived from Biblical studies.

It will be useful to distinguish the stages in these labors. There is, first, the assembling and collecting of the materials, whether in manuscript or in print. In English literary history, this work has been accomplished almost completely, though in the present century a few fairly important works like The Book of Margery Kempe, Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece. and Chris- topher Smart's Rejoice m the Lamb have been added to our knowledge of the history of English mysticism and that of Eng- lish poetry.1 But there is, of course, no end to the discovery of personal and legal documents which might illustrate the litera- ture or at least the lives of English writers. In recent decades the discoveries of Leslie Hotson on Marlowe or the recovery of the Boswell papers may be quoted as well-known instances.2 In other literatures the possibilities of new discoveries may be much greater, especially in those where little has been fixed in writing.

In the field of oral literature the assembly of materials has its own special problems, such as the discovery of a competent singer or narrator, tact and skill in inducing him to sing or to recite, the method of recording his recitations by phonograph or by phonetic writing, and many others. In finding manuscript materials one has to meet problems of a purely practical nature, such as personal acquaintance with the heirs of the writer, one's own social prestige and financial restrictions, and frequently some kind of detective skill.3 Such a search may require very special knowledge as, for example, in the case of Leslie Hotson, who had to know much about Elizabethan legal procedure to find his way through the masses of documents in the Public Record Office. Since the majority of students can find their source ma- terials in libraries, a knowledge of the most important libraries, and familiarity with their catalogues as well as other reference books, is undoubtedly, in many ways, an important equipment of almost every student of literature.4

We may leave the technical details of cataloguing and biblio- graphical description to the librarians and professional bibliog- raphers; but sometimes merely bibliographical facts may have a literary relevance and value. The number and size of editions may throw light on questions of success and reputation ; the dis-

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 5 I

tinctions between editions may allow us to trace the stages of the author's revision and thus throw light on problems of the genesis and evolution of the work of art. A skillfully edited bibliography such as the CBEL maps out vast areas for research ; and special- ized bibliographies such as Greg's Bibliography of English Drama, Johnson's Spenser Bibliography, Macdonald's Dryden Bibliography, Griffith's Pope 5 may be guides to many problems of literary history. Such bibliographies may necessitate investi- gations into printing house practices, booksellers' and publishers' histories; and they require knowledge of printers' devices, water- marks, type fonts, compositors' practices, and bindings. Some- thing like a library science, or certainly an immense erudition on the history of book production, is needed to decide questions which, by their implications as to date, order of editions, etc., may be important for literary history. "Descriptive" bibliog- raphy, which uses all the arts of collating and examining of the actual make-up of a book, must thus be distinguished from "enumerative" bibliography, the compiling of book lists which give descriptive data only sufficient for identification.6

Once the preliminary task of assembly and cataloguing is completed, the process of editing begins. Editing is often an extremely complex series of labors, inclusive of both interpre- tation and historical research. There are editions which in the introductions and notes contain important criticism. Indeed, an edition may be a complex of almost every kind of literary study. Editions have played a very important role in the history of literary studies : they may — to quote a recent example, like F. N. Robinson's edition of Chaucer — serve as a repository of learn- ing, as a handbook of all the knowledge about an author. But taken in its central meaning as the establishment of the text of a work, editing has its own problems, among which actual "tex- tual criticism" is a highly developed technique with a long his- tory especially in classical and Biblical scholarship.7

One must distinguish rather sharply between the problems which arise in editing classical or medieval MSS on the one hand and, on the other, printed matter. MS materials will neces- sitate, first, a knowledge of paleography, a study which has established very subtle criteria for the dating of MSS and has produced useful manuals for the deciphering of abbreviations.8

52 Theory of Literature

Much has been done to trace the exact provenience of MSS to specific monasteries of a certain period. Very complex questions of the exact relationships between these MSS may arise. An investigation should lead to a classification which can be made graphically clear by the construction of a pedigree.9 In recent decades Dom Henri Quentin and W. W. Greg 10 have worked out elaborate techniques for which they claim scientific certainty, though other scholars, such as Bedier and Shepard,11 have ar- gued that there is no completely objective method of establishing classifications. While this is hardly the place to reach a decision on such a question, we would lean toward the latter view. We would conclude that, in most cases, it is advisable to edit the MS which is adjudged to be nearest the author's own without attempting the reconstruction of some hypothetical "original." The edition will, of course, draw upon the results of collation, and the choice of the MS itself will be determined by a study of the whole MS tradition. The experiences with the sixty sur- viving MSS of Piers Plowman and the eighty-three MSS of the Canterbury Tales 12 lead, we think, to conclusions mostly un- favorable to the idea that there ever existed an authorized re- cension or archetype analogous to the definitive edition of a modern work.

The process of recension, i.e., constructing a stemma or pedi- gree, must be distinguished from actual textual criticism and emendation, which will, of course, be based on these classifica- tions but will have to take into consideration other points of view and criteria than those derived merely from the MS tradi- tion.13 Emendation may use the criterion of "genuineness," i.e., derivation of a particular word or passage from the oldest and best (i.e., most authoritative) MS 5 but it will have to intro- duce distinct considerations of "correctness" such as linguistic criteria, historical criteria, and finally unavoidable psychological criteria. Otherwise we could not eliminate "mechanical" errors, misreadings, miswritings, associations, or even conscious changes of the scribes. Much must be left, after all, to the lucky guess- work of the critic, to his taste and linguistic feeling. Modern editors have, we think rightly, become more and more reluctant to indulge in such guesses, but the reaction in favor of the diplo- matic text seems to have gone too far when the editor reproduces

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 53

all abbreviations and scribal errors and all the vagaries of the original punctuation. This may be important for other editors or sometimes for linguists but is a needless impediment for the literary scholar. We plead not for modernized texts but for read- able texts which will avoid unnecessary guesses and changes and give reasonable help by minimizing attention to purely scribal conventions and habits.

The problems of editing printed materials are usually some- what simpler than those of editing manuscripts, though in gen- eral they are similar. But there is a distinction, formerly not always understood. In the case of nearly all classical MSS, we are met with documents from very different times and places, centuries remote from the original, and hence are free to use most of these MSS, as each may be presumed to be derived from some ultimate ancient authority. In the case of books, however, usually only one or two editions have any kind of independent authority. A choice has to be made of a basic edition, which will usually be either the first edition or the last edition supervised by the author. In some cases, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which underwent many successive additions and revisions, or Pope's Dunciad, which exists in at least two widely divergent versions, it may be necessary, for a critical edition, to print all or both versions.14 On the whole, modern editors are more reluctant to produce complete eclectic texts, though one should realize that practically all editions of Hamlet have been hybrids between the Second Quarto and the Folio. With Elizabethan plays, one may have to come to the conclusion that sometimes there was no final version which can be reconstructed. As in oral poetry (e.g., the ballads), the hunt for a single archetype is futile. It was long be- fore editors of ballads gave up the search for it. Percy and Scott "contaminated" different versions freely (and even rewrote them), while the first scientific editors such as Motherwell chose one version as superior and original. Finally Child de- cided to print all versions.15

Elizabethan plays represent, in some way, unique textual problems: their corruption is far greater than that of most contemporary books, partly because plays were not considered worth much attention in proofreading and partly because the MSS from which they were printed were often the much re-

54 Theory of Literature

vised "foul papers" of the author or authors and sometimes a prompt copy which contained playhouse revisions and markings. Besides, there was a special class of bad "quartos" which were apparently printed either from memorial reconstruction or from actors' fragmentary parts or possibly from a primitive shorthand version. In recent decades, very much attention has been paid to these problems, and the Quartos of Shakespeare have been re- classified after the discoveries of Pollard and Greg.16 Pollard demonstrated, on the basis of purely "bibliotic" knowledge, such as watermarks and type fonts, that certain Quartos of Shake- speare's plays were purposely antedated though actually printed in 1 619 as preparation for a collected edition which did not materialize.

A close study of Elizabethan handwriting, partly based on the assumption that two pages in the preserved MS of a play Sir Thomas More are in the handwriting of Shakespeare him- self,17 has had important implications for textual criticism, mak- ing it now possible to classify the likely misreadings of the Eliza- bethan compositor, while a study of printing house practices has shown what errors are likely or possible. But the wide margin which is still left for the individual editor in emending shows that no really "objective" method of textual criticism has been discovered. Certainly, many of the emendations introduced by Dover Wilson into his Cambridge edition seem as wild and un- necessary guesswork as some produced by eighteenth-century editors. But it is interesting that Theobald's brilliant guess, which, in Mrs. Quickly's account of FalstafPs death, changed the nonsensical "table of green fields" into "a babbled of green fields" is supported by the study of Elizabethan handwriting and spelling, i.e., "a babld" could have easily been mistaken for "a table."

The convincing arguments that the Quartos (with the excep- tion of a few bad ones) were most probably either printed from the author's MS or from a promptbook have restored authority to the earlier editions and have somewhat reduced the venera- tion in which the Folio had been held since the days of Dr. Johnson. The English textual scholars who, rather mislead- ingly, call themselves "bibliographers" (McKerrow, Greg, Pol- lard, Dover Wilson, etc.) have tried to ascertain, in each case,

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 55

what the MS authority for each Quarto may have been, and have used these theories, only partially arrived at on the basis of strictly bibliographical investigation, for elaborate hypotheses on the genesis, revisions, alterations, collaborations, etc., of Shakespeare's plays. Their preoccupation is only partly with tex- tual criticism j especially the work of Dover Wilson more legiti- mately belongs to "higher criticism."

Wilson makes very large claims for the method: "We can at times creep into the compositor's skin and catch glimpses of the MS through his eyes. The door of Shakespeare's workshop stands ajar." 18 No doubt, the "bibliographers" have thrown some light on the composition of Elizabethan plays and have suggested, and possibly proved, many traces of revision and alteration. But many of Dover Wilson's hypotheses seem fanci- ful constructions for which evidence seems very slight or even completely lacking. Thus, Dover Wilson has constructed the genesis of The Temfest. He claims that the long exposition scene points to the existence of an earlier version in which the pre-history of the plot has been told as a loosely constructed drama in the style of The Winter's Tale. But the slight incon- sistencies and irregularities in line arrangement, etc., cannot yield even presumptive evidence for such farfetched and need- less fancies.19

Textual criticism has been most successful, but also most un- certain, in the case of Elizabethan plays j but it is needed also in many apparently far more well-authenticated books. Pascal and Goethe, Jane Austen, and even Trollope have benefited from the meticulous attention of modern editors,20 even though some of these studies have degenerated into mere lists of print- ing house habits and compositors' vagaries.

In preparing an edition, one should keep firmly in mind its purpose and its presumed public. There will be one standard of editing for an audience of other textual scholars, who want to compare the minutest differences between existent versions, and another standard for the general reader, who has but mod- erate interest in variations of spelling or even in the minor dif- ferences between editions.

Editing presents other problems than that of establishing a correct text.21 In a collected edition there arise questions of

56 Theory of Literature

inclusion and exclusion, arrangement, annotation, etc., which may vary greatly from case to case. Probably the most useful edition for the scholar is a complete edition in strictly chrono- logical order, but such an ideal may be very difficult or impos- sible to reach. Chronological arrangement may be purely con- jectural or may dissolve the artistic grouping of poems within a collection. The literary reader will object to the mixture of the great and the trivial, if we print side by side an ode of Keats' with a jocular poem included in a contemporary letter. We would want to preserve the artistic arrangement of Baude- laire's Fleurs du Mai or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Gedichte, but we may have our doubts whether Wordsworth's elaborate classifications need to be kept. Yet if we were to break up Words- worth's own order of the poems and print them chronologically we would run into great difficulties as to the version we had to reprint. It would have to be the first version, as it would falsify the picture of Wordsworth's development to print a late revision with an early date; but obviously it seems awkward to dis- regard the will of the poet completely and to ignore the later revisions, which indubitably were improvements in many re- spects. Ernest de Selincourt has therefore decided to keep the traditional order in his new complete edition of Wordsworth's poems. Many complete editions, such as those of Shelley, ignore the important distinction between a finished work of art and a mere fragment or sketch by the poet which he may have aban- doned. The literary reputations of many poets have suffered from the overcompleteness of many current editions, inclusive of the slightest occasional verse or "workshop" jotting side by side with the finished product.

The question of annotation will also have to be decided by the purpose of the edition:22 the Variorum Shakespeare may legitimately exceed the text by the mass of annotation which is supposed to preserve the opinions of everybody who has ever written on a specific passage of Shakespeare and thus will save the scholar a search through enormous bodies of printed matter. The general reader will need much less: usually only the in- formation which is necessary to a complete understanding of a text. But, of course, opinions of what is needed may vary greatly: some editors tell the reader that Queen Elizabeth was

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 57

a Protestant or who David Garrick was and, at the same time^ shirk all real obscurities (these are actual cases). It is difficult to draw the line against overannotation unless the editor is quite certain what audience and what purpose he has to serve.

Annotation in the strict sense — the explanation of a text, lin- guistic, historical, and the like — should be distinguished from a general commentary, which may simply accumulate the ma- terials for literary or linguistic history (i.e., point out sources, parallels, imitations by other writers) and form a commentary which may be of an aesthetic nature, contain little essays on specific passages, and hence fulfill something like the function of the anthology. It may not always be easy to draw such neat distinctions, yet the mixture of textual criticism, literary history in the special form of source study, linguistic and historical ex- planation, and aesthetic commentary in many editions seems a dubious fashion of literary scholarship, justified only by the convenience of having all kinds of information between two covers.

In the editing of letters special problems arise. Should they be printed in full even if they are the most trivial business notes? The reputation of writers like Stevenson, Meredith, Arnold and Swinburne has not increased by the publication of letters which, were never meant as works of literature. Should we also print the answers, without which many a correspondence is incomprehensible? By this procedure much heterogeneous matter is intruded into the works of an author. These are all practical questions which cannot be answered without good sense and some consistency, much diligence, and frequently in- genuity and good luck.

Beyond the establishment of the text, preliminary research will have to settle such questions as those of chronology, au- thenticity, authorship, and revision. Chronology is in many cases sufficiently established either by publication date on the title page of the book or by contemporary evidence of publication. But these obvious sources are often lacking, for example, in the case of many Elizabethan plays or a medieval MS. The Eliza- bethan play may have been printed long after the first per- formance j the medieval MS may be a copy of a copy hundreds of years remote from the date of composition. External evi-

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dence must be then supplemented by evidence from the text itself, allusions to contemporary events, or to other dateable sources. This internal evidence pointing to some external event will establish only the initial date after which that part of the book was written.

Take, for instance, purely internal evidence such as can be derived from a study of metrical statistics in the attempt to establish the order of Shakespeare's plays. It can establish only relative chronology within a wide margin of error.23 Though it is safe to assume that the number of rhymes in Shakespeare's plays decreases from Love's Labour's Lost (which has most) to The Winter's Tale (which has none), we cannot conclude that The Winter's Tale is necessarily later than The Tern-pest ( which has two rhymes). As the criteria such as number of rhymes, feminine endings, run-on lines, etc., do not yield exactly the same results, no fixed and regular correlation between chronol- ogy and metrical tables can be established. In isolation from other evidence, the tables can be interpreted quite differently. An eighteenth-century critic, James Hurdis,24 for example, thought that Shakespeare progressed from the irregular verse of The Winter's Tale to the regular verse of The Comedy of Errors. However, a judicious combination of all these types of evidence (external, internal-external, and internal) has led to a chronology of Shakespeare's plays which is, without doubt, broadly true. Statistical methods, mainly as to the occurrence and frequency of certain words, have been also used for the establishment of a relative chronology of Plato's dialogues, by Lewis Campbell and especially by Wincenty Lutoslawski, who calls his method "stylometry." 25

If we have to consider undated MSS, chronological difficul- ties may multiply and even become insoluble. We may have to resort to a study of the evolution of an author's handwriting. We may have to puzzle over stamps or franks on letters, exam- ine the calendar, and trace very carefully the exact migrations of the author, since these may give a clue to the dating. Chrono- logical questions are often very important to the literary his- torian: without their being settled, he could not trace the ar- tistic development of Shakespeare or of Chaucer, to take examples where the dating is entirely due to the efforts of

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 59

modern research. Malone and Tyrwhitt in the late eighteenth century laid the ground, but since then controversy on details has never ceased.

Questions of authenticity and attribution may be even more important, and their solution may require elaborate stylistic and historical investigations.26 We are certain of the authorship of most works in modern literature. But there is a large pseudon- ymous and anonymous literature which sometimes yields its secret, even if that secret is nothing else than a name unasso- ciated with any biographical information and hence no more illuminating than the pseudonym or anonym itself.

With many authors the question of a canon of their work arises. The eighteenth century discovered that a large part of what had been included in printed editions of Chaucer's work (such as The Testament of Creseld and The Flower and the Leaf) cannot be Chaucer's authentic work. Even today the canon of Shakespeare's work is far from settled. The pendulum seems to have swung to the other extreme from the time when August Wilhelm Schlegel argued with strange confidence that all the apocrypha are Shakespeare's genuine work.27 Recently, J. M. Robertson has been the most outstanding proponent of the "disintegration of Shakespeare," a view which would leave Shakespeare with little more than the authorship of a few scenes in the best-known plays. According to this school of thought, even Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice are supposed to be nothing but a hotchpotch of passages by Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and several other playwrights of the time.28 Robert- son's method consists largely in tracing little verbal tags, dis- covering inconsistencies and literary parallels. The method is extremely uncertain and willful. It seems based on a false as- sumption and a vicious circle: we know what is Shakespeare's work from certain contemporary testimony (the inclusion in the Folio, the entries under his name in the Stationer's Register, etc.) ; but Robertson, by an arbitrary act of aesthetic judgment, selects only certain purple passages as Shakespeare's and denies his authorship of anything that falls below that standard or that shows similarities to the practice of contemporary drama- tists. Yet there is no reason why Shakespeare could not have written poorly or carelessly or why he could not have written

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in various styles imitating his contemporaries. On the other hand, the older premise that every word in the Folio is Shake- speare's cannot be upheld in its entirety.

No wholly definitive conclusion can be reached on some of these points, since Elizabethan drama was a communal art in which close collaboration was a very real practice. The indi- vidual authors were frequently scarcely differentiate by their styles. Two authors might well themselves have been unable to distinguish between their shares. Collaboration sometimes poses almost hopeless tasks to the literary detective.29 Even in the case of Beaumont and Fletcher, in which we have the advantage of having work definitely only by Fletcher written after the death of Beaumont, the division between their shares is not estab- lished beyond controversy; and the case is completely lost with The Revenger's Tragedy , which has been assigned to Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and Marston alternatively or in various combinations.30

Similar difficulties arise in attempts to ascertain authorship where, in the absence of external evidence, a definite traditional manner and uniform style make detection extremely difficult. Examples are abundant in the troubadours, or in eighteenth- century pamphleteers (who will ever establish the canon of Defoe's writings?), not to speak of anonymous contributions to periodicals. In many cases, however, some measure of success can be achieved even here. Investigation of the records of pub- lishing houses, or marked files of periodicals may unearth new external evidence; and skillful study of connecting links between articles of authors who repeat and quote themselves (such as Goldsmith) may yield conclusions of a high degree of cer- tainty.31 G. Udny Yule, a statistician and actuary, has used very complex mathematical methods to study the vocabulary of writers like Thomas a Kempis in order to establish the common authorship of several manuscripts.32 Stylistic methods, if pa- tiently developed, can supply evidence which, though falling short of complete certainty, makes identification highly probable.

In the history of literature, the question of the authenticity of forgeries or pious frauds has played an important role and has given valuable impetus to further investigations. Thus the controversy about Ossian stimulated the study of Gaelic folk

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 6 1

poetry, the controversy around Chatterton led to an intensified study of English medieval history and literature, and the Ire- land Forgeries of Shakespeare plays and documents led to de- bates about Shakespeare and the history of the Elizabethan stage.33 Discussing Chatterton, Thomas Warton, Thomas Tyr- whitt, and Edmond Malone brought forth historical and lit- erary arguments to show the Rowley Poems to be modern fabri- cations. Two generations later W. W. Skeat, who had made a systematic study of Middle English grammar, pointed to the violations of elementary grammatical conventions which should have betrayed the forgery much more quickly and completely. Edmond Malone demolished the clumsy forgeries of the Ire- lands; but even they, like Chatterton and Ossian, had bona fide defenders (such as Chalmers, a man of considerable learning) who were not without merit in the history of the Shakespearean research.

The mere suspicion of forgery has also forced scholars to but- tress the arguments for the traditional dating and ascription and thus to go beyond acceptance of tradition to positive arguments: for example, in the case of Hroswitha, the German nun of the tenth century whose plays were sometimes supposed to have been forged by Conrad Celtes, the German fifteenth-century humanist, or the Russian Slovo o folku Igoreve, which is ascribed usually to the twelfth century but has even recently been argued to be a forgery of the late eighteenth century.34 In Bohemia, the question of the forgeries of two supposedly medieval MSS, the Zelend hora and Krdlove dvur MSS, was a hot political issue as late as the 1880's; and the public reputa- tion of the future President of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, was partly made in these contests and arguments which began with linguistics but widened into an issue of scien- tific truthfulness versus romantic self-delusion.35

In some of these questions of authenticity and authorship, very elaborate problems of legal evidence may be involved; and all kinds of learning such as paleography, bibliography, linguistics, and history may have to be invoked. Among recent exposures, nothing has been neater than the conviction of T. J. Wise of the forgery of some eighty-six nineteenth-century pamphlets: the detective work, by Carter and Pollard,36 involved watermarks,

62 Theory of Literature

printing house tactics such as inking procedures, use of certain kinds of paper and letter fonts, and the like. (The direct literary- bearings of many of these questions is, however, only slight : the forgeries of Mr. Wise, who never invented a text, concern rather the book collector.)

One must never forget that the establishment of a different date of authorship does not dispose of the actual question of criticism. Chatterton's poems are neither worse nor better for having been written in the eighteenth century, a point which is frequently forgotten by those who in their moral indignation punish with contempt and oblivion the work proved to be a later production.

The questions discussed in this chapter are practically the only questions to which the existent textbooks of methods and manuals such as those of Morize and Rudler are devoted, and they are almost the only methods in which American graduate schools provide any kind of systematic training. Still, whatever their importance, it must be recognized that these types of study only lay the foundations for an actual analysis and interpreta- tion as well as causal explanation of literature. They are justified by the uses to which their results are put.

Ill

The Extrinsic Approach to the Study of Literature

Introduction

The most widespread and flourishing methods of studying lit- erature concern themselves with its setting, its environment, its external causes. These extrinsic methods are not limited to a study of the past but are equally applicable to present-day lit- erature. Hence, the term "historical" should properly be re- served for that study of literature which concentrates on its change in time and is thus centrally preoccupied with the prob- lem of history. Though the "extrinsic" study may merely at- tempt to interpret literature in the light of its social context and its antecedents, in most cases it becomes a "causal" explanation, professing to account for literature, to explain it, and finally to reduce it to its origins (the "fallacy of origins"). Nobody can deny that much light has been thrown on literature by a proper knowledge of the conditions under which it has been produced} the exegetical value of such a study seems indubitable. Yet it is clear that causal study can never dispose of problems of descrip- tion, analysis, and evaluation of an object such as a work of lit- erary art. Cause and effect are incommensurate : the concrete re- sult of these extrinsic causes — the work of art — is always un- predictable.

All history, all environmental factors, can be argued to shape a work of art. But the actual problems begin when we evaluate, compare, and isolate the individual factors which are supposed to determine the work of art. Most students try to isolate a spe- cific series of human actions and creations and to ascribe to that alone a determining influence on the work of literature. Thus one group considers literature mainly the product of an indi- vidual creator and concludes hence that literature should be in- vestigated mainly through biography and the psychology of the author. A second group looks for the main determining factors of literary creation in the institutional life of man — in economic,

6s

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social, and political conditions} another related group seeks for the causal explanation of literature largely in such other collec- tive creations of the human mind as the history of ideas, of theology, and the other arts. Finally, there is a group of stu- dents who seek to explain literature in terms of the Zeitgeist, some quintessential spirit of the time, some intellectual atmos- phere or "climate" of opinion, some unitary force abstracted largely from the characteristics of the other arts.

These advocates of the extrinsic approach vary in the rigidity with which they apply deterministic causal methods to their study and hence in the claims they make for the success of their method. Those who believe in social causation are usually the most deterministic. This radicalism can be explained by their philosophical affiliations with nineteenth-century positivism and science; but one must not forget that the idealistic adherents of Geistesgeschichte, philosophically affiliated with Hegelianism or other forms of Romantic thought, are also extreme determinists and even fatalists in a sense.

Many students who use these methods will make much more modest claims. They will seek to establish only some degree of relationship between the work of art and its settings and ante- cedents, and they will assume that some degree of illumination follows from such knowledge, though the precise relevance of these relationships may escape them altogether. These more modest proponents seem wiser, for surely causal explanation is a very overrated method in the study of literature, and as surely it never can dispose of the critical problems of analysis and evaluation. Among the different cause-governed methods, an explanation of the work of art in terms of the total setting seems preferable, since the reduction of literature to the effect of a single cause is manifestly impossible. Without endorsing the specific conceptions of German Geistesgeschickte, we recognize that such explanation by a synthesis of all the factors obviates a most important criticism against the other current methods. What follows is an attempt to weigh the importance of these different factors and to criticize the array of methods from the point of view of their relevance to a study which could be called centrally literary or "ergocentric."

CHAPTER VII

Literature and Biography

The most obvious cause of a work of art is its creator, the author ; and hence an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer has been one of the oldest and best- established methods of literary study.

Biography can be judged in relation to the light it throws on the actual production of poetry j but we can, of course, defend it and justify it as a study of the man of genius, of his moral, intellectual, and emotional development, which has its own in- trinsic interest ; and finally, we can think of biography as afford- ing materials for a systematic study of the psychology of the poet and of the poetic process.

These three points of view should be carefully distinguished. For our conception of "literary scholarship" only the first thesis, that biography explains and illuminates the actual product of poetry, is directly relevant. The second point of view, which advocates the intrinsic interest of biography, shifts the center of attention to human personality. The third considers biog- raphy as material for a science or future science, the psychology of artistic creation.

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all — chrono- logically and logically — it is a part of historiography. Biography makes no methodological distinction between a statesman, a gen- eral, an architect, a lawyer, and a man who plays no public role. And Coleridge's view that any life, however insignificant, would, if truthfully told, be of interest is sound enough.1 In the view of a biographer, the poet is simply another man whose moral and intellectual development, external career and emotional life, can be reconstructed and can be evaluated by reference to stand- ards, usually drawn from some ethical system or code of man- ners. His writings may appear as mere facts of publications, as events like those in the life of any active man. So viewed, the

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problems of a biographer are simply those of a historian. He has to interpret his documents, letters, accounts by eye-witnesses, reminiscences, autobiographical statements, and to decide ques- tions of genuineness, trustworthiness of witnesses, and the like. In the actual writing of biography he encounters problems of chronological presentation, of selection, of discretion or frank- ness. The rather extensive work which has been done on biog- raphy as a genre deals with such questions, questions in no way specifically literary.2 A historical sketch of the lives of English poets may suggest the different types of biography and the chief problems of the biographers.3

At least in England, biography has been one of the earliest and certainly one of the most persistent forms of literary study. Leland and Bale compiled biographical and bibliographical cata- logues of authors in the sixteenth century, and a collection of lives was the standard form of English literary history long before Johnson's Lives of the Poets and down to Morley's Eng- lish Men of Letters. In the seventeenth century, Walton wrote the lives of Donne and Herbert, treating these poets as An- glican saints. In the eighteenth century, diverse types of literary biography became established. Boswell's Johnson is the most famous example of a literary portraiture which tries, by an accumulation of anecdotes, to recreate a moral and intellectual personality. A different type of biography is best represented by Edmond Malone's Life of Dry den (1800), the scholarly ac- cumulation, verification, and examination of documents which yield a series of external facts. It was not till the nineteenth century that attempts were first made to write the biography of an author against his social and literary background. William Godwin's much padded Life of Chaucer (1803), Scott's Dry den (1808 — factually derived from Malone), and Nathan Drake's Shakespeare (1817) are early examples. The type doubtless cul- minates in Masson's Life of Milton (1 859-80), a work which manages to include almost the whole of the political and social history of the time; but many a Victorian Life and Times is similar in intent even though it may not equal Masson's per- formance in bulk or extravagance.

A new type arises only when conscious attempts are made to trace the ethical evolution and integration of a writer. Dowden's

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Life of Shakespeare (1875) is one early attempt out of a score, of which Dowden's own Shelley (1886) and Froude's Carlyle seem much more successful examples. The ethical biography easily passes into the psychological or even psychiatrical and psychoanalytical study of the personality of the poet. Such a transition occurred when Victorian standards of ethics seemed to become inadequate and when attention began to turn to the results of medical psychology. Since the success of Lytton Strachey's brilliant biographies, this "analysis" has been done frequently in a debunking spirit ; but it can be done, of course, in a compassionate tone of apology or from an attitude of simple scientific detachment. Carpenter's book on Shelley, Krutch's biography of Poe, and Van Wyck Brooks' Ordeal of Mark Twain are examples of an approach whose validity can scarcely be de- nied, however doubtful we may feel about the individual books, which indulge too frequently in the reduction of the complex to the simple.

However, in our context two questions of literary biography are crucial. How far is the biographer justified in using the evi- dence of the works themselves for his purposes? How far are the results of literary biography relevant and important for an understanding of the works themselves? An affirmative answer to both questions is usually given. To the first question it is assumed by practically all biographers who are specifically at- tracted to poets, for poets appear to offer abundant evidence usable in the writing of a biography, evidence which will be absent, or almost absent, in the case of many far more influential historical personages. But is this optimism justified?

We must distinguish two ages of man, two possible solutions. For most early literature we have no private documents on which a biographer can draw. We have only a series of public documents, birth registers, marriage certificates, lawsuits, and the like, and then the evidence of the works. We can, for example, trace Shakespeare's movements very roughly, and we know something of his finances; but we have absolutely noth- ing in the form of letters, diaries, reminiscences, except a few anecdotes of doubtful authenticity. The vast effort which has been expended upon the study of Shakespeare's life has yielded only few results of literary profit. They are chiefly facts of

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chronology and illustrations of the social status and the associa- tions of Shakespeare. Hence those who have tried to construct an actual biography of Shakespeare, of his ethical and emotional development, have either arrived, if they went about it in a scientific spirit, as Miss Spurgeon attempted in her study of Shakespeare's imagery, at a mere list of trivialities, or if they used the plays -and sonnets recklessly, have constructed biograph- ical romances like those of Georg Brandes or Frank Harris.4 The whole assumption behind these attempts (which began, probably, with a few hints in Hazlitt and Schlegel, elaborated first, rather cautiously, by Dowden) is quite mistaken. One can- not, from fictional statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer. One may gravely doubt even the usual view that Shakespeare passed through a period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve some serenity of resolution in The T em-pest. It is not self-evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or that he writes comedies when he feels pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the sor- rows of Shakespeare.5 He cannot be made responsible for the views of Timon or Macbeth on life, just as he cannot be con- sidered to hold the views of Doll Tearsheet or Iago. There is no reason to believe that Prospero speaks like Shakespeare: authors cannot be assigned the ideas, feelings, views, virtues, and vices of their heroes. And this is true not only of dramatic characters or characters in a novel but also of the / of the lyrical poem. The relation between the private life and the work is not a simple relation of cause and effect.

Proponents of the biographical method will, however, object to these contentions. Conditions, they will say, have changed since the time of Shakespeare. Biographical evidence has, for many poets, become abundant, because the poets have become self-conscious, have thought of themselves as living in the eyes of posterity (like Milton, Pope, Goethe, Wordsworth, or Byron), and have left many autobiographical statements as well as attracted much contemporary attention. The biographical approach now seems easy, for we can check life and work against each other. Indeed, the approach is even invited and demanded by the poet, especially the Romantic poet, who

Literature and Biografhy 7 1

writes about himself and his innermost feelings or even, like Byron, carries the "pageant of his bleeding heart" around Eu- rope. These poets spoke of themselves not only in private let- ters, diaries, and autobiographies, but also in their most formal pronouncements. Wordsworth's Prelude is an autobiography declaredly. It seems difficult not to take these pronouncements, sometimes not different in content or even in tone from their private correspondence, at their face value without interpreting poetry in the terms of the poet, who saw it himself, in Goethe's well-known phrase, as "fragments of a great confession."

We should certainly distinguish two types of poets, the ob- jective and the subjective: those who, like Keats and T. S. Eliot, stress the poet's "negative capability," his openness to the world, the obliteration of his concrete personality, and the opposite type of the poet, who aims at displaying his personality, wants to draw a self-portrait, to confess, to express himself.6 For long stretches of history we know only the first type: the works in which the element of personal expression is very weak, even though the aesthetic value may be great. The Italian novelle, chivalric romances, the sonnets of the Renaissance, Elizabethan drama, naturalistic novels, most folk poetry, may serve as lit- erary examples.

But, even with the objective poet, the distinction between a personal statement of an autobiographical nature and the use of the very same motif in a work of art should not and cannot be withdrawn. A work of art forms a unity on a quite different plane, with a quite different relation to reality, than a book of memoirs, a diary, or a letter. Only by a perversion of the bio- graphical method could the most intimate and frequently the most casual documents of an author's life become the central study while the actual poems were interpreted in the light of the documents and arranged according to a scale entirely separate from or even contradictory to that provided by any critical judg- ment of the poems. Thus Brandes slights Macbeth as uninter- esting because it is least related to what he conceives to be Shakespeare's personality} thus, Kingsmill complains of Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum.7

Even when a work of art contains elements which can be surely identified as biographical, these elements will be so re-

72 Theory of Literature

arranged and transformed in a work that they lose all their specifically personal meaning and become simply concrete human material, integral elements of a work. Ramon Fernandez has argued this very convincingly in connection with Stendhal. G. W. Meyer has shown how much the professedly autobio- graphical Prelude differs from Wordsworth's actual life during the process the poem purports to describe.s

The whole view that art is self-expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feelings and experiences, is demon- strably false. Even when there is a close relationship between the work of art and the life of an author, this must never be construed as meaning that the work of art is a mere copy of life. The biographical approach forgets that a work of art is not simply the embodiment of experience but always the latest work of art in a series of such works; it is drama, a novel, a poem "determined," so far as it is determined at all, by literary tra- dition and convention. The biographical approach actually ob- scures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life cycle of an individual. The biographical approach ignores also quite simple psychological facts. A work of art may rather em- body the "dream" of an author than his actual life, or it may be the "mask," the "anti-self" behind which his real person is hiding, or it may be a picture of the life from which the author wants to escape. Furthermore, we must not forget that the artist may "experience" life differently in terms of his art: actual ex- periences are seen with a view to their use in literature and come to him already partially shaped by artistic traditions and pre- conceptions.9

We must conclude that the biographical interpretation and use of every work of art needs careful scrutiny and examination in each case, since the work of art is not a document for biog- raphy. We must seriously question Miss Wade's Life of Tra- herney which takes every statement of his poems as literal bio- graphical truth, or the many books about the lives of the Brontes which simply lift whole passages from Jane Eyre or Villette. There is The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte by Vir- ginia Moore, who thinks that Emily must have experienced the passions of Heathcliffj and there are others who have argued

Literature and Biografhy J 3

that a woman could not have written Wuthering Heights and that the brother, Patrick, must have been the real author.10 This is the type of argument which has led people to argue that Shakespeare must have visited Italy, must have been a lawyer, a soldier, a teacher, a farmer. Ellen Terry gave the crushing reply to all this when she argued that, by the same criteria, Shakespeare must have been a woman.

But, it will be said, such instances of pretentious folly do not dispose of the problem of personality in literature. We read Dante or Goethe or Tolstoy and know that there is a person behind the work. There is an indubitable physiognomical simi- larity between the writings of one author. The question might be asked, however, whether it would not be better to distinguish sharply between the empirical person and the work, which can be called "personal" only in a metaphorical sense. There is a quality which we may call "Miltonic" or "Keatsian" in the work of their authors. But this quality can be determined on the basis of the works themselves, while it may not be ascertainable upon purely biographical evidence. We know what is "Virgilian" or "Shakespearian" without having any really definite biographical knowledge of the two great poets.

Still, there are connecting links, parallelisms, oblique resem- blances, topsy-turvy mirrors. The poet's work may be a mask, a dramatized conventionalization, but it is frequently a conven- tionalization of his own experiences, his own life. If used with a sense of these distinctions, there is use in biographical study. First, no doubt, it has exegetical value: it may explain a great many allusions or even words in an author's work. The bio- graphical framework will also help us in studying the most ob- vious of all strictly developmental problems in the history of literature — the growth, maturing, and possible decline of an author's art. Biography also accumulates the materials for other questions of literary history such as the reading of the poet, his personal associations with literary men, his travels, the land- scape and cities he saw and lived in: all of them questions which may throw light on literary history, i.e., the tradition in which the poet was placed, the influences by which he was shaped, the materials on which he drew.

Whatever the importance of biography in these respects, how-

74 Theory of Literature

ever, it seems dangerous to ascribe to it any real critical impor- tance. No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of "sincerity" is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulness, correspondence to the author's experience or feel- ings as they are attested by outside evidence. Byron's "Fare Thee Well . . ." is neither a worse nor a better poem because it dramatizes the poet's actual relations with his wife, nor "is it a pity," as Paul Elmer More thinks, that the MS shows no traces of the tears which, according to Thomas Moore's Memoranda, fell on it.11 The poem exists ; the tears shed or unshed, the per- sonal emotions, are gone and cannot be reconstructed, nor need they be.

CHAPTER VIII

Literature and Psychology

By "psychology of literature," we may mean the psychological study of the writer, as type and as individual, or the study of the creative process, or the study of the psychological types and laws present within works of literature, or, finally, the effects of literature upon its readers (audience psychology). The fourth we shall consider under "Literature and Society"; the other three shall here be discussed in turn. Probably only the third belongs, in the strictest sense, to literary study. The first two are subdivisions of the psychology of art: though, at times, they may serve as engaging pedagogic approaches to the study of lit- erature, we should disavow any attempt to evaluate literary works in terms of their origins (the genetic fallacy).

The nature of literary genius has always attracted speculation, and it was, as early as the Greeks, conceived of as related to "madness" (to be glossed as the range from neuroticism to psy- chosis). The poet is the "possessed": he is unlike other men, at once less and more; and the unconscious out of which he speaks is felt to be at once sub- and superrational.

Another early and persistent conception is that of the poet's "gift" as compensatory: the Muse took away the sight of Demodocos' eyes but "gave him the lovely gift of song" (in the Odyssey), as the blinded Tiresias is given prophetic vision. Handicap and endowment are not always, of course, so directly correlative j and the malady or deformity may be psychological or social instead of physical. Pope was a hunchback and a dwarf; Byron had a club-foot; Proust was an asthmatic neurotic of partly Jewish descent; Keats was shorter than other men; Thomas Wolfe, much taller. The difficulty with the theory is its very ease. After the event, any success can be attributed to compensatory motivation, for everyone has liabilities which may serve him as spurs. Dubious, certainly, is the widespread

75

7 6 Theory of Literature

view that neuroticism — and "compensation" — differentiate artists from scientists and other "contemplatives" : the obvious distinc- tion is that writers often document their own cases, turning their maladies into their thematic material.1

The basic questions are these: If the writer is a neurotic, does his neurosis provide the themes of his work or only its motiva- tion? If the latter, then the writer is not to be differentiated from other contemplatives. The other question is: If the writer is neu- rotic in his themes (as Kafka certainly is), how is it that his work is intelligible to his readers? The writer must be doing far more than putting down a case history. He must either be deal- ing with an archetypal pattern (as does Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov) or with a "neurotic personality" pattern widespread in our time.

Freud's view of the writer is not quite steady. Like many of his European colleagues, notably Jung and Rank, he was a man of high general culture, with the educated Austrian's respect for the classics and classical German literature. Then, too, he dis- covered in literature many insights anticipating and corroborat- ing his own — in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in Hamlet, in Diderot's Nephew of Rameau, in Goethe. But he also thought of the author as an obdurate neurotic who, by his creative work, kept himself from a crackup but also from any real cure. "The artist," says Freud, "is originally a man who turns from reality because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction as it is first made, and who then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world of phantasy back to reality; with his special gifts, he moulds his phantasies into a new kind of reality, and men con- cede them a justification as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desired to be, without the circuitous path of creating real alterations in the outer world." The poet, that is, is a daydreamer who is socially validated. Instead of altering his character, he perpetuates and publishes his phantasies.2

Such an account presumably disposes of the philosopher and the "pure scientist" along with the artist, and is, therefore, a kind of positivist "reduction" of contemplative activity to an

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observing and naming instead of acting. It scarcely does justice to the indirect or oblique effect of contemplative work, to the "alterations in the outer world" effected by the readers of nov- elists and philosophers. It also fails to recognize that creation is itself a mode of work in the outer world ; that, while the day- dreamer is content to dream of writing his dreams, one who is actually writing is engaged in an act of externalization and of adjustment to society.

Most writers have drawn back from subscription to orthodox Freudianism or from completing — what some have begun — their psychoanalytic treatment. Most of them have not wanted to be "cured" or "adjusted," either thinking they would cease to write if they were adjusted, or that the adjustment proposed was to a normality or a social environment which they rejected as philistine or bourgeois. Thus Auden has asserted that artists should be as neurotic as they can endure ; and many have agreed with such revisionist Freudians as Horney, Fromm, and Kardiner, that Freud's conceptions of neurosis and normality, drawn from turn-of-the-century Vienna, need to be corrected by Marx and the anthropologists.3

The theory of art as neurosis raises the question of imagina- tion in relation to belief. Is the novelist analogous not only to the romantic child who "tells stories" — i.e., reconstructs his experience till it conforms to his pleasure and credit, but also to the man who suffers from hallucinations, confounding the world of reality with the phantasy world of his hopes and fears? Some novelists (e.g., Dickens) have spoken of vividly seeing and hearing their characters, and, again, of the characters as taking over the control of the story, shaping it to an end different from the novelist's preliminary design. None of the instances cited by psychologists seem to bear out the charge of hallucination ; some novelists may, however, have the capacity, common among chil- dren, but rare thereafter, of eidetic imagery (neither after- images nor memory-images yet perceptual, sensory, in char- acter). In the judgment of Erich Jaensch, this capacity is symp- tomatic of the artist's special integration of perceptual and con- ceptual. He retains, and has developed, an archaic trait of the race: he feels and even sees his thoughts.4

Another trait sometimes assigned to the literary man — more

78 Theory of Literature

specifically, the poet — is synaesthesia, or the linking together of sensory perceptions out of two or more senses, most commonly, hearing and sight {audition coloree: e.g., the trumpet as scarlet). As a physiological trait, it is apparently, like red-green color blindness, a survival from an earlier comparatively undifferen- tiated sensorium. Much more frequently, however, synaesthesia is a literary technique, a form of metaphorical translation, the stylized expression of a metaphysical-aesthetic attitude towards life. Historically, this attitude and style are characteristic of the Baroque and the Romantic periods and correspondingly distaste- ful to rationalist periods in search of the "clear and distinct" rather than "correspondences," analogies, and unifications.5

Since his earliest critical writing, T. S. Eliot has urged an inclusive view of the poet as recapitulating — or, better, preserv- ing intact — his strata of the race-history, of keeping his commu- nication open with his own childhood and that of the race while reaching forward into the future: "The artist," he wrote in 19 18, "is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contem- poraries. . . ." In 1932, he recurs to this conception, speaking particularly of the "auditory imagination" but also of the poet's visual imagery, and especially his recurrent images, which "may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they have come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer." Eliot cites with approval the work of Cailliet and Bede on the relation of the Symbolist Movement to the primitive psyche, summarizing: "the pre-logical mentality persists in civi- lized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet." G

In these passages it is not difficult to discover the influence of Carl Jung and a restatement of the Jungian thesis that beneath the individual "unconscious" — the blocked-off residue of our past, particularly our childhood and infancy — lies the "collective unconscious" — the blocked-off memory of our racial past, even of our pre-humanity.

Jung has an elaborate psychological typology, according to which "extravert" and "introvert" subdivide the four types based upon the dominance respectively of thinking, feeling, intuition, sensation. He does not, as one might have supposed, assign all writers to the intuitive-introverted category, or, more generally, to the category of the introvert. As a further guard

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against simplification, he remarks that some writers reveal their type in their creative work, while others reveal their anti-type, their complement.7

Homo scriftor, it should be conceded, is not a single type. If we devise a romantic blend of Coleridge, Shelley, Baudelaire, and Poe, we must presently remember Racine, Milton, and Goethe, or Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. We may begin by differentiating lyric poets, and Romantic poets, from dra- matic and epic poets and their partial equivalents, the novelists. One of the German typologists, Kretschmer, separates the poets (who are leptosomatic and incline to schizophrenia) from the novelists (who are pyknic of physical structure and manic- depressive or "cycloid" of temperament). There is certainly a typological pair of the "possessed," i.e., the automatic or obses- sive or prophetic poet, and the "maker," the writer who is pri- marily a trained, skillful, responsible craftsman. This distinction seems partly historical: the "possessed" is the primitive poet, the shaman j then the Romantic, the Expressionist, the Surreal- ist, we say. The professional poets, trained in the bardic schools of Ireland and Iceland, the poets of the Renaissance and neo- classicism, are "makers." But of course these types must be understood as not mutually exclusive but polar ; and in the in- stances of great writers — including Milton, Poe, James, and Eliot as well as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky — we have to think of the writer as both "maker" and "possessed," as combining an obsessively held vision of life with a conscious, precise care for the presentation of that vision.8

Perhaps the most influential of modern polarities is Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), that between Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, and the two kinds and processes of art which they represent: the arts of sculpture and of music j the psychological states of the dream and of ecstatic inebriation. These correspond approximately to the clas- sical "maker" and the romantic "possessed" (or foeta vates).

Though he does not avow it, the French psychologist Ribot must owe to Nietzsche the basis for his own division of literary artists between the two chief types of imagination. The former of these, the "plastic," characterizes the sharp visualizer who is primarily incited by observation of the outside world, by per-

80 Theory of Literature

ception, while the "diffluent" (the auditory and symbolic) is that of the symbolist poet or the writer of Romantic tales (Tieck, Hoffmann, Poe), who starts from his own emotions and feelings, projecting them through rhythms and images unified by the compulsion of his Stimmung. It is doubtless from Ribot that Eliot starts in his contrast of Dante's "visual imagination" and Milton's "auditory."

One more specimen may be offered, that of L. Rusu, a con- temporary Rumanian scholar, who distinguishes three basic types of artist: the "type sympathique" (conceived of as gay, spontaneous, bird-like in its creativity), the "type detnoniaque anarchique" and the "type demoniaque equilibre." The exam- ples are not always fortunate ; but there is a general suggestive- ness to the thesis and antithesis of "sympathetic" and "anarchic" with a synthesizing greatest type in which the struggle with the daemon has ended in triumph, an equilibrium of tensions. Rusu cites Goethe as the example of this greatness ; but we shall have to assign it all our greatest names — Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.9

The "creative process" should cover the entire sequence from the subconscious origins of a literary work to those last revisions which, with some writers, are the most genuinely creative part of the whole.

There is a distinction to be made between the mental struc- ture of a poet and the composition of a poem, between impres- sion and expression. Croce has not won the assent of writers and critics to his reduction of both to aesthetic intuition; indeed, something like the contrary reduction has plausibly been argued by C. S. Lewis. But any attempt to dualize the pair as "Erlebnis" and "Dichtung," after the fashion of Dilthey, also fails to sat- isfy. The painter sees as a painter; the painting is the clarifica- tion and completion of his seeing. The poet is a maker of poems; but the matter of his poems is the whole of his percipient life. With the artist, in any medium, every impression is shaped by his art ; he accumulates no inchoate experience.10

"Inspiration," the traditional name for the unconscious factor in creation, is classically associated with the Muses, the daugh- ters of memory, and in Christian thought with the Holy Spirit. By definition, the inspired state of a shaman, prophet, or poet,

Literature and Psychology 8 1

differs from his ordinary state. In primitive societies the shaman may voluntarily be able to put himself into a trance, or he may involuntarily be "possessed" by some ancestral or totemic spirit- control. In modern times, inspiration is felt to have the essential marks of suddenness (like conversion) and impersonality: the work seems written through one.11

May not inspiration be induced? Creative habits there assur- edly are, as well as stimulants and rituals. Alcohol, opium, and other drugs dull the conscious mind, the overcritical "censor," and release the activity of the subconscious. Coleridge and De Quincey made a more grandiose claim — that through opium, a whole new world of experience was opened up for literary treatment ; but in the light of modern clinical reports it appears that the unusual elements in the work of such poets derive from their neurotic psyches and not from the specific effect of the drug. Miss Elizabeth Schneider has shown that De Quincey's "literary 'opium dreams,' so influential on later writing, actually differ little, save in elaborateness, from an entry made in his diary in 1 803 before his use of opium began. . . ." 12

As the mantic poets of primitive communities are taught methods of putting themselves into states conducive to "posses- sion" and as, by spiritual disciplines of the East, the religious are advised to use set places and times for prayer, and special "ejaculations" or mantras, so writers of the modern world learn, or think they learn, rituals for inducing the creative state. Schiller kept rotten apples in his work-desk; Balzac wrote dressed in the robes of a monk. Many writers think "hori- zontally," and even write in bed — writers as different as Proust and Mark Twain. Some require silence and solitude ; but others prefer to write in the midst of the family or the company at a cafe. There are instances, which attract attention as sensational, of authors who work through the night and sleep during the day. Probably this devotion to the night (time of contempla- tion, the dream, the subconscious) is the chief Romantic tradi- tion; but there is, we must remember, a rival Romantic tradi- tion, the Wordsworthian, which exalts the early morning (the freshness of childhood). Some authors assert that they can write only at certain seasons, as did Milton, who held that his poetic vein never flowed happily but from the autumnal equinox to the

82 Theory of Literature

vernal. Dr. Johnson, who found all such theories distasteful, believed that a man might write at any time if he would set himself doggedly to it : he himself wrote confessedly under eco- nomic compulsion. But one can suppose that these seemingly capricious rituals have in common that, by association and habit, they facilitate systematic production.13

Does the mode of transcription have any demonstrable effect on the literary style? Does it matter whether one writes a first draught with pen and ink or composes directly on the type- writer? Hemingway thinks that the typewriter "solidifies one's sentences before they are ready to print," hence makes revision as an integral part of writing difficult j others suppose the in- strument has made for overfluent or journalistic style. No em- pirical investigation has been made. As for dictation, it has been used by authors of very various quality and spirit. Milton dic- tated to an amanuensis verses of Paradise Lost already com- posed in his head. More interesting, however, are the instances of Scott, Goethe in his old age, and Henry James in his, in which, though the structure has been thought out in advance, the verbal texture is extemporized. In the case of James, at least, it seems possible to make some causal connection between dic- tation and the "later manner," which, in its own complexly elo- quent way, is oral and even conversational.14

Of the creative process itself, not much has been said at the degree of generalization profitable to literary theory. We have the individual case histories of particular authors; but these of course will be authors from comparatively recent times only, and authors given to thinking and writing analytically about their art (authors like Goethe and Schiller, Flaubert, James, Eliot and Valery) ; and then we have the long-distance gener- alizations made by psychologists concerning such topics as origi- nality, invention, imagination, finding the common denominator between scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic creation.

Any modern treatment of the creative process will chiefly con- cern the relative parts played by the unconscious and the con- scious mind. It would be easy to contrast literary periods: to distinguish romantic and expressionistic periods which exalt the unconscious from classical and realistic periods which stress in- telligence, revision, communication. But such a contrast may

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readily be exaggerated: the critical theories of classicism and romanticism differ more violently than the creative practice of their best writers.

The authors most given to discussing their art wish naturally to discuss their conscious and technical procedures, for which they may claim credit, rather than their "given," the unelected experience which is their matter or their mirror or their prism. There are obvious reasons why self-conscious artists speak as though their art were impersonal, as though they chose their themes either by editorial compulsion or as a gratuitous aesthetic problem. The most famous document on the topic, Poe's "Phi- losophy of Composition," professes to explain by what methodo- logical strategies, proceeding from what initial aesthetic axioms, his "Raven" was constructed. To defend his vanity against the charge that his horror tales were literary imitations, Poe wrote that their horrors were not of Germany but of the soul; yet that they were of his own soul he could not admit: he professed to be a literary engineer, skilled at manipulating the souls of others. In Poe, the division is terrifyingly complete between the unconscious, which provides the obsessive themes of delirium, torture, and death, and the conscious, which literarily develops them.15

Were we to set up tests for the discovery of literary talent, they would doubtless be of two sorts: one, that for poets in the modern sense, would concern itself with words and their com- bination, with image and metaphor, with linkages semantic and phonetic (i.e., rhyme, assonance, alliteration) ; the latter, for narrative writers (novelists and dramatists) would concern itself with characterization and plot-structure.

The literary man is a specialist in association ("wit"), disso- ciation ("judgment"), recombination (making a new whole out of elements separately experienced). He uses words as his me- dium. As a child, he may collect words as other children col- lect dolls, stamps, or pets. For the poet, the word is not pri- marily a "sign," a transparent counter, but a "symbol," valuable for itself as well as in its capacity of representative ; it may even be an "object" or "thing," dear for its sound or look. Some nov- elists may use words as signs (Scott, Cooper, Dreiser), in which case they may be read to advantage translated into another Ian-

84 Theory of Literature

guage, or remembered as mythic structure; poets normally us& words "symbolically." 16

The traditional phrase, the "association of ideas," is an in- accurate name. Beyond the associative linkage of word with word (marked in some poets) there is the association of the objects to which our mental "ideas" refer. The chief categories of such association are contiguity in time and place, and similarity or dissimilarity. The novelist operates primarily, perhaps, in terms of the former j the poet, in terms of the latter (which we may equate with metaphor) ; but — especially in recent literature — the contrast must not be made too strong.

In his Road to Xanadu , Lowes reconstructs with the acumen of a brilliant detective the process of association by which the vastly and curiously read Coleridge moved from one quotation or allusion to another. As for theory, however, he is soon con- tent: a few purely figurative terms serve him to describe the creative process. He speaks of the "hooked atoms" or (in the phrase of Henry James) of images and ideas as dropping for a time "into the deep well of unconscious cerebration," to emerge having undergone (in the favorite quotation of scholars) a "sea-change." When Coleridge's recondite reading reappears, we sometimes get "marquetry" or "mosaic," sometimes a "miracle." Lowes formally acknowledges that "at the zenith of its power the creative energy is both conscious and unconscious . . . controlling consciously the throng of images which in the reservoir [the "well" of the unconscious] have undergone un- conscious metamorphosis" j but he scarcely attends to or attempts to define the really purposive and constructive in the creative process.17

In the narrative writer, we think of his creation of characters and his "invention" of stories. Since the Romantic period, both have undoubtedly been conceived of too simply as either "original" or copied from real people (a view read back also into the literature of the past) or plagiarism. Yet even in the most "original" novelists like Dickens, character types and nar- rative techniques are chiefly traditional, drawn from the profes- sional, the institutional literary stock.ls

The creation of characters may be supposed to blend, in vary- ing degrees, inherited literary types, persons observed, and the

Literature and Psychology 85

self. The realist, we might say, chiefly observes behavior or "empathizes," while the Romantic writer "projects"; yet it is to be doubted that mere observation can suffice for life-like characterization. Faust, Mephistopheles, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister are all, says one psychologist, "projections into fiction of various aspects of Goethe's own nature." The novelist's po- tential selves, including those selves which are viewed as evil, are all potential fersonae. "One man's mood is another man's character." Dostoevsky's four brothers Karamazov are all aspects of Dostoevsky. Nor should we suppose that a novelist is neces- sarily limited to observation in his heroines. "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" says Flaubert. Only selves recognized from within as potential can become "living characters," not "flat" but "round." Whatever characters a novelist has succeeded with must be parts of himself, since only from himself, and not ex nihiloy could he give them life.19

What kind of relation have these "living characters" to the novelist's actual self? The more numerous and separate his char- acters, the less definite his own "personality," it would seem. Shakespeare disappears into his plays; neither in them, nor in anecdote, do we get any sense of a sharply defined and indi- viduated character comparable to that of Ben Jonson. The char- acter of the poet, Keats once wrote, is to have no self: "it is everything and nothing. ... It has as much delight in con- ceiving an lago as an Imogen. ... A Poet is the most un- poetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity — he is continually informing and filling some other body." 20

All these theories we have discussed belong actually to the psychology of the writer. The processes of his creation are the legitimate object of the psychologists' investigative curiosity. They can classify the poet according to physiological and psy- chological types; they can describe his mental ills; they may even explore his subconscious mind. The evidence of the psy- chologist may come from unliterary documents or it may be drawn from the works themselves. In the latter case, it needs to be checked with the documentary evidence, to be carefully interpreted.

Can psychology, in its turn, be used to interpret and evaluate the literary works themselves? Psychology obviously can illumi-

86 Theory of Literature

nate the creative process. As we have seen, attention has been given to the varying methods of composition, to the habits of authors in revising and rewriting. There has been study of the genesis of works: the early stages, the drafts, the rejected read- ings. Yet the critical relevance of much of this information, especially the many anecdotes about writers' habits, is surely overrated. A study of revisions, corrections, and the like has more which is literarily profitable, since, well used, it may help us perceive critically relevant fissures, inconsistencies, turnings, distortions in a work of art. Analyzing how Proust composed his cyclic novel, Feuillerat illuminates the later volumes, ena- bling us to distinguish several layers in their text. A study of variants seems to permit glimpses into an author's workshop.21 Yet if we examine drafts, rejections, exclusions, and cuts more soberly, we conclude them not, finally, necessary to an under- standing of the finished work or to a judgment upon it. Their interest is that of any alternative, i.e., they may set into relief the qualities of the final text. But the same end may very well be achieved by devising for ourselves alternatives, whether or not they have actually passed through the author's mind. Keats' verses in the "Ode to the Nightingale":

The same [voice] that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

may gain something from our knowing that Keats considered "ruthless seas" and even "keelless seas." But the status of "ruthless" or "keelless," by chance preserved, does not essen- tially differ from "dangerous," "empty," "barren," "shipless," "cruel," or any other adjective the critic might invoke. They do not belong to the work of art; nor do these genetic questions dispense with the analysis and evaluation of the actual work.22 There remains the question of "psychology" in the works themselves. Characters in plays and novels are judged by us to be "psychologically" true. Situations are praised and plots accepted because of this same quality. Sometimes, a psycho- logical theory, held either consciously or dimly by an author, seems to fit a figure or a situation. Thus Lily Campbell has argued that Hamlet fits the type of "sanguine man's suffering

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from melancholy adust" known to the Elizabethans from their psychological theories. In like fashion Oscar Campbell has tried to show that Jaques, in As You Like It, is a case of "unnatural melancholy produced by adustion of phlegm." Walter Shandy could be shown to suffer from the disease of linguistic associa- tionism described in Locke. Stendhal's hero Julien Sorel is de- scribed in terms of the psychology of Destutt de Tracy, and the different kinds of love relationship are obviously classified ac- cording to Stendhal's own book De ly Amour. Rodion Raskol- nikov's motives and feelings are analyzed in a way which sug- gests some knowledge of clinical psychology. Proust certainly has a whole psychological theory of memory, important even for the organization of his work. Freudian psychoanalysis is used quite consciously by novelists such as Conrad Aiken or Waldo Frank.23

The question may be raised, of course, whether the author has really succeeded in incorporating psychology into his figures and their relationships. Mere statements of his knowledge or theories would not count. They would be "matter" or "content," like any other type of information to be found in literature, e.g., facts from navigation, astronomy, or history. In some cases, the reference to contemporary psychology may be doubted or minimized. The attempts to fit Hamlet or Jaques into some scheme of Elizabethan psychology seem mistaken, because Elizabethan psychology was contradictory, confusing, and con- fused, and Hamlet and Jaques are more than types. Though Raskolnikov and Sorel fit certain psychological theories, they do so only incompletely and intermittently. Sorel sometimes be- haves in a most melodramatic manner. Raskolnikov's initial crime is inadequately motivated. These books are not primarily psychological studies or expositions of theories but dramas or melodramas, where striking situations are more important than realistic psychological motivation. If one examines "stream of consciousness" novels, one soon discovers that there is no "real" reproduction of the actual mental processes of the subject, that the stream of consciousness is rather a device of dramatizing the mind, of making us aware concretely what Benjy, the idiot in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, is like, or what Mrs.

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Bloom is like. But there is little that seems scientific or even "realistic" about the device.24

Even if we assume that an author succeeds in making his fig- ures behave with "psychological truth," we may well raise the question whether such "truth" is an artistic value. Much great art continuously violates standards of psychology, either con- temporary with it or subsequent. It works with improbable situa- tions, with fantastic motifs. Like the demand for social realism, psychological truth is a naturalistic standard without universal validity. In some cases, to be sure, psychological insight seems to enhance artistic value. In such cases, it corroborates important artistic values, those of complexity and coherence. But such in- sight can be reached by other means than a theoretical knowl- edge of psychology. In the sense of a conscious and systematic theory of the mind and its workings, psychology is unnecessary to art and not in itself of artistic value.25

For some conscious artists, psychology may have tightened their sense of reality, sharpened their powers of observation or allowed them to fall into hitherto undiscovered patterns. But, in itself, psychology is only preparatory to the act of creation ; and in the work itself, psychological truth is an artistic value only if it enhances coherence and complexity — if, in short, it is art.

CHAPTER IX

Literature and Society

Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation. Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and meter are social in their very nature. They are conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society. But, fur- thermore, literature "imitates" "life" 3 and "life" is, in large measure, a social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of the individual have also been objects of literary "imitation." The poet himself is a member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree of social recognition and reward} he addresses an audi- ence, however hypothetical. Indeed, literature has usually arisen in close connection with particular social institutions} and in primitive society we may even be unable to distinguish poetry from ritual, magic, work, or play. Literature has also a social function, or "use," which cannot be purely individual. Thus a large majority of the questions raised by literary study are, at least ultimately or by implication, social questions: questions of tradition and convention, norms and genres, symbols and myths. With Tomars, one can formulate: "Esthetic institutions are not based upon social institutions: they are not even part of social institutions: they are social institutions of one type and inti- mately interconnected with those others." x

Usually, however, the inquiry concerning "literature and so- ciety" is put more narrowly and externally. Questions are asked about the relations of literature to a given social situation, to an economic, social, and political system. Attempts are made to describe and define the influence of society on literature and to prescribe and judge the position of literature in society. This sociological approach to literature is particularly cultivated by those who profess a specific social philosophy. Marxist critics not only study these relations between literature and society, but

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also have their clearly defined conception of what these relations should be, both in our present society and in a future "classless" society. They practice evaluative, "judicial" criticism, based on non-literary political, and ethical criteria. They tell us not only what were and are the social relations and implications of an author's work but what they should have been or ought to be.2 They are not only students of literature and society but prophets of the future, monitors, propagandists; and they have difficulty in keeping these two functions separate.

The relation between literature and society is usually discussed by starting with the phrase, derived from De Bonald, that "literature is an expression of society." But what does this axiom mean? If it assumes that literature, at any given time, mirrors the current social situation "correctly," it is false ; it is common- place, trite, and vague if it means only that literature depicts some aspects of social reality.3 To say that literature mirrors or expresses life is even more ambiguous. A writer inevitably ex- presses his experience and total conception of life ; but it would be manifestly untrue to say that he expresses the whole of life — or even the whole life of a given time — completely and exhaus- tively. It is a specific evaluative criterion to say that an author should express the life of his own time fully, that he should be "representative" of his age and society. Besides, of course, the terms "fully" and "representative" require much interpre- tation: in most social criticism they seem to mean that an author should be aware of specific social situations, e.g., of the plight of the proletariat, or even that he should share a specific attitude and ideology of the critic.

But it seems best to postpone the problem of evaluative criti- cism till we have disengaged the actual relations between lit- erature and society. These descriptive (as distinct from norma- tive) relations admit of rather ready classification.

First, there is the sociology of the writer and the profession and institutions of literature, the whole question of the economic basis of literary production, the social provenience and status of the writer, his social ideology, which may find expression in extraliterary pronouncements and activities. Then there is the problem of the social content, the implications and social pur- pose of the works of literature themselves. Lastly, there are the

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problems of the audience and the actual social influence of lit- erature. The question how far literature is actually determined by or dependent on its social setting, on social change and de- velopment, is one which, in one way or another, will enter into all the three divisions of our problem: the sociology of the writer, the social content of the works themselves, and the in- fluence of literature on society. We shall have to decide what is meant by dependence or causation ; and ultimately we shall ar- rive at the problem of cultural integration and specifically at how our own culture is integrated.

Since every writer is a member of society, he can be studied as a social being. Though his biography is the main source, such a study can easily widen into one of the whole milieu from which he came and in which he lived. It will be possible to ac- cumulate information about the social provenience, the family background, the economic position of writers. We can show what was the exact share of aristocrats, bourgeois, and proletarians in the history of literature; for example, we can demonstrate the predominant share which the children of the professional and commercial classes take in the production of American litera- ture.4 Statistics can establish that, in modern Europe, literature recruited its practitioners largely from the middle classes, since aristocracy was preoccupied with the pursuit of glory or leisure while the lower classes had little opportunity for education. In England, this generalization holds good only with large reser- vations. The sons of peasants and workmen appear infrequently in older English literature: exceptions such as Burns and Car- lyle are partly explicable by reference to the democratic Scottish school system. The role of the aristocracy in English literature was uncommonly great — partly because it was less cut off from the professional classes than in other countries, where there was no primogeniture. But, with a few exceptions, all modern Rus- sian writers before Goncharov and Chekhov were aristocratic in origin. Even Dostoevsky was technically a nobleman, though his father, a doctor in a Moscow Hospital for the Poor, acquired land and serfs only late in his life.

It is easy enough to collect such data but harder to interpret them. Does social provenience prescribe social ideology and allegiance? The cases of Shelley, Carlyle, and Tolstoy are ob-

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vious examples of such "treason" to one's class. Outside of Russia, most Communist writers are not proletarian in origin. Soviet and other Marxist critics have carried out extensive investigations to ascertain precisely both the exact social provenience and the social allegiance of Russian writers. Thus P. N. Sakulin bases his treat- ment of recent Russian literature on careful distinctions between the respective literatures of the peasants, the small bourgeoisie, the democratic intelligentsia, the declasse intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and the revolutionary proletariat.5 In the study of older literature, Russian scholars attempt elab- orate distinctions between the many groups and sub-groups of the Russian aristocracy to whom Pushkin and Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy may be shown to have belonged by virtue of their inherited wealth and early associations.6 But it is difficult to prove that Pushkin represented the interests of the impoverished landed nobility and Gogol those of the Ukrainian small land- holder ; such a conclusion is indeed disproved by the general ideology of their works and by the appeal the works have made beyond the confines of a group, a class, and a time.7

The social origins of a writer play only a minor part in the questions raised by his social status, allegiance, and ideology; for writers, it is clear, have often put themselves at the service of another class. Most Court poetry was written by men who, though born in lower estate, adopted the ideology and taste of their patrons.

The social allegiance, attitude, and ideology of a writer can be studied not only in his writings but also, frequently, in biograph- ical extra-literary documents. The writer has been a citizen, has pronounced on questions of social and political importance, has taken part in the issues of his time.

Much work has been done upon political and social views of individual writers; and in recent times more and more attention has been devoted to the economic implications of these views. Thus L. C. Knights, arguing that Ben Jonson's economic attitude was profoundly medieval, shows how, like several of his fellow- dramatists, he satirized the rising class of usurers, monopolists, speculators, and "undertakers." s Many works of literature — e.g., the "histories" of Shakespeare and Swift's Gulliver's Travels — have been reinterpreted in close relation to the political context

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of the time.9 Pronouncements, decisions, and activities should never be confused with the actual social implications of a writer's works. Balzac is a striking example of the possible division j for, though his professed sympathies were all with the old order, the aristocracy, and the Church, his instinct and imagination were far more engaged by the acquisitive type, the speculator, the new strong man of the bourgeoisie. There may be a considerable dif- ference between theory and practice, between profession of faith and creative ability.

These problems of social origins, allegiance, and ideology will, if systematized, lead to a sociology of the writer as a type, or as a type at a particular time and place.10 We can distinguish be- tween writers according to their degree of integration into the social process. It is very close in popular literature, but may reach the extremes of dissociation, of "social distance," in Bo- hemianism, with the foete maudit and the free creative genius. On the whole, in modern times, and in the West, the literary man seems to have lessened his class ties. There has arisen an "intelligentsia," a comparatively independent in-between class of professionals. It will be the task of literary sociology to trace its exact social status, its degree of dependence on the ruling class, the exact economic sources of its support, the prestige of the writer in each society.

The general outlines of this history are already fairly clear. In popular oral literature, we can study the role of the singer or narrator who will depend closely on the favor of his public: the bard in ancient Greece, the scop in Teutonic antiquity, the pro- fessional folk-tale teller in the Orient and Russia. In the ancient Greek city state, the tragedians and such composers of dithyrambs and hymns as Pindar had their special, semireligious position, one slowly becoming more secularized, as we can see when we compare Euripides with Aeschylus. Among the Courts of the Roman Empire, we must think of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid as dependent on the bounty and good will of their Caesar and Maecenas.

In the Middle Ages, there are the monk in his cell, the troubadour and Minnes'dnger at the Court or baron's castle, the vagrant scholars on the roads. The writer is either a clerk or scholar, or he is a singer, an entertainer, a minstrel. But even

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kings like Wenceslaus II of Bohemia or James I of Scotland are now poets — amateurs, dilettantes. In the German Meistersang, artisans are organized in poetic guilds, burghers who practice poetry as a craft. With the Renaissance there arose a compara- tively unattached group of writers, the Humanists, who wan- dered sometimes from country to country and offered their services to different patrons. Petrarch is the first modern foeta laureatuSy possessed of a grandiose conception of his mission, while Aretino is the prototype of the literary journalist, living on blackmail, feared rather than honored and respected.

In the large, the later history is the transition from support by noble or ignoble patrons to that afforded by publishers acting as predictive agents of the reading public. The system of aristo- cratic patronage was not, however, universal. The Church and, soon, the theater supported special types of literature. In Eng- land, the patronage system apparently began to fail early in the eighteenth century. For a time, literature, deprived of its earlier benefactors and not yet fully supported by the reading public, was economically worse off. The early life of Dr. Johnson in Grub Street and his defiance of Lord Chesterfield symbolize these changes. Yet a generation earlier, Pope was able to amass a for- tune from his translation of Homer, lavishly subscribed by nobil- ity and university men.

The great financial rewards, however, came only in the nine- teenth century, when Scott and Byron wielded an enormous influence upon taste and public opinion. Voltaire and Goethe had vastly increased the prestige and independence of the writer on the Continent. The growth of the reading public, the founding of the great reviews like the Edinburgh and the Quarterly , made literature more and more the almost independent "institution" which Prosper de Barante, writing in 1822, claimed it to have been in the eighteenth century.11

As Ashley Thorndike urged, the "outstanding characteristic of the printed matter of the nineteenth century is not its vul- garization, or its mediocrity, but rather its specialization. This printed matter is no longer addressed to a uniform or homo- geneous public: it is divided up among many publics and conse- quently divided by many subjects, interests, and purposes." 12 In Fiction and the Reading Public, which might well be considered

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a homily on Thorndike's text, Mrs. Q. D. Leavis 13 points out that the eighteenth-century peasant who learned to read had to read what the gentry and the university men read ; that the nine- teenth century readers, on the other hand, are properly spoken of not as "the public" but as "publics." Our own time knows still further multiplications in publishing lists and magazine racks: there exist books for 9-10-year olds, books for boys of high school age, books for those who "live alone" j trade journals, house or- gans, Sunday School weeklies, Westerns, true-story romances. Publishers, magazines, and writers all specialize.

Thus a study of the economic basis of literature and of the social status of the writer is inextricably bound up with a study of the audience he addresses and upon which he is dependent finan- cially.14 Even the aristocratic patron is an audience and fre- quently an exacting audience, requiring not only personal adula- tion but also conformity to the conventions of his class. In even earlier society, in the group where folk poetry flourishes, the dependence of the author on the audience is even greater: his work will not be transmitted unless it pleases immediately. The role of the audience in the theater is, at least, as tangible. There have been even attempts to trace the changes in Shakespeare's periods and style to the change in the audience between the open-air Globe, on the South Bank, with its mixed audience, and Blackfriars, a closed hall frequented by the higher classes. It becomes harder to trace the specific relation between author and public at a later time when the reading public rapidly ex- pands, becomes dispersed and heterogeneous, and when the rela- tionships of author and public grow more indirect and oblique. The number of intermediaries between writers and the public increases. We can study the role of such social institutions and associations as the salon, the cafe, the club, the academy, and the university. We can trace the history of reviews and magazines as well as of publishing houses. The critic becomes an important middleman ; a group of connoisseurs, bibliophiles, and collectors may support certain kinds of literature ; and the associations of literary men themselves may help to create a special public of writers or would-be writers. In America especially, women, who, according to Veblen provide vicarious leisure and consumption

^6 Theory of Literature

of the arts for the tired businessman, have become active deter- minants of literary taste.

Still, the old patterns have not been completely replaced. All modern governments support and foster literature in various degrees ; and patronage means, of course, control and super- vision.15 To overrate the conscious influence of the totalitarian state during the last decades would be difficult. It has been both negative — in suppression, book-burning, censorship, silencing, and reprimanding, and positive — in the encouragement of "blood and soil" regionalism or Soviet "socialist realism." The fact that the state has been unsuccessful in creating a literature which, conforming to ideological specifications, is still great art, cannot refute the view that government regulation of literature is effec- tive in offering the possibilities of creation to those who identify themselves voluntarily or reluctantly with the official prescrip- tions. Thus, in Soviet Russia, literature is, at least, in theory again becoming a communal art and the artist has again been integrated into society.

The graph of a book's success, survival, and recrudescence, or a writer's reputation and fame is, mainly, a social phenomenon. In part it belongs, of course, to literary "history," since fame and reputation are measured by the actual influence of a writer on other writers, his general power of transforming and changing the literary tradition. In part, reputation is a matter of critical response: till now, it has been traced chiefly on the basis of more or less formal pronouncements assumed to be representative of a period's "general reader." Hence, while the whole question of the "whirligig of taste" is "social," it can be put on a more defi- nitely sociological basis: detailed work can investigate the actual concordance between a work and the specific public which has made its success ; evidence can be accumulated on editions, copies sold.

The stratification of every society is reflected in the stratifica- tion of its taste. While the norms of the upper classes usually descend to the lower, the movement is sometimes reversed: in- terest in folklore and primitive art is a case in point. There is no necessary concurrence between political and social advancement and aesthetic: leadership in literature had passed to the bour- geoisie long before political supremacy. Social stratification may

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be interfered with and even abrogated in questions of taste by differences of age and sex, by specific groups and associations. Fashion is also an important phenomenon in modern literature, for in a competitive fluid society, the norms of the upper classes, quickly imitated, are in constant need of replacement. Certainly, the present rapid changes of taste seem to reflect the rapid social changes of the last decades and the general loose relation between artist and audience.

The modern writer's isolation from society, illustrated by Grub Street, Bohemia, Greenwich Village, the American ex- patriate, invites sociological study. A Russian socialist, Georgi Plekhanov, believes that the doctrine of "art for art's sake" de- velops when artists feel a "hopeless contradiction between their aims and the aims of the society to which they belong. Artists must be very hostile to their society and they must see no hope of changing it." 16 In his Sociology of Literary Taste, Levin L. Schiicking has sketched out some of these problems j elsewhere, he has studied in detail the role of the family and women as an audience in the eighteenth century.17

Though much evidence has been accumulated, well-substan- tiated conclusions have rarely been drawn concerning the exact relations between the production of literature and its economic foundations, or even concerning the exact influence of the public on a writer. The relationship is obviously not one of mere de- pendence or of passive compliance with the prescriptions of patron or public. Writers may succeed in creating their own spe- cial public ; indeed, as Coleridge knew, every new writer has to create the taste which will enjoy him.

The writer is not only influenced by society: he influences it. Art not merely reproduces Life but also shapes it. People may model their lives upon the patterns of fictional heroes and heroines. They have made love, committed crimes and suicide according to the book, be it Goethe's Sorrows of Werther or Dumas' Musketeers. But can we precisely define the influence of a book on its readers? Will it ever be possible to describe the influence of satire? Did Addison really change the manners of his society or Dickens incite reforms of debtors' prisons, boys' schools, and poorhouses? 1S Was Mrs. Stowe really the "little woman who made the great war"? Has Gone with the Wind

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changed Northern readers' attitudes toward Mrs. Stowe's war? How have Hemingway and Faulkner affected their readers? How great was the influence of literature on the rise of modern nationalism? Certainly the historical novels of Walter Scott in Scotland, of Henryk Sienkiewicz in Poland, of Alois Jirasek in Czechoslovakia, have done something very definite to increase national pride and a common memory of historical events.

We can hypothesize — plausibly, no doubt — that the young are more directly and powerfully influenced by their reading than the old, that inexperienced readers take literature more naively as transcript rather than interpretation of life, that those whose books are few take them in more utter seriousness than do wide and professional readers. Can we advance beyond such conjecture? Can we make use of questionnaires and any other mode of sociological enquiry? No exact objectivity is obtainable, for the attempt at case histories will depend upon the memories and the analytic powers of the interrogated, and their testimonies will need codification and evaluation by a fallible mind. But the question, "How does literature affect its audience?" is an em- pirical one, to be answered, if at all, by the appeal to experience; and, since we are thinking of literature in the broadest sense, and society in the broadest, the appeal must be made to the experi- ence not of the connoisseur alone but to that of the human race. We have scarcely begun to study such questions.19

Much the most common approach to the relations of literature and society is the study of works of literature as social documents, as assumed pictures of social reality. Nor can it be doubted that some kind of social picture can be abstracted from literature. Indeed, this has been one of the earliest uses to which literature has been put by systematic students. Thomas Warton, the first real historian of English poetry, argued that literature has the "peculiar merit of faithfully recording the features of the times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive represen- tation of manners" j20 and to him and many of his antiquarian successors, literature was primarily a treasury of costumes and customs, a source book for the history of civilization, especially of chivalry and its decline. As for modern readers, many of them derive their chief impressions of foreign societies from the read-

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ing of novels, from Sinclair Lewis and Galsworthy, from Balzac and Turgenev.

Used as a social document, literature can be made to yield the outlines of social history. Chaucer and Langland preserve two views of fourteenth-century society. The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales was early seen to offer an almost complete survey of social types. Shakespeare, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, Ben Jonson in several plays, and Thomas Deloney seem to tell us something about the Elizabethan middle class. Addison, Fielding, and Smollett depict the new bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century 5 Jane Austen, the country gentry and country parsons early in the nineteenth century ; and Trollope, Thackeray, and Dickens, the Victorian world. At the turn of the century, Galsworthy shows us the English upper middle classes ; Wells, the lower middle classes ; Bennett, the provincial towns.

A similar series of social pictures could be assembled for American life from the novels of Mrs. Stowe and Howells to those of Farrell and Steinbeck. The life of post-Restoration Paris and France seems preserved in the hundreds of characters moving through the pages of Balzac's Human Comedy; and Proust traced in endless detail the social stratifications of the de- caying French aristocracy. The Russia of the nineteenth-century landowners appears in the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy 5 we have glimpses of the merchant and the intellectual in Chekhov's stories and plays and of collectivized farmers in Sholokhov.

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. One can assemble and exposit the "world" of each, the part each gives to love and marriage, to business, to the professions, its delineation of clergymen, whether stupid or clever, saintly or hypocritical j or one can specialize upon Jane Austen's naval men, Proust's arri- vistes y Howells' married women. This kind of specialization will offer us monographs on the "Relation between Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction," "The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama," or "Irish Americans in Twentieth-Century Fiction."

But such studies seem of little value so long as they take it for granted that literature is simply a mirror of life, a reproduction, and thus, obviously, a social document. Such studies make sense only if we know the artistic method of the novelist studied, can

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say — not merely in general terms, but concretely — in what rela- tion the picture stands to the social reality. Is it realistic by inten- tion? Or is it, at certain points, satire, caricature, or romantic idealization? In an admirably clearheaded study of Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany , Kohn-Bramstedt rightly cautions us: "only a person who has a knowledge of the structure of a society from other sources than purely literary ones is able to find out if, and how far, certain social types and their behavior are reproduced in the novel. . . . What is pure fancy, what realistic observation, and what only an expression of the desires of the author must be separated in each case in a subtle man- ner." 21 Using Max Weber's conception of ideal "social types," the same scholar studies such social phenomena as class hatred, the behavior of the parvenu, snobbery, and the attitude toward the Jews; and he argues that such phenomena are not so much objective facts and behavior patterns as they are complex atti- tudes, thus far much better illustrated in fiction than elsewhere. Students of social attitudes and aspirations can use literary mate- rial, if they know how to interpret it properly. Indeed, for older periods, they will be forced to use literary or at least semiliterary material for want of evidence from the sociologists of the time: writers on politics, economics, and general public questions.

Heroes and heroines of fiction, villains and adventuresses, af- ford interesting indications of such social attitudes.22 Such studies constantly lead into the history of ethical and religious ideas. We know the medieval status of the traitor and the medieval attitude towards usury, which, lingering on into the Renaissance, gives us Shylock and, later, Moliere's L'Avare. To which "deadly sin" have later centuries chiefly assigned the villain; and is his vil- lainy conceived of in terms of personal or social morality? Is he, for example, artist at rape or embezzler of widows' bonds?

The classic case is that of Restoration English comedy. Was it simply a realm of cuckoldom, a fairyland of adulteries and mock marriages as Lamb believed? Or was it, as Macaulay would have us believe, a faithful picture of decadent, frivolous, and brutal aristocracy? 23 Or should we not rather, rejecting both alterna- tives, see what particular social group created this art for what audience? And should we not see whether it was a naturalistic or a stylized art? Should we not be mindful of satire and irony,

Literature and Society 1 01

self-ridicule and fantasy? Like all literature, these plays are not simply documents ; they are plays with stock figures, stock situa- tions, with stage marriages and stage conditions of marriage settlements. E. E. Stoll concludes his many arguments on these matters: "Evidently this is not a 'real society,' not a faithful picture even of the 'fashionable life': evidently it is not England, even 'under the Stuarts,' whether since or before the Revolution or the Great Rebellion." 24 Still, the salutary emphasis upon con- vention and tradition to be found in writing like Stoll's cannot completely discharge the relations between literature and society. Even the most abstruse allegory, the most unreal pastoral, the most outrageous farce can, properly interrogated, tell us some- thing of the society of a time.

Literature occurs only in a social context, as part of a culture, in a milieu. Taine's famous triad of race, milieu, and moment has, in practice, led to an exclusive study of the milieu. Race is an un- known fixed integral with which Taine operates very loosely, and moment can be dissolved into the concept of milieu. A difference of time means simply a different setting, but the actual question of analysis arises only if we try to break up the term "milieu." The most immediate setting of a work of literature, we shall then recognize, is its linguistic and literary tradition, and this tra- dition in turn is encompassed by a general cultural "climate." Only far less directly can literature be connected with concrete economic political and social situations. Of course there are inter- relationships between all spheres of human activities. Eventually we can establish some connection between the modes of produc- tion and literature, since an economic system usually implies some system of power and must control the forms of family life. And the family plays an important role in education, in the con- cepts of sexuality and love, in the whole convention and tradition of human sentiment. Thus it is possible to link even lyric poetry with love conventions, religious preconceptions, and conceptions of nature. But these relationships may be devious and oblique.

It seems impossible, however, to accept a view constituting any particular human activity the "starter" of all the others, whether it be the theory of Taine, who reduces all creativity to a mysterious biological factor, "race," or that of Hegel and the Hegelians, who consider "spirit" the only moving force in his-

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tory, or that of the Marxists, who derive everything from the mode of production. No radical technological changes took place in the many centuries between the early Middle Ages and the rise of Capitalism, while cultural life, and literature in particular, underwent most profound transformations. Nor does literature always show, at least immediately, much awareness of an epoch's technological changes: the Industrial Revolution penetrated English novels only in the forties of the nineteenth century (with Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, and Charlotte Bronte), long after its symptoms were plainly visible to economists and social thinkers.

The social situation, one should admit, seems to determine the possibility of the realization of certain aesthetic values, but not the values themselves. We can determine in general outlines what art forms are possible in a given society and which are im- possible, but it is not possible to predict that these art forms will actually come into existence. Many Marxists — and not Marxists only — attempt far too crude short cuts from economics to litera- ture. For example, John Maynard Keynes, not an unliterary person, has ascribed the existence of Shakespeare to the fact that "we were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare at the moment when he presented himself. Great writers flourished in the atmosphere of buoyancy, exhilaration, and the freedom of economic cares felt by the governing class, which is engendered by profit inflations." 25 But profit inflations did not elicit great poets elsewhere — for instance, during the boom of the twenties in the United States — nor is this view of the optimistic Shake- speare quite beyond dispute. No more helpful is the opposite formula, devised by a Russian Marxist: "Shakespeare's tragic outlook on the world was consequential upon his being the dramatic expression of the feudal aristocracy, which in Eliza- beth's day had lost their former dominant position." 26 Such con- tradictory judgments, attached to vague categories like optimism and pessimism, fail to deal concretely with either the ascertain- able social content of Shakespeare's plays, his professed opinions on political questions (obvious from the chronicle plays), or his social status as a writer.

One must be careful, however, not to dismiss the economic approach to literature by means of such quotations. Marx him-

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self, though on occasion he made some fanciful judgments, in general acutely perceived the obliqueness of the relationship between literature and society. In the Critique of Political Econ- omy, he admits that "certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organization. Witness the example of the Greeks as com- pared with the modern nations or even Shakespeare." 2T He also understood that the modern division of labor leads to a definite contradiction between the three factors ("moments" in his Hegel- ian terminology) of the social process — "productive forces," "social relations," and "consciousness." He expected, in a manner which scarcely seems to avoid the Utopian, that in the future classless society these divisions of labor would again disappear, that the artist would again be integrated into society. He thought it possible that everybody could be an excellent, even an original, painter. "In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint." 2S

The "vulgar Marxist" tells us that this or that writer was a bourgeois who voiced reactionary or progressive opinions about Church and State. There is a curious contradiction between this avowed determinism which assumes that "consciousness" must follow "existence," that a bourgeois cannot help being one, and the usual ethical judgment which condemns him for these very opinions. In Russia, one notes, writers of bourgeois origin who have joined the proletariat have constantly been subjected to suspicions of their sincerity, and every artistic or civic failing has been ascribed to their class origin. Yet if progress, in the Marxist sense, leads directly from feudalism via bourgeois capitalism to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," it would be logical and con- sistent for a Marxist to praise the "progressives" at any time. He should praise the bourgeois when, in the early stages of capi- talism, he fought the surviving feudalism. But frequently Marx- ists criticize writers from a twentieth-century point of view, or, like Smirnov and Grib, Marxists very critical of "vulgar sociol- ogy," rescue the bourgeois writer by a recognition of his universal humanity. Thus Smirnov comes to the conclusion that Shake- speare was the "humanist ideologist of the bourgeoisie, the ex- ponent of the program advanced by them when, in the name of

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humanity, they first challenged the feudal order." 29 But the con- cept of humanism, of the universality of art, surrenders the cen- tral doctrine of Marxism, which is essentially relativistic.

Marxist criticism is at its best when it exposes the implied, or latent, social implications of a writer's work. In this respect it is a technique of interpretation parallel to those founded upon the insights of Freud, or of Nietzsche, or of Pareto, or to the Scheler-Mannheim "sociology of knowledge." All these intel- lectuals are suspicious of the intellect, the professed doctrine, the mere statement. The central distinction is that Nietzsche's and Freud's methods are psychological, while Pareto's analysis of "residues" and "derivatives" and the Scheler-Mannheim tech- nique of the analysis of "ideology" are sociological.

The "sociology of knowledge," as illustrated in the writings of Max Scheler, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, has been worked out in detail and has some definite advantages over its rivals.30 It not only draws attention to the presuppositions and implica- tions of a given ideological position, but it also stresses the hidden assumptions and biases of the investigator himself. It is thus self- critical and self-conscious, even to the extreme of morbidity. It is also less prone than either Marxism or psychoanalysis to isolate one single factor as the sole determinant of change. Whatever their failure at isolating the religious factor, the studies of Max Weber in the sociology of religion are valuable for their attempt to describe the influence of ideological factors on economic be- havior and institutions— for earlier emphasis had been entirely upon the economic influence on ideology.31 A similar investiga- tion of the influences of literature on social change would be very welcome, though it would run into analogous difficulties. It seems as hard to isolate the strictly literary factor as the religious factor and to answer the question whether the influence is due to the particular factor itself, or to other forces for which the factor is a mere "shrine" or "channel." 82

The "sociology of knowledge" suffers, however, from its exces- sive historicism; it has come to ultimately skeptical conclusions despite its thesis that "objectivity" can be achieved by synthe- sizing, and thus neutralizing, the conflicting perspectives. It suf- fers also, in application to literature, from its inability to connect "content" with "form." Like Marxism, preoccupied with an ir-

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rationalistic explanation, it is unable to provide a rational founda- tion for aesthetics and hence criticism and evaluation. This is, of course, true of all extrinsic approaches to literature. No causal study can do theoretical justice to the analysis, description, and evaluation of a literary work.

But the problem of "literature and society" can obviously be put in different terms, those of symbolic or meaningful rela- tions: of consistency, harmony, coherence, congruence, struc- tural identity, stylistic analogy, or with whatever term we want to designate the integration of a culture and the interrelationship among the different activities of men. Sorokin, who has analyzed the various possibilities clearly,33 has concluded that the degree of integration varies from society to society.

Marxism never answers the question of the degree of de- pendence of literature on society. Hence many of the basic prob- lems have scarcely begun to be studied. Occasionally, for ex- ample, one sees arguments for the social determination of genres, as in the case of the bourgeois origin of the novel, or even the details of their attitudes and forms, as in E. B. Burgum's not very convincing view that tragicomedy "results from the impact of middle class seriousness upon aristocratic frivolity." 34 Are there definite social determinants of such a broad literary style as Romanticism, which, though associated with the bourgeoisie, was anti-bourgeois in its ideology, at least in Germany, from its very beginning? 35 Though some kind of dependence of literary ide- ologies and themes on social circumstances seems obvious, the social origins of forms and styles, genres and actual literary norms have rarely been established.36

It has been attempted most concretely in studies of the social origins of literature: in Bucher's one-sided theory of the rise of poetry from labor rhythms ; in the many studies by anthropolo- gists of the magic role of early art; in George Thomson's very learned attempt to bring Greek tragedy into concrete relations with cult and rituals and with a definite democratic social revolu- tion at the time of Aeschylus; in Christopher Caudwell's some- what naive attempt to study the sources of poetry in tribal emo- tions and in the bourgeois "illusion" of individual freedom.37

Only if the social determination of forms could be shown con- clusively could the question be raised whether social attitudes

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cannot become "constitutive" and enter a work of art as effective parts of its artistic value. One can argue that "social truth," while not, as such, an artistic value, corroborates such artistic values as complexity and coherence. But it need not be so. There is great literature which has little or no social relevance j social literature is only one kind of literature and is not central in the theory of literature unless one holds the view that literature is primarily an "imitation" of life as it is and of social life in particular. But literature is no substitute for sociology or politics. It has its own justification and aim.

CHAPTER X

Literature and Ideas

The relation between literature and ideas can be conceived in very diverse ways. Frequently literature is thought of as a form of philosophy, as "ideas" wrapped in form; and it is ana- lyzed to yield "leading ideas." Students are encouraged to sum- marize and to abstract works of art in terms of such generaliza- tions. Much older scholarship has pushed this method to absurd extremes j one thinks especially of such German Shakespeare scholars as Ulrici, who formulated the central idea of the Mer- chant of Venice as "summum jus summa injuria." x Though to- day most scholars have become wary of such overintellectualiza- tion, there are still discussions which treat literature as though it were a philosophical tract.

The opposite view is to deny any philosophical relevance to literature. In a lecture on Philosophy and Poetry , George Boas has stated this view quite bluntly: "Ideas in poetry are usually stale and false, and no one older than sixteen would find it worth his while to read poetry merely for what it says." 2 According to T. S. Eliot, neither "Shakespeare nor Dante did any real think- ing." 3 One may grant Boas that the intellectual content of most poetry (and he seems to be thinking chiefly of lyrical poetry) is usually much exaggerated. If we analyze many famous poems admired for their philosophy, we frequently discover mere com- monplaces concerning man's mortality or the uncertainty of fate. The oracular sayings of Victorian poets such as Browning, which have struck many readers as revelatory, often turn out mere portable versions of primeval truths.4 Even if we seem to be able to carry away some general proposition such as Keats' "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," we are left to make what we can of these conversible propositions, unless we see them as the con- clusion of a poem which has to do with illustrating the per- manence of art and the impermanence of human emotions and

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natural beauty. The reduction of a work of art to a doctrinal statement — or, even worse, the isolation of passages — is dis- astrous to understanding the uniqueness of a work: it disinte- grates its structure and imposes alien criteria of value.

To be sure, literature can be treated as a document in the his- tory of ideas and philosophy, for literary history parallels and reflects intellectual history. Frequently either explicit statements or allusions show the allegiance of a poet to a specific philosophy, or establish that he has had some direct acquaintance with phi- losophies once well-known or at least that he is aware of their general assumptions.

In recent decades, a whole group of American scholars have devoted themselves to a study of these questions, calling their method the "History of Ideas," a somewhat misleading term for the specific, limited method developed and advocated by A. O. Lovejoy.5 Lovejoy has brilliantly demonstrated its effectiveness in a book on The Great Chain oj Being which traces the idea of a scale of nature from Plato to Schelling, pursuing the idea through all modes of thought: philosophy in the strict sense, scientific thought, theology, and — specifically — literature. The method differs from history of philosophy in two respects. Love- joy limits the study of the history of philosophy to the great thinkers and conceives of his own "history of ideas" as inclusive also of small thinkers, including the poets, conceived as deriva- tive from the thinkers. He further distinguishes that the history of philosophy studies the great systems, while the history of ideas traces unit ideas, i.e., breaks up the systems of philosophers into their component parts, studying individual motifs.

The particular deliminations made by Lovejoy, while per- fectly defensible as the basis of an individual study like The Great Chain of Being, fail to be generally convincing. The his- tory of philosophical concepts belongs properly enough to the history of philosophy and was so included by Hegel and Windel- band long ago. Of course it is as one-sided to study unit ideas to the exclusion of systems as it would be to restrict literary history to the history of versification or diction or imagery, neglecting the study of those coherent wholes, specific works of art. "His- tory of Ideas" is simply a specific approach to the general history of thought, using literature only as document and illustration.

Literature and Ideas 1 09

This assumption is obvious when Lovejoy calls ideas in seri- ous reflective literature in great part "philosophical ideas in dilution." 6

None the less, the "History of Ideas" must be welcomed by literary students, and not merely for the indirect light a better comprehension of philosophical history must throw on literature. Lovejoy 's method reacts against the excessive intellectualism of most historians of thought. It recognizes that thought, or at least the choice between systems of thought, is frequently determined by assumptions, by more or less unconscious mental habits ; that people are influenced in their adoption of ideas by their sus- ceptibility to diverse kinds of metaphysical pathos ; and that ideas are frequently key words, pious phrases, which must be studied semantically. Leo Spitzer, who has disapproved of many fea- tures of Lovejoy's "History of Ideas," has himself given excel- lent examples of how to combine intellectual and semantic his- tory in studies tracing such words as "milieu," "ambiance," and "Stimmung" through all their associations and ramifications in history.7 Finally, Lovejoy's scheme has one most attractive fea- ture. It explicitly ignores the division of literary and historical studies by nationalities and languages.

The value for the exegesis of a poetic text of a knowledge of the history of philosophy and of general thought can scarcely be overrated. Besides, literary history — especially when occupied with such writers as Pascal, Emerson, Nietzsche — has constantly to treat problems of intellectual history. Indeed, the history of criticism is simply a part of the history of aesthetic thought — at least, if it is treated in itself, without reference to the creative work contemporary with it.

Without doubt, English literature can be shown to reflect the history of philosophy. Renaissance Platonism pervades Eliza- bethan poetry: Spenser wrote four hymns describing the Neo- Platonic ascent from matter to Heavenly Beauty, and in the Faerie Queene, decides the dispute between Mutability and Na- ture in favor of an eternal, unchangeable order. In Marlowe we hear reverberations of the contemporary Italianate atheism and skepticism. Even in Shakespeare, there are many traces of Renaissance Platonism, e.g., in the famous speech of Ulysses in Troilus, together with echoes of Montaigne and tags from

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Stoicism. We can trace Donne's study of the Fathers and the Schoolmen as well as the impact of the new science upon his sensibility. Milton himself evolved a highly personal theology and cosmogony, which, according to one interpretation, combine materialistic and Platonic elements and draw both on Oriental thought and on the doctrines of such contemporary sects as the mortalists.

Dryden has written philosophical poetry which expounds the theological and political controversies of the time and certainly demonstrates his awareness of fideism, modern science, skepti- cism, and deism. Thomson can be described as the expounder of a system combining Newtonianism and Shaftesbury. Pope's Essay on Man abounds in philosophical echoes; and Gray versi- fied Locke's theories in Latin hexameters. Laurence Sterne was an enthusiastic admirer of Locke and used his ideas of association and duration, often for comic purposes, throughout Tristram- Shandy.

Among the great Romantic poets, Coleridge was himself a technical philosopher of great ambition and some standing. He was a detailed student of Kant and Schelling and expounded their views, even though not always critically. Through Cole- ridge, whose own poetry seems little affected by his systematic philosophy, many German or generally Neo-Platonic ideas en- tered or re-entered the tradition of English poetry. There are traces of Kant in Wordsworth, and it has been shown that he was a close student of the psychologist Hartley. Shelley at first was deeply influenced by the French eighteenth-century philosofihes and their English disciple Godwin, but later assimilated ideas derived from Spinoza, Berkeley, and Plato.

The Victorian controversy between science and religion finds well-known expression in Tennyson and Browning. Swinburne and Hardy reflect the pessimistic atheism of the time, while Hopkins shows the effect of his study of Duns Scotus. George Eliot translated Feuerbach and Strauss, Shaw read Samuel But- ler and Nietzsche. Most recent writers have read Freud or read about him. Joyce knew not only Freud and Jung but Vico, Gior- dano Bruno, and, of course, Thomas Aquinas; Yeats was deeply immersed in theosophy, mysticism, and even Berkeley.

In other literatures, studies of such problems have been pos-

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sibly even more abundant. Numberless are the interpretations of Dante's theology. In France, M. Gilson has applied his learning in medieval philosophy to the exegesis of passages in Rabelais and Pascal.8 Paul Hazard has written skillfully on the Crisis of European Consciousness toward the end of the seventeenth cen- tury, tracing the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment and, in a new work, their establishment throughout Europe.9 In Ger- many, studies abound on Schiller's Kantianism, Goethe's con- tacts with Plotinus and Spinoza, Kleist's with Kant, Hebbel's with Hegel, and such topics. In Germany, indeed, the collabora- tion between philosophy and literature was frequently extremely close, especially during the Romantic period, when Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel lived with the poets and when even as pure a poet as Holderlin thought it incumbent upon him to speculate systematically on questions of epistemology and meta- physics. In Russia, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have been treated frequently simply as philosophers and religious thinkers, and even Pushkin has been made to yield an elusive wisdom.10 At the time of the Symbolist movement, a whole school of "meta- physical critics" arose in Russia, interpreting literature in terms of their own philosophical positions. Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Shestov, Berdayev, Volynsky, and Vyacheslav Ivanov all wrote on Dostoevsky or around him,11 sometimes using him merely as a text for preaching their own doctrine, sometimes reducing him to a system and, rarely, thinking of him as a tragic novelist.

But at the end, or better at the beginning, of such studies some questions must be raised which are not always answered clearly. How far do mere echoes of philosophers' thought in the poet's work define the view of an author, especially a dramatic author like Shakespeare? How clearly and systematically were philosophical views held by poets and other writers? Isn't it fre- quently an anachronism of the worst sort to assume that a writer in older centuries held a personal philosophy, felt even the de- mand for it, or lived among people who would encourage any personal pattern of opinions or be interested in it? Do not liter- ary historians frequently grossly overrate, even among recent authors, the coherence, clarity, and scope of their philosophical convictions?

Even if we think of authors who were highly self-conscious or

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even, as in a few instances, speculative philosophers themselves and wrote poetry which could be called "philosophical," we shall still have to ask such questions as these: Is poetry better because it is more philosophical? Can poetry be judged according to the value of the philosophy which it adopts or according to the de- gree of insight which it shows into the philosophy it adopts? Or can it be judged by criteria of philosophical originality, by the de- gree with which it modified traditional thought? T. S. Eliot has preferred Dante to Shakespeare because the philosophy of Dante seemed to him sounder than that of Shakespeare. A German philosopher, Hermann Glockner, has argued that poetry and philosophy have never been farther apart than in Dante because Dante took over a finished system without changing it.12 The true collaboration between philosophy and poetry occurred when there were poets-thinkers like Empedocles in the pre-Socratic age of Greece, or during the Renaissance when Ficino or Gior- dano Bruno wrote poetry and philosophy, poetic philosophy and philosophical poetry, and later in Germany, when Goethe was both a poet and an original philosopher.

But are philosophical standards of this sort criteria of literary criticism? Is Pope's Essay on Man to be condemned because it shows considerable eclecticism in its sources and consistency only passage by passage, while the total is riddled with over-all inco- herencies? Does the fact that we can show Shelley to have pro- gressed, at a certain time of his life, from the crude materialism of Godwin to some sort of Platonic idealism, make him a better poet or a worse? Can the impression that Shelley's poetry is vague, monotonous, and boring, which seems to be the experience of a new generation of readers, be refuted by showing that, prop- erly interpreted, his philosophy made sense in its time, or that this or that passage is not meaningless but alludes to contempo- rary scientific or pseudo-scientific conceptions? 13 All these criteria are surely based on the intellectualist misunderstanding, on a confusion of the functions of philosophy and art, on a misunder- standing of the way ideas actually enter into literature.

These objections to the excessive intellectualism of the phil- osophical approach have been taken account of in some methods developed especially in Germany. Rudolf Unger has most clearly defended an approach which, though not systematically ex-

Literature and Ideas 1 1 3

ploited before, had long been used.14 He rightly argues that lit- erature is not philosophical knowledge translated into imagery and verse, but that literature expresses a general attitude toward life, that poets usually answer, unsystematically, questions which are also themes of philosophy but that the poetic mode of an- swering differs in different ages and situations. Unger classifies these "problems" in the following rather arbitrary manner: the problem of fate, by which he means the relation of freedom and necessity, spirit and nature ; the religious "problem," including the interpretation of Christ, the attitude toward sin and salva- tion} the problem of nature, which would include such questions as the feelings for nature, but also questions of myth and magic. Another group of problems Unger calls the problem of man. It concerns questions of the concept of man, but also of man's relation to death, man's concept of love; and finally there is a group of problems of society, family, and state. The attitude of the writers is to be studied in relation to these problems, and in some cases, books have been produced which try to trace the history of these problems in terms of an assumed immanent de- velopment. Walter Rehm has written a large book on the prob- lem of death in German poetry, Paul Kluckhohn on the concep- tion of love in the eighteenth century and the Romantic age.15

In other languages, there is similar work. Mario Praz's Ro- mantic Agony could be described as a book about the problem of sex and death as its Italian title The Fleshy Death, and the Devil 16 suggests. C. S. Lewis' Allegory of Love, besides being a genre history of allegory, contains much about changing atti- tudes toward love and marriage, and Theodore Spencer has written a book on Death and Elizabethan Tragedy which traces in its introductory part the medieval conception of death in con- trast to Renaissance conceptions.17 To give only one example: man in the Middle Ages feared sudden death most, as it pre- cluded preparation and repentance, while Montaigne begins to think that a quick death is best. He has lost the Christian view that death is the aim of life. H. N. Fairchild has attempted to trace religious trends in English eighteenth-century poetry by classifying writers according to the heat of their religious emo- tions.18 In France, Abbe Bremond's voluminous History of

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French Religious Sentiment in the Seventeenth Century draws much of its material from literature} and Monglond and Tra- hard have written very fine studies of sentimentalism, the pre- romantic feeling for nature, and the curious sensibility displayed by the French Revolutionaries.19

If one surveys Unger's list, one must recognize that some of the problems he enumerates are simply philosophical, ideological problems for which the poet has been only, in Sidney's phrase, the "right popular philosopher," while other problems belong rather to a history of sensibility and sentiment than to a history of thought. Sometimes the ideological intermingles with the purely emotional. In his attitude to nature man is profoundly in- fluenced by cosmological and religious speculations but also di- rectly by aesthetic considerations, literary conventions, and pos- sibly even physiological changes in his manner of seeing.20 Land- scape feeling, though also determined by travelers, painters, and garden designers, has been profoundly influenced by poets such as Milton or Thomson and writers like Ruskin.

A history of sentiment will make considerable difficulties, since sentiment is elusive and, at the same time, uniform. The Ger- mans have certainly exaggerated the changes in human attitudes and have constructed schemes of their development which are suspiciously neat. Still, there is little doubt that sentiment changes^ has at the very least its conventions and fashions. Balzac amusingly comments on M. Hulot's frivolous eighteenth-cen- tury attitude to love as different from that of Madame Marneffe, who has the new Restoration conventions of the poor feeble woman, the "sister of charity." 21 The torrents of tears of the eighteenth-century reader and writer are a commonplace of lit- erary history. Gellert, a German poet of intellectual and social standing, cried over the parting of Grandison and Clementine till his handkerchief, his book, his table, and even the floor got wet, and boasted of it in a letter}22 and even Dr. Johnson, not renowned for softheartedness, indulged in tears and sentimental effusions far more unrestrainedly than our contemporaries, at least those of the intellectual classes.23

In the study of the individual writer, Unger's less intellectual- ist point of view also has its advantages, since it tries to define

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less tangibly, less overtly formulated attitudes and ideas. It is less in danger of isolating and reducing the contents of a work of art to mere prose statement, a mere formula.

The study of these attitudes has led some German philos- ophers to speculate about the possibility of reducing them to a few types of W eltanschauung> a term which is used widely enough to include both philosophical ideas and emotional atti- tudes. The most well-known attempt is that of Dilthey, who in his practice as a literary historian has constantly stressed the dif- ference between an idea and an experience (Erlebnis). He finds three main types in the history of thought: 2i positivism, which derives from Democritus and Lucretius and includes Hobbes, the French encyclopedists, and modern materialists and positiv- ists; objective idealism, which includes Heraclitus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel ; and a dualistic idealism, or "Idealism of Freedom," which includes Plato, the Christian theologians, Kant, and Fichte. The first group explains the spiritual by the physical world, the second sees reality as the expression of an internal reality and does not recognize a conflict between being and value, the third assumes the independence of spirit against nature. Dilthey then associates specific authors with these types: Balzac and Stendhal belong to the first type; Goethe to the sec- ond; Schiller to the third. This is a classification not based merely on conscious adherence and pronouncements, but deducible, it is supposed, from even the most unintellectual art. The types are also associated with general psychological attitudes: thus realism with predominance of the intellect, objective idealism with the predominance of feeling, the dualistic idealism with the predominance of will.

Hermann Nohl has tried to show that the types are also ap- plicable to painting and music.25 Rembrandt and Rubens belong to the objective idealists, the pantheists; painters like Velasquez and Hals to the realists; Michelangelo to the subjective idealists. Berlioz belongs to type I, Schubert to type II, Beethoven to type III. The argument from painting and music is important, since it implies that these types can exist also in literature without any overtly intellectual content. Unger has tried to show that the differences will hold good even of small lyrical poems by

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Morike, C. F. Meyer and Liliencron ; 26 he and Nohl tried to show that Weltanschauung can be discovered merely from style or, at least, from scenes in a novel with no direct intellectual con- tent. Here the theory changes into a theory of fundamental artistic styles. Walzel has attempted to link it with the Principles of Art History of Wolfflin and similar typologies.27

The interest of these speculations is considerable, and many variations of the theory here expounded have been invented in Germany. They have also been applied to the history of litera- ture. Walzel, for example, sees, in nineteenth-century Germany and, presumably, European literature, a clear evolution from type II (Goethe's and the Romantics' objective idealism), through type I (realism), which progressively becomes conscious of the phenomenality of the world in impressionism, to a sub- jective, dualistic idealism represented by expressionism, the rep- resentative of type III. Walzel's scheme does not merely state that there was this change but that this change is somehow inter- locking and logical. Pantheism at a certain stage leads to natural- ism, and naturalism leads to impressionism, and the subjectivity of impressionism finally merges into a new idealism. The scheme is dialectical and ultimately Hegelian.

A sober view of these speculations will be skeptical of the neatness of these schemes. It will doubt the sacredness of the number three. Unger himself, for example, distinguishes two types of objective idealism: a harmonious type, represented by Goethe, and a dialectical, in Boehme, Schelling, and Hegel -y and similar objections could be voiced against the types of "posi- tivism," which seems to cover a multitude of frequently highly divergent points of view. But less important than such objections against the details of the classification are the doubts which must arise about the whole assumption behind the undertaking. All typology of this sort leads only to a rough classification of all lit- erature under three, or at the most five or six, headings. The concrete individuality of the poets and their works is ignored or minimized. From a literary point of view, little seems to be achieved by classifying such diverse poets as Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley as "objective idealists." There seems little point in reducing the history of poetry to the permutations of three or

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more types of W eltanschauung. Finally, the position implies a radical and excessive relativism. The assumption must be that these three types are of equal value and that the poet cannot but choose one of them on the basis of his temperament or some fundamentally irrational, merely given attitude toward the world. The implication is that there are only so many types and that every poet is an illustration of one of these types. The whole theory, of course, is based on a general philosophy of history which assumes a close and necessary relation between philosophy and art not only in the individual but in a period and in history. We are led to a discussion of the assumptions of Geistesge- schichte.

Geistesgeschichte may be used widely as an alternative term for intellectual history, for the history of ideas in Lovejoy's sense ; and it has the advantage of being a less intellectualized term than the English. Geist is a wide term which will include the prob- lems described as belonging largely to the history of sentiment. Geist has, however, less desirable associations with the whole conception of an objective "spirit." But Geistesgeschichte is usually understood in Germany in an even more special sense: it assumes that each period has its "time spirit" and aims to "recon- struct the spirit of a time from the different objectivations of an age — from its religion down to its costumes. We look for the totality behind the objects and explain all facts by this spirit of the time."28

It assumes a very tight coherence of all cultural and other activities of man, a complete parallelism of the arts and sciences. The method goes back to suggestions made by the Schlegels and has had its most well-known as well as most extravagant ex- ponent in Spengler. But it has also academic practitioners who are literary historians by profession and who have used the method largely with literary materials. Its practice varies from fairly sober dialecticians like Korff (who traces the history of German literature between 1750 and 1830 in terms of a dialectical move- ment from rationality to irrationality to their Hegelian synthesis) to fantastic, quibbling, pseudo-mystical, verbalistic productions by Cysarz, Deutschbein, Stefansky, and Meissner.29 The method is largely a method of analogy: negative analogy, in so far as it tends to emphasize the differences between a given age and to

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forget the likenesses, and positive analogy, in so far as it tends to emphasize the likenesses among the happenings or productions of a particular period and to forget the differences. The Ro- mantic and the Baroque periods have proved to be particularly happy hunting grounds for such exercises of ingenuity.

A good example is Meissner's Die geisteswissenschajtlichen Grundlagen des englischen Liter aturbarocks (1934), which de- fines the spirit of the age as a conflict of antithetic tendencies and pursues this formula relentlessly through all human activities from technology to exploration, from traveling to religion. The material is neatly ordered into such categories as expansion and concentration, macrocosmos and microcosmos, sin and salvation, faith and reason, absolutism and democracy, "atectonics" and "tectonics." By such universal analogizing, Meissner arrives at the triumphant conclusion that the Baroque age showed conflict, contradiction, and tension throughout its manifestations. There were active men interested in conquering nature and praising war j there were passionate collectors, travelers, adventurers -, but there were also contemplative men who sought out solitude or founded secret societies. Some people were fascinated by the new astronomy, while others, the diarists, analyzed personal states of mind or drew the individual features of men like the painters of portraits. There were some who believed in the divine right of kings and others who believed in an equalitarian de- mocracy. Everything exemplifies thus the principle either of con- centration or of expansion. If we want concentration in literature, we are presented with the plain style of prose promoted by the Royal Society after the Restoration. If we want expansion, we are shown the long involved sentences of Milton or Sir Thomas Browne. Like his fellow workers, Meissner never asks the ob- vious but fundamental question whether the same scheme of contraries could not be extracted from almost any other age. Nor does he raise the question whether we could not impose a com- pletely different scheme of contraries on the seventeenth century, and even on the basis of the same quotations, drawn from his wide reading.

Similarly, Korff's large books reduce all and everything to the thesis, "rationalism," the antithesis, "irrationalism," and their synthesis, "Romanticism." Rationalism quickly assumes in Korff

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also a formal meaning, "Classicism," and irrationalism the mean- ing of the loose Storm and Stress form, while German Romanti- cism is pressed into service as the synthesis. There are many books in German which work with such contraries: Cassirer's much more sober Freiheit und Form, Cysarz's tortuous Erfah- rung und Idee.30 With some German writers these ideological types are either closely connected or simply shade off into racial types : the German, or at least the Teuton, is the man of feeling, while the Latin is the man of reason ; or again the types may be basically psychological, like the usual contrast between the dae- monic and the rational. Finally, the ideological types are said to be interchangeable with stylistic concepts: they merge with Classicism and Romanticism, the Baroque and the Gothic, and have given rise to an enormous literature in which ethnology, psychology, ideology, and art history are presented in an inex- tricable mixture and confusion.

But the whole assumption of a complete integration of a time, of a race, of a work of art is open to serious question. The paral- lelism of the arts can be accepted only with large reservations. The parallelism between philosophy and poetry is even more open to doubt. We need only to think of English Romantic poetry which flourished during a time when English and Scot- tish philosophy were completely dominated by common sense philosophy and utilitarianism. Even at times when philosophy seems to be in close contact with literature, the actual integration is far less certain than it is assumed by German Geistesgeschichte. The German Romantic movement is studied mostly in the light of the philosophy developed by men like Fichte or Schelling, professional philosophers, and by writers like Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, borderline cases whose actual artistic productions were neither of central importance nor artistically very success- ful. The greatest poets or dramatists or novelists of the German Romantic movement had frequently only tenuous relationships with contemporary philosophy (as was the case with E. T. A. Hoffmann and Eichendorff, a traditional Catholic) or evolved a philosophical point of view inimical to the Romantic philos- ophers far excellence, as did Jean Paul Richter, who attacked Fichte, or Kleist, who felt crushed by Kant. The strong integra- tion between philosophy and literature, even during the German

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Romantic movement, can be achieved only by arguing from frag- ments and theoretical disquisitions of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, avowedly Fichte's disciples, whose speculations, fre- quently unpublished in their time, had little to do with the pro- duction of concrete works of literature. The genuine artistic achievements of Novalis (such as some poems) are scarcely re- lated to the Fragmente.

The close integration between philosophy and literature is fre- quently deceptive, and arguments in its favor are overrated be- cause they are based on a study of literary ideology, professions of intentions, and programs which, necessarily borrowing from existing aesthetic formulations, may sustain only remote rela- tionship to the actual practice of the artists. This skepticism about the close integration of philosophy and literature does not, of course, deny the existence of many relationships and even the likelihood of a certain parallelism reinforced by the common social background of a time, and hence by common influences exerted on literature and philosophy. But, even here, the as- sumption of a common social background may really be decep- tive. Philosophy has frequently been cultivated by a special class which may be very different from the practitioners of poetry, both in social affiliations and provenience. Philosophy, much more than literature, has been identified with the Church and the Academy. It has, like all the other activities of mankind, its own history, its own dialectics: its factions and movements are not, it seems to us, so closely related to literary movements as it is assumed by many practitioners of Geistesgeschkhte.

The explanation of literary change in terms of a "time spirit" seems positively vicious when this spirit becomes a mythical in- tegral and absolute, instead of being, at the most, a pointer to a difficult and obscure problem. German Geistesgeschkhte has usually merely succeeded in transferring criteria from one series (either one of the arts or philosophy) to the whole of cultural activity and has then characterized the time and in it every indi- vidual work of literature in terms of such vague contraries as Classicism and Romanticism or Rationalism and Irrationalism. The conception of the "time spirit" has also frequently disastrous consequences for a conception of the continuity of Western civilization: the individual ages are conceived as far too sharply

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distinct and discontinuous, and the revolutions which they show are conceived of as so radical that the Geisteswissenschaftler ends not only in complete historical relativism (one age is as good as another) but also in a false conception of individuality and originality which obscures the basic constants in human na- ture, civilization, and the arts. In Spengler we arrive at the idea of closed cultural cycles developing with fatal necessity: self- enclosed, though mysteriously parallel. Antiquity does not con- tinue into the Middle Ages, the continuity of Western literary evolution is completely obscured, denied, or forgotten.

These fantastic card palaces should not, of course, obscure the real problem of a general history of mankind or, at least, of Western civilization. We are only convinced that the solutions offered by the usual Geistesgeschichte, with its excessive reliance on contraries and analogies, its uncritical presupposition of the seesaw alterations of styles and Denkformen, and its belief in a complete integration of all activities of man, have been premature and, frequently, immature.

Instead of speculating on such large-scale problems of the philosophy of history and the ultimate integral of civilization, the literary student should turn his attention to the concrete problem not yet solved or even adequately discussed : the question of how ideas actually enter into literature. It is obviously not a question of ideas in a work of literature as long as these ideas remain mere raw material, mere information. The question arises only when and if these ideas are actually incorporated into the very texture of the work of art, when they become "constitu- tive," in short, when they cease to be ideas in the ordinary sense of concepts and become symbols, or even myths. There is the large province of didactic poetry in which ideas are merely stated, are provided with meter or with some embellishments of metaphor or allegory. There is the novel of ideas such as George Sand's or George Eliot's where we get discussions of "problems," social, moral, or philosophical. On a higher level of integration there is a novel like Melville's Moby Dick where the whole ac- tion conveys some mythic meaning, or a poem like Bridges' Testament of Beauty which in intention at least is pervaded by a single philosophical metaphor. And there is Dostoevsky, in whose novels the drama of ideas is acted out in concrete terms of

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characters and events. In the Brothers Karamazov, the four brothers are but carriers, symbols who represent an ideological debate which is, at the same time, a personal drama. The ideo- logical conclusion is integral to the personal catastrophes of the main figures.

But are these philosophical novels and poems, such as Goethe's Faust or Dostoevsky's Brothers , superior works of art because of their philosophical import? Must not we rather conclude that "philosophical truth" as such has no artistic value just as we argued that psychological or social truth has no artistic value as such? Philosophy, ideological content, in it proper context, seems to enhance artistic value because it corroborates several important artistic values: those of complexity and coherence. A theoretical insight may increase the artist's depth of penetration and scope of reach. But it need not be so. The artist will be hampered by too much ideology if it remains unassimilated. Croce has argued that the Divine Comedy consists of passages of poetry alternat- ing with passages of rhymed theology and pseudo-science.31 The second part of Faust indubitably suffers from overintellec- tualization, is constantly on the verge of overt allegory j and in Dostoevsky we frequently feel the discrepancy between the ar- tistic success and the weight of thought. Zossima, Dostoevsky's spokesman, is a less vividly realized character than Ivan Karama- zov. On a lower level, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain il- lustrates the same contradiction: the early parts, with their evo- cation of the sanatorium world, are artistically superior to the later parts of large philosophical pretensions. Sometimes, in the history of literature, however, there are cases, confessedly rare, when ideas incandesce, when figures and scenes not merely rep- resent but actually embody ideas, when some identification of philosophy and art seems to take place. Image becomes concept and concept image. But are these necessarily the summits of art, as many philosophically inclined critics assume them to be? Croce seems right arguing, in a discussion of the second part of Faust, that "when poetry becomes superior in this manner, that is to say, superior to itself, it loses rank as poetry, and should be termed rather inferior, namely wanting in poetry." 32 At least, it should be granted that philosophical poetry, however integrated, is only one kind of poetry, and that its position is not necessarily

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central in literature unless one holds to a theory of poetry which is revelatory, essentially mystical. Poetry is not substitute-phi- losophy j it has its own justification and aim. Poetry of ideas is like other poetry, not to be judged by the value of the material but by its degree of integration and artistic intensity.

CHAPTER XI

Literature and the Other Arts

The relationships of literature with the fine arts and music are highly various and complex. Sometimes poetry has drawn inspiration from paintings or sculpture or music. Like natural objects and persons, other works of art may become the themes of poetry. That poets have described pieces of sculpture, painting, or even music presents no particular theoretical problem. Spen- ser, it has been suggested, drew some of his descriptions from tapestries and pageants 5 the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvatore Rosa influenced eighteenth-century landscape poetry j Keats derived details of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from a spe- cific picture of Claude Lorrain.1 Stephen A. Larrabee has con- sidered all the allusions and treatments of Greek sculpture to be found in English poetry.2 Albert Thibaudet has shown that Mallarme's "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" was inspired by a paint- ing of Boucher in the London National Gallery.3 Poets, espe- cially nineteenth-century poets like Hugo, Gautier, the Parnas- siens, and Tieck, have written poems on definite pictures. Poets, of course, have had their theories about painting and their pref- erences among painters, which can be studied and more or less related to their theories about literature and their literary tastes. Here is a wide area for investigation, only partially traversed in recent decades.4

In its turn, obviously, literature can become the theme of

painting or of music, especially vocal and program music, just

as literature, especially the lyric and the drama, has intimately

collaborated with music. In an increasing number, there are

studies of medieval carols or Elizabethan lyrical poetry which

stress the close association of the musical setting.5 In art history

there has appeared a whole group of scholars (Erwin Panofsky,

Fritz Saxl, and others) who study the conceptual and symbolic

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meanings of works of art ("Iconology") and frequently also their literary relations and inspirations.0

Beyond these obvious questions of sources and influences, in- spiration, and co-operation, there arises a more important prob- lem: literature has sometimes definitely attempted to achieve the effects of painting — to become word painting, or has tried to achieve the effects of music — to turn into music. At times, poetry has even wanted to be sculpturesque. A critic may, as did Lessing in his Laokoon and Irving Babbitt in his New Laokodny deplore this confusion of genres ; but one cannot deny that the arts have tried to borrow effects from each other and that they have been, in considerable measure, successful in achieving these effects. One can, of course, deny the possibility of the literal metamor- phosis of poetry into sculpture, painting, or music. The term "sculpturesque," applied to poetry, even to that of Landor or Gautier or Heredia, is merely a vague metaphor, meaning that the poetry conveys an impression somehow similar to the effects of Greek sculpture : coolness, induced by white marble or plaster casts, stillness, repose, sharp outlines, clarity. But we must recog- nize that coolness in poetry is something very different from the tactual sensation of marble, or the imaginative reconstruction of that perception from whiteness ; that stillness in poetry is some- thing very different from stillness in sculpture. When Collins' "Ode to Evening" is called a "sculptured poem" nothing is said that implies any real relationship with sculpture.7 The only analyzable objectivities are the slow, solemn meter and the dic- tion, which is strange enough to compel attention to individual words and hence to enforce a slow pace in reading.

But one can hardly deny the success of the Horatian formula ut fictura foesis.5 Though the amount of visualization in the reading of poetry is likely to be overrated, there were ages and there were poets who did make the reader visualize. Lessing may have been right in criticizing the enumerative description of fe- male beauty in Ariosto as visually ineffective (though not neces- sarily poetically ineffective), but the eighteenth-century addicts of the picturesque cannot be easily dismissed ; and modern litera- ture from Chateaubriand to Proust has given us many descrip- tions at least suggesting the effects of painting and inciting us to visualize scenes in terms frequently evocative of contemporary

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paintings. Though it may be doubted whether the poet can really suggest the effects of painting to hypothetical readers totally ig- norant of painting, it is clear that, within our general cultural tradition, writers did suggest the emblem, the landscape painting of the eighteenth century, the impressionistic effects of a Whistler and the like.

Whether poetry can achieve the effects of music seems more doubtful, though it is a widely held view that it can. "Musical- ity" in verse, closely analyzed, turns out to be something entirely different from "melody" in music: it means an arrangement of phonetic patterns, an avoidance of accumulations of consonants, or simply the presence of certain rhythmical effects. With such romantic poets as Tieck and, later, Verlaine, the attempts to achieve musical effects are largely attempts to suppress the meaning structure of verse, to avoid logical constructions, to stress connotations rather than denotations. Yet blurred outlines, vagueness of meaning, and illogicality are not, in a literal sense, "musical" at all. Literary imitations of musical structures like leitmotiv, the sonata or symphonic form seem to be more con- crete ; but it is hard to see why repetitive motifs or a certain con- trasting and balancing of moods, though by avowed intention imitative of musical composition, are not essentially the familiar literary devices of recurrence, contrast, and the like which are common to all the arts.9 In the comparatively rare instances where poetry suggests definite musical sounds, Verlaine's "Les sanglonts longs des violons" or Poe's "Bells," the effect of the timbre of an instrument or the very generalized clang of bells is achieved by means which are not much beyond ordinary onomat- opoeia.

Poems have been, of course, written with the intention that music should be added, e.g., many Elizabethan airs and all librettos for opera. In rare instances, poets and composers have been one and the same 5 but it seems hard to prove that the com- position of music and words was ever a simultaneous process. Even Wagner sometimes wrote his "dramas" years before they were set to music ; and, no doubt, many lyrics were composed to fit ready melodies. But the relation between music and really great poetry seems rather tenuous when we think of the evidence afforded by even the most successful settings into musical terms.

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Poems of close-knit, highly integrated structure do not lend themselves to musical setting, while mediocre or poor poetry, like much of the early Heine or Wilhelm Miiller, has provided the text for the finest songs of Schubert and Schumann. If the poetry is of high literary value, the setting frequently distorts or obscures its patterns completely, even when the music has value in its own right. One need not cite such examples as the lot of Shakespeare's Othello in Verdi's opera, for nearly all the settings of the Psalms or of the poems of Goethe offer adequate proof of the contention. Collaboration between poetry and music ex- ists, to be sure j but the highest poetry does not tend towards music, and the greatest music stands in no need of words.

The parallels between the fine arts and literature usually amount to the assertion that this picture and that poem induce the same mood in me : for example, that I feel light-hearted and gay in hearing a minuet of Mozart, seeing a landscape by Wat- teau, and reading an Anacreontic poem. But this is the kind of parallelism which is of little worth for purposes of precise analysis: joy induced by a piece of music is not joy in general or even joy of a particular shade, but is an emotion closely follow- ing and thus tied to the pattern of the music. We experience emotions which have only a general tone in common with those of real life, and even if we define these emotions as closely as we can, we are still quite removed from the specific object which induced them. Parallels between the arts which remain inside the individual reactions of a reader or spectator and are content with describing some emotional similarity of our reactions to two arts will, therefore, never lend themselves to verification and thus to a co-operative advance in our knowledge.

Another common approach is the intentions and theories of the artists. No doubt, we can show that there are some similar- ities in the theories and formulas behind the different arts, in the Neo-Classical or the Romantic movements, and we can find also professions of intentions of the individual artists in the dif- ferent arts which sound identical or similar. But "Classicism" in music must mean something very different from its use in liter- ature for the simple reason that no real classical music (with the exception of a few fragments) was known and could thus shape the evolution of music as literature was actually shaped by the

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precepts and practice of antiquity. Likewise painting, before the excavation of the frescoes in Pompeii and Herculaneum, can scarcely be described as influenced by classical painting in spite of the frequent reference to classical theories and Greek painters like Apelles and some remote pictorial traditions which must have descended from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Sculp- ture and architecture, however, were to an extent far exceeding the other arts, including literature, determined by classical mod- els and their derivatives. Thus theories and conscious intentions mean something very different in the various arts and say little or nothing about the concrete results of an artist's activity: his work and its specific content and form.

How indecisive for specific exegesis the approach through the author's intention may be, can best be observed in the rare cases when artist and poet are identical. For example, a comparison of the poetry and the paintings of Blake, or of Rossetti, will show that the character — not merely the technical quality — of their painting and poetry is very different, even divergent. A gro- tesque little animal is supposed to illustrate "Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright." W. M. Thackeray illustrated Vanity Fair, but his smirky caricature of Becky Sharp has hardly anything to do with the complex character in the novel. In structure and quality there is little comparison between Michelangelo's Sonnets and his sculpture and paintings, though we can find the same Neo- Platonic ideas in all and may discover some psychological simi- larities.10 This shows that the "medium" of a work of art (an un- fortunate question-begging term) is not merely a technical ob- stacle to be overcome by the artist in order to express his per- sonality, but a factor preformed by tradition and having a pow- erful determining character which shapes and modifies the ap- proach and expression of the individual artist. The artist does not conceive in general mental terms but in terms of concrete material ; and the concrete medium has its own history, fre- quently very different from that of any other medium.

More valuable than the approach through the artist's inten- tions and theories is a comparison of the arts on the basis of their common social and cultural background. Certainly it is possible to describe the common temporal, local, or social nourishing soil of the arts and literature and thus to point to common influences

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working on them. Many parallels between the arts are possible only because they ignore the utterly different social background to which the individual work of art appealed or from which it seems to be derived. The social classes either creating or de- manding a certain type of art may be quite different at any one time or place. Certainly the Gothic cathedrals have a different social background from the French epic; and sculpture fre- quently appeals to and is paid for by a very different audience from the novel. Just as fallacious as the assumption of a common social background of the arts at a given time and place is the usual assumption that the intellectual background is necessarily identical and effective in all the arts. It seems hazardous to in- terpret painting in the light of contemporary philosophy: to mention only one example, Karoly Tolnai X1 has attempted to interpret the pictures of the elder Brueghel in evidence of a pantheistic monism paralleling Cusanus or Paracelsus and an- ticipating Spinoza and Goethe. Even more dangerous is an "ex- planation" of the arts in terms of a "time spirit," as practiced by German G eistes geschichte y a movement which we have criticized in a different context.12

The genuine parallelisms which follow from the identical or similar social or intellectual background scarcely ever have been analyzed in concrete terms. We have no studies which would concretely show how, for example, all the arts in a given time or setting expand or narrow their field over the objects of "nature," or how the norms of art are tied to specific social classes and thus subject to uniform changes, or how aesthetic values change with social revolutions. Here is a wide field for investigation which has been scarcely touched, yet promises con- crete results for the comparison of the arts. Of course, only similar influences on the evolution of the different arts can be proved by this method, not any necessary parallelism.

Obviously, the most central approach to a comparison of the arts is based on an analysis of the actual objects of art, and thus of their structural relationships. There will never be a proper history of an art, not to speak of a comparative history of the arts, unless we concentrate on an analysis of the works them- selves and relegate to the background studies in the psychology of the reader and the spectator or the author and the artist as

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well as studies in the cultural and social background, however illuminating they may be from their own point of view. Unfor- tunately hitherto we have had scarcely any tools for such a com- parison between the arts. Here a very difficult question arises: What are the common and the comparable elements of the arts? We see no light in a theory like Croce's, which concentrates all aesthetic problems on the act of intuition, mysteriously identi- fied with expression. Croce asserts the non-existence of modes of expression and condemns "any attempt at an aesthetic classifica- tion of the arts as absurd" and thus a fortiori rejects all distinc- tion between genres or types.13 Nor is much gained for our problem by John Dewey's insistence, in his Art as Experience (1934), that there is a common substance among the arts be- cause there are "general conditions without which an experience is not possible." 14 No doubt, there is a common denominator in the act of all artistic creation or, for that matter, in all human creation, activity, and experience. But these are solutions which do not help us in comparing the arts. More concretely, Theodore Meyer Greene defines the comparable elements of the arts as complexity, integration, and rhythm, and he argues eloquently, as John Dewey had done before him, for the applicability of the term "rhythm" to the plastic arts.15 It seems, however, impos- sible to overcome the profound distinction between the rhythm of a piece of music and the rhythm of a colonnade, where neither the order nor the tempo is imposed by the structure of the work itself. Complexity and integration are merely other terms for "variety" and "unity" and thus of only very limited use. Few concrete attempts to arrive at such common denominators among the arts on a structural basis have gone any further. G. D. BirkhofF, a Harvard mathematician, in a book on Aesthetic Measure,16 has with apparent success tried to find a common mathematical basis for simple art forms and music and he has included a study of the "musicality" of verse which is also de- fined in mathematical equations and coefficients. But the problem of euphony in verse cannot be solved in isolation from meaning, and BirkhofPs high grades for poems by Edgar Allan Poe seem to confirm such an assumption. His ingenious attempt, if accepted, would tend rather to widen the gulf between the essen- tially "literary" qualities of poetry and the other arts which

Literature and the Other Arts 1 3 1

share much more fully in "aesthetic measure" than literature.

The problem of the parallelism of the arts early suggested the application to literature of style-concepts arrived at in the history of the arts. In the eighteenth century, innumerable com- parisons were made between the structure of Spenser's Faerie Queene and the glorious disorder of a Gothic cathedral.17 In The Decline of the West, analogizing all the arts of a culture, Spengler speaks of the "visible chamber music of the bent fur- niture, the mirror rooms, pastorals and porcelain groups of the eighteenth century," mentions the "Titian style of the mad- rigal," and refers to the "allegro feroce of Franz Hals and the andante con moto of Van Dyck." 18 In Germany this mode of analogizing the arts has incited copious writing on the Gothic man and the spirit of the Baroque, has led to the literary use of the terms "Rococo" and "Biedermeier." In the periodization of literature, the clearly worked-out sequence of art styles of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Bieder- meier, Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism has impressed literary historians and has imposed itself also on literature. The styles named are grouped into two main groups, presenting fun- damentally the contrast between the Classical and the Romantic : Gothic, the Baroque, Romanticism, Expressionism appear on one line 5 the Renaissance, Neo-Classicism, Realism on the other. Rococo, Biedermeier, can be interpreted as late decadent, florid variations of the preceding styles — respectively Baroque and Romanticism. Frequently the parallelisms are pressed very hard j and it is easy to pick out absurdities from the writings of even the most reputable scholars who have indulged in the method.19

The most concrete attempt to transfer the categories of art history to literature is Oskar Walzel's application of Wolfflin's criteria. In his Principles of Art History,20 Wolmin distin- guished, on purely structural grounds, between Renaissance and Baroque art. He constructed a scheme of contraries applicable to any kind of picture, piece of sculpture, or specimen of architec- ture in the period. Renaissance art, he held, is "linear," while Baroque art is "painterly." "Linear" suggests that the outlines of figures and objects are drawn clearly, while "painterly" means that light and color, which blur the outlines of objects, are them-

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selves the principles of composition. Renaissance painting and sculpture use a "closed" form, a symmetrical, balanced group- ing of figures or surfaces, while Baroque prefers an "open" form, an unsymmetrical composition which puts emphasis on a corner of a picture rather than its center, or even points beyond the frame of the picture. Renaissance pictures are "flat" or, at least, composed on different recessive planes, while Baroque pictures are "deep" or seem to lead the eye into a distant and indistinct background. Renaissance pictures are "multiple" in the sense of having clearly distinct parts; Baroque works are "unified," highly integrated, closely knit. Renaissance works of art are "clear," while Baroque works are relatively "unclear," blurred, indistinct.

Wolfflin demonstrated his conclusions by an admirably sensi- tive analysis of concrete works of art and suggested the neces- sity of the progression from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Certainly their sequence cannot be inverted. Wolfflin offers no causal explanation of the process, except that he suggests a change in the "manner of seeing," a process which, however, hardly can be thought of as purely physiological. This view, with its stress on changes in the "manner of seeing," on the purely structural, compositional changes, goes back to the theo- ries of Fiedler and Hildebrand concerning pure visibility, and is ultimately derived from Zimmermann, an Herbartian aesthe- tician.21 But Wolfflin himself, especially in later pronounce- ments,22 recognized the limitations of his method and by no means thought that his history of forms had exhausted all the problems of art history. Even early he admitted "personal" and "local" styles and saw that his types could be found elsewhere than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though in a less clearly defined form.

In 19 1 6, fresh from the reading of the Principles of Art His- tory, Walzel attempted to transfer Wolfflin's categories to lit- erature.23 Studying the composition of Shakespeare's plays, he came to the conclusion that Shakespeare belongs to the Baroque, since his plays are not built in the symmetrical manner found by Wolfflin in pictures of the Renaissance. The number of minor characters, their unsymmetrical grouping, the varying emphasis on different acts of the play: all these characteristics are supposed

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to show that Shakespeare's technique is the same as that of Baroque art, while Corneille and Racine, who composed their tragedies around one central figure and distributed the emphasis among the acts according to a traditional Aristotelian pattern, are assigned to the Renaissance type. In a little book, Wechsel- seitige Erhellung der Kiinste, and in many later writings,24 Walzel tried to elaborate and justify this transfer, at first rather modestly and then with increasingly extravagant claims.

Some of Wolfflin's categories can clearly and rather easily be reformulated in literary terms. There is an obvious opposition between an art which prefers clear outlines and distinct parts and an art with looser composition and blurred outlines. Fritz Strich's attempt to describe the opposition between German Classicism and Romanticism by applying Wolfflin's categories devised for the Renaissance and Baroque shows that these cate- gories, liberally interpreted, can restate the old oppositions be- tween the perfect Classical poem and the unfinished, frag- mentary, or blurred Romantic poetry.25 But we are then left with only one set of contraries for all the history of literature. Even reformulated in strictly literary terms, Wolfflin's categories help us merely to arrange works of art into two categories which, when examined in detail, amount only to the old distinction be- tween classic and romantic, severe and loose structure, plastic and picturesque art : a dualism which was known to the Schlegels and to Schelling and Coleridge and was arrived at by them through ideological and literary arguments. Wolfflin's one set of contraries manages to group all Classical and pseudo-Classical art together, on the one hand, and on the other to combine very divergent movements such as the Gothic, the Baroque, and Romanticism. This theory appears to obscure the undoubted and extremely important continuity between the Renaissance and Baroque, just as its application to German literature by Strich makes an artificial contrast between the pseudo-Classical stage in the development of Schiller and Goethe and the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, while it must leave the "Storm and Stress" unexplained and incomprehensible. Ac- tually, German literature at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forms a comparative unity which it seems absurd to break up into an irreconcilable antithesis. Thus,

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Wolfflin's theory may help us in classifying works of art and establishing or rather confirming the old action-reaction, con- vention-revolt, or seesaw type of dualistic evolutionary scheme, which, however, confronted with the reality of the complex process of literature, falls far short of coping with the highly diversified pattern of the actual development.

The transfer of Wolfflin's pairs of concepts also leaves one important problem completely unsolved. We cannot explain in any way the undoubted fact that the arts did not evolve with the same speed at the same time. Literature seems sometimes to linger behind the arts: for instance, we can scarcely speak of an English literature when the great English cathedrals were being built. At other times music lags behind literature and the other arts: for instance, we cannot speak of "Romantic" music before 1800, while much Romantic poetry preceded that date. We have difficulty in accounting for the fact that there was "picturesque" poetry at least sixty years before the picturesque invaded archi- tecture 26 or for the fact, mentioned by Burckhardt,27 that Nencia, the description of peasant life by Lorenzo Magnifico, preceded by some eighty years the first genre pictures of Jacopo Bassano and his school. Even if these few examples were wrongly chosen and could be refuted, they raise a question which cannot be answered by an over-simple theory according to which, let us say, music is always lagging by a generation after poetry.28 Obviously a correlation with social factors should be attempted, and these factors will vary in every single instance.

We are finally confronted with the problem that certain times or nations were extremely productive only in one or two arts, while either completely barren or merely imitative and derivative in others. The flowering of Elizabethan literature, which was not accompanied by any comparable flowering of the fine arts, is a case in point ; and little is gained by speculations to the effect that the "national soul," in some way, concentrated on one art or that, as Emile Legouis phrases it in his History of English Literature, "Spenser would have become a Titian or Veronese had he been born in Italy or a Rubens or Rembrandt in the Netherlands." 29 In the case of English literature it is easy to suggest that Puri- tanism was responsible for the neglect of the fine arts, but that is scarcely enough to account for the differences between the pro-

Literature and the Other Arts 135

ductivity in very secular literature and the comparative barren- ness in painting. But all this leads us far afield into concrete his- torical questions.

The various arts — the plastic arts, literature, and music — have each their individual evolution, with a different tempo and a dif- ferent internal structure of elements. No doubt they are in con- stant relationship with each other, but these relationships are not influences which start from one point and determine the evolu- tion of the other arts ; they have to be conceived rather as a com- plex scheme of dialectical relationships which work both ways, from one art to another and vice versa, and may be completely transformed within the art which they have entered. It is not a simple affair of a "time spirit" determining and permeating each and every art. We must conceive of the sum total of man's cul- tural activities as of a whole system of self-evolving series, each having its own set of norms which are not necessarily identical with those of the neighboring series. The task of art historians in the widest sense, including historians of literature and of music, is to evolve a descriptive set of terms in each art, based on the specific characteristics of each art. Thus poetry today needs a new poetics, a technique of analysis which cannot be arrived at by a simple transfer or adaptation of terms from the fine arts. Only when we have evolved a successful system of terms for the anal- ysis of literary works of art can we delimit literary periods, not as metaphysical entities dominated by a "time spirit." Having established such outlines of strictly literary evolution, we then can ask the question whether this evolution is, in some way, similar to the similarly established evolution of the other arts. The answer will be, as we can see, not a flat "yes" or "no." It will take the form of an intricate pattern of coincidences and di- vergences rather than parallel lines.

IV

The Intrinsic Study of Literature

CHAPTER XII

The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art

The natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship is the interpretation and analysis of the works of literature themselves. After all, only the works themselves justify all our interest in the life of an author, in his social en- vironment and the whole process of literature. But, curiously enough, literary history has been so preoccupied with the setting of a work of literature that its attempts at an analysis of the works themselves have been slight in comparison with the enormous efforts expended on the study of environment. Some reasons for this overemphasis on the conditioning circumstances rather than on the works themselves are not far to seek. Modern literary history arose in close connection with the Romantic movement, which could subvert the critical system of Neo-Classicism only with the relativist argument that different times required dif- ferent standards. Thus the emphasis shifted from the literature itself to its historical background, which was used to justify the new values ascribed to old literature. In the nineteenth century, explanation by causes became the great watchword, largely in an endeavor to emulate the methods of the natural sciences. Besides, the breakdown of the old "poetics," which occurred with the shift of interest to the individual "taste" of the reader, strengthened the conviction that art, being fundamentally irra- tional, should be left to "appreciation." Sir Sidney Lee, in his inaugural lecture, merely summed up the theory of most academic literary scholarship when he said: "In literary history we seek the external circumstances — political, social, economic — in which literature is produced." x The result of a lack of clarity on questions of poetics has been the astonishing helplessness of most scholars when confronted with the task of actually ana- lyzing and evaluating a work of art.

In recent years a healthy reaction has taken place which recog-

139

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nizes that the study of literature should, first and foremost, con- centrate on the actual works of art themselves. The old methods of classical rhetoric, poetics, or metrics are and must be reviewed and restated in modern terms. New methods based on a survey of the wider range of forms in modern literature are being intro- duced. In France the method of explication de textes,2 in Ger- many the formal analyses based on parallels with the history of fine arts, cultivated by Oskar Walzel,3 and especially the brilliant movement of the Russian formalists and their Czech and Polish followers 4 have brought new stimuli to the study of the literary work, which we are only beginning to see properly and to analyze adequately. In England some of the followers of I. A. Richards have paid close attention to the text of poetry 5 and also in this country a group of critics have made a study of the work of art the center of their interest.6 Several studies of the drama 7 which stress its difference from life and combat the confusion between dramatic and empirical reality point in the same direction. Simi- larly, many studies of the novel 8 are not content to consider it merely in terms of its relations to the social structure but try to analyze its artistic methods — its points of view, its narrative tech- nique.

The Russian Formalists most vigorously objected to the old dichotomy of "content versus form," which cuts a work of art into two halves: a crude content and a superimposed, purely ex- ternal form.9 Clearly, the aesthetic effect of a work of art does not reside in what is commonly called its content. There are few works of art which are not ridiculous or meaningless in synopsis (which can be justified only as a pedagogical device).10 But a distinction between form as the factor aesthetically active and a content aesthetically indifferent meets with insuperable diffi- culties. At first sight the boundary line may seem fairly definite. If we understand by content the ideas and emotions conveyed in a work of literature, the form would include all linguistic ele- ments by which contents are expressed. But if we examine this distinction more closely, we see that content implies some ele- ments of form: e.g., the events told in a novel are parts of the content, while the way in which they are arranged into a "plot" is part of the form. Dissociated from this way of arrangement they have no artistic effect whatsoever. The common remedy pro-

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posed and widely used by Germans, i.e., the introduction of the term "inner form," which originally dates back to Plotinus and Shaftesbury, is merely complicating matters, as the boundary line between inner and outer form remains completely obscure. It must simply be admitted that the manner in which events are arranged in a plot is part of the form. Things become even more disastrous for the traditional concepts when we realize that even in the language, commonly considered part of the form, it is necessary to distinguish between words in themselves, aestheti- cally indifferent, and the manner in which individual words make up units of sound and meaning, aesthetically effective. It would be better to rechristen all the aesthetically indifferent elements "materials," while the manner in which they acquire aesthetic efficacy may be styled "structure." This distinction is by no means a simple renaming of the old pair, content and form. It cuts right across the old boundary lines. "Materials" include elements formerly considered part of the content, and parts for- merly considered formal. "Structure" is a concept including both content and form so far as they are organized for aesthetic pur- poses. The work of art is, then, considered as a whole system of signs, or structure of signs, serving a specific aesthetic purpose.

How, more concretely, can we envisage an analysis of this structure? What is meant by this totality, and how can it be analyzed? What is meant by saying that an analysis is wrong or mistaken? This raises an extremely difficult epistemological ques- tion, that of the "mode of existence" or the "ontological situs" of a literary work of art (which, for brevity's sake, we shall call a "poem" in what follows).11 What is the "real" poem; where should we look for it; how does it exist? A correct answer to these questions must solve several critical problems and open a way to the proper analysis of a work of literature.

To the question what and where is a poem, or rather a literary work of art in general, several traditional answers have been given which must be criticized and eliminated before we can at- tempt an answer of our own. One of the most common and oldest answers is the view that a poem is an "artifact," an object of the same nature as a piece of sculpture or a painting. Thus the work of art is considered identical with the black lines of ink on white paper or parchment or, if we think of a Babylonian poem, with

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the grooves in the brick. Obviously this answer is quite unsatis- factory. There is, first of all, the huge oral "literature." There are poems or stories which have never been fixed in writing and still continue to exist. Thus the lines in black ink are merely a method of recording a poem which must be conceived as existing elsewhere. If we destroy the writing or even all copies of a printed book we still may not destroy the poem, as it might be preserved in oral tradition or in the memory of a man like Macaulay, who boasted of knowing Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress by heart. On the other hand, if we destroy a painting or a piece of sculpture or a building, we destroy it completely, though we may preserve descriptions or records in another me- dium and might even try to reconstruct what has been lost. But we shall always create a different work of art (however similar), while the mere destruction of the copy of a book or even of all its copies may not touch the work of art at all.

That the writing on the paper is not the "real" poem can be demonstrated also by another argument. The printed page con- tains a great many elements which are extraneous to the poem: the size of the type, the sort of type used (roman, italic), the size of the page, and many other factors. If we should take seri- ously the view that a poem is an artifact, we would have to come to the conclusion that every single copy is a different work of art. There would be no a friori reason why copies in different edi- tions should be copies of the same book. Besides, not every print- ing is considered by us, the readers, a correct printing of a poem. The very fact that we are able to correct printer's errors in a text which we might not have read before or, in some rare cases, restore the genuine meaning of the text shows that we do not consider the printed lines as the genuine poem. Thus we have shown that the poem (or any literary work of art) can exist out- side its printed version and that the printed artifact contains many elements which we all must consider as not included in the genuine poem.

Still, this negative conclusion should not blind us to the enormous practical importance, since the invention of writing and printing, of our methods of recording poetry. There is no doubt that much literature has been lost and thus completely destroyed because its written records have disappeared and the theoretically

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possible means of oral tradition have failed or have been inter- rupted. Writing and especially printing have made possible the continuity of literary tradition and must have done much to in- crease the unity and integrity of works of art. Besides, at least in certain periods of the history of poetry, the graphic picture has become a part of some finished works of art.

In Chinese poetry, as Ernest Fenollosa has shown, the pic- torial ideograms form a part of the total meaning of the poems. But also in the Western tradition there are the graphic poems of the Greek Anthology, the "Altar" or the "Church-floor" of George Herbert, and similar poems of the Metaphysicals which can be paralleled on the Continent in Spanish Gongorism, Italian Marinism, in German Baroque poetry, and elsewhere. Also modern poetry in America (e. e. cummings), in Germany (Arno Holz), in France (Apollinaire), and elsewhere has used graphic devices like unusual line arrangements or even begin- nings at the bottom of the page, different colors of printing, etc.12 In the novel Tristram Shandy, Sterne used, as far back as the eighteenth century, blank and marbled pages. All such devices are integral parts of these particular works of art. Though we know that a majority of poetry is independent of them, they can- not and should not be ignored in those cases.

Besides, the role of print in poetry is by no means confined to such comparatively rare extravaganzas ; the line-ends of verses, the grouping into stanzas, the paragraphs of prose passages, eye- rhymes or puns which are comprehensible only through spelling, and many similar devices must be considered integral factors of literary works of art. A purely oral theory tends to exclude all considerations of such devices, but they cannot be ignored in any complete analysis of many works of literary art. Their existence merely proves that print has become very important for the prac- tice of poetry in modern times, that poetry is written for the eye as well as for the ear. Though the use of graphic devices is not indispensable, they are far more frequent in literature than in music, where the printed score is in a position similar to the printed page in poetry. In music such uses are rare, though by no means non-existent. There are many curious optical devices (colors, etc.) in Italian madrigal scores of the sixteenth century. The supposedly "pure" composer Handel wrote a chorus speak-

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ing of the Red Sea flood where the "water stood like a wall," and the notes on the printed page of music form firm rows of evenly spaced dots suggesting a phalanx or wall.13

We have started with a theory which probably has not many serious adherents today. The second answer to our question puts the essence of a literary work of art into the sequence of sounds uttered by a speaker or reader of poetry. This is a widely accepted solution favored especially by reciters. But the answer is equally unsatisfactory. Every reading aloud or reciting of a poem is merely a performance of a poem and not the poem itself. It is on exactly the same level as the performance of a piece of music by a musician. There is — to follow the line of our previous argu- ment— a huge written literature which may never be sounded at all. To deny this, we have to subscribe to some such absurd theory as that of some behaviorists that all silent reading is ac- companied by movements of the vocal cords. Actually, all ex- perience shows that, unless we are almost illiterate or are strug- gling with the reading of a foreign language or want to articu- late the sound whisperingly on purpose, we usually read "glob- ally," that is, we grasp printed words as wholes without breaking them up into sequences of phonemes and thus do not pronounce them even silently. In reading quickly we have no time even to articulate the sounds with our vocal cords. To assume besides that a poem exists in the reading aloud leads to the absurd conse- quence that a poem is non-existent when it is not sounded and that it is recreated afresh by every reading. Moreover, we could not show how a work like Homer's Iliad y or Tolstoy's War and Peace, exists as a unity, as it can never be read aloud all in one sitting.

But most importantly, every reading of a poem is more than the genuine poem: each performance contains elements which are extraneous to the poem and individual idiosyncrasies of pro- nunciation, pitch, tempo, and distribution of stress — elements which are either determined by the personality of the speaker or are symptoms and means of his interpretation of the poem. Moreover, the reading of a poem not only adds individual ele- ments but always represents only a selection of factors implicit in the text of a poem: the pitch of the voice, the speed in which a passage is read, the distribution and intensity of the stresses, these

The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art 145

may be either right or wrong, and even when right, may still represent only one version of reading a poem. We must acknowl- edge the possibility of several readings of a poem: readings which we either consider wrong readings, if we feel them to be distortions of the true meaning of the poem, or readings which we have to consider as correct and admissible, but still may not consider ideal.

The reading of the poem is not the poem itself, for we can correct the performance mentally. Even if we hear a recitation which we acknowledge to be excellent or perfect, we cannot pre- clude the possibility that somebody else, or even the same reciter at another time, may give a very different rendering which would bring out other elements of the poem equally well. The analogy to a musical performance is again helpful: the performance of a symphony even by a Toscanini is not the symphony itself, for it is inevitably colored by the individuality of the performers and adds concrete details of tempo, rubato, timbre, etc., which may be changed in a next performance, though it would be impossible to deny that the same symphony has been performed for the second time. Thus we have shown that the poem can exist outside its sounded performance, and that the sounded performance con- tains many elements which we must consider as not included in the poem.

Still, in some literary works of art (especially in lyrical poetry) the vocal side of poetry may be an important factor of the gen- eral structure. Attention can be drawn to it by various means like meter, patterns of vowel or consonant sequences, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, etc. This fact explains — or rather helps to ex- plain— the inadequacy of much translating of lyrical poetry, since these potential sound-patterns cannot be transferred into another linguistic system, though a skillful translator may approximate their general effect in his own language. There is, however, an enormous literature which is relatively independent of sound- patterns, as can be shown by the historical effects of many works in even pedestrian translations. Sound may be an important fac- tor in the structure of a poem, but the answer that a poem is a sequence of sounds is as unsatisfactory as the solution which puts faith in the print on the page.

The third, very common answer to our question says that a

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poem is the experience of the reader. A poem, it is argued, is nothing outside the mental processes of individual readers and is thus identical with the mental state or process which we experi- ence in reading or listening to a poem. Again, this "psycho- logical" solution seems unsatisfactory. It is true, of course, that a poem can be known only through individual experiences, but it is not identical with such an individual experience. Every indi- vidual experience of a poem contains something idiosyncratic and purely individual. It is colored by our mood and our indi- vidual preparation. The education, the personality of every reader, the general cultural climate of a time, the religious or philosophical or purely technical preconceptions of every reader will add something instantaneous and extraneous to every read- ing of a poem. Two readings at different times by the same indi- vidual may vary considerably either because he has matured mentally or because he is weakened by momentary circumstances such as fatigue, worry, or distraction. Every experience of a poem thus both leaves out something or adds something indi- vidual. The experience will never be commensurate with the poem: even a good reader will discover new details in poems which he had not experienced during previous readings, and it is needless to point out how distorted or shallow may be the reading of a less trained or untrained reader.

The view that the mental experience of a reader is the poem itself leads to the absurd conclusion that a poem is non-existent unless experienced and that it is recreated in every experience. There thus would not be one Divine Comedy but as many Divine Comedies as there are and were and will be readers. We end in complete skepticism and anarchy and arrive at the vicious maxim of De gustibus non est disfutandum. If we should take this view seriously, it would be impossible to explain why one experience of a poem by one reader should be better than the experience of any other reader and why it is possible to correct the interpreta- tion of another reader. It would mean the definite end of all teaching of literature which aims at enhancing the understanding and appreciation of a text. The writings of I. A. Richards, especially his book on Practical Criticism-, have shown how much can be done in analyzing the individual idiosyncrasies of readers and how much a good teacher can achieve in rectifying false ap-

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proaches. Curiously enough, Richards, who constantly criticizes the experiences of his pupils, holds to an extreme psychological theory which is in flat contradiction to his excellent critical prac- tice. The idea that poetry is supposed to order our impulses and the conclusion that the value of poetry is in some sort of psychical therapy lead him finally to the admission that this goal may be accomplished by a bad as well as a good poem, by a carpet, a pot, a gesture as well as by a sonata.14 Thus the supposed pattern in our mind is not definitely related to the poem which caused it.

The psychology of the reader, however interesting in itself or useful for pedagogical purposes, will always remain outside the object of literary study — the concrete work of art — and is unable to deal with the question of the structure and value of the work of art. Psychological theories must be theories of effect and may lead in extreme cases to such criteria of the value of poetry as that proposed by A. E. Housman in a lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933), where he tells us, one hopes with his tongue in his cheek, that good poetry can be recog- nized by the thrill down our spine. This is on the same level as eighteenth-century theories which measured the quality of a tragedy by the amount of tears shed by the audience or the movie scout's conception of the quality of a comedy on the basis of the number of laughs he has counted in the audience. Thus anarchy, skepticism, a complete confusion of values is the result of every psychological theory, as it must be unrelated either to the struc- ture or the quality of a poem.

The psychological theory is only very slightly improved by I. A. Richards when he defines a poem as the "experience of the right kind of reader." 15 Obviously the whole problem is shifted to the conception of the right reader — and the meaning of that adjective. But even assuming an ideal condition of mood in a reader of the finest background and the best training, the defini- tion remains unsatisfactory, as it is open to all the criticism we have made of the psychological method. It puts the essence of the poem into a momentary experience which even the right kind of reader could not repeat unchanged. It will always fall short of the full meaning of a poem at any given instance and will always add inevitable personal elements to the reading.

A fourth answer has been suggested to obviate this difficulty.

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The poem, we hear, is the experience of the author. Only in parenthesis, we may dismiss the view that the poem is the ex- perience of the author at any time of his life after the creation of his work, when he rereads it. He then has obviously become sim- ply a reader of his work and is liable to errors and misinterpreta- tions of his own work almost as much as any other reader. Many instances of glaring misinterpretations by an author of his own work could be collected: the old anecdote about Browning pro- fessing not to understand his own poem has probably its element of truth. It happens to all of us that we misinterpret or do not fully understand what we have written some time ago. Thus the suggested answer must refer to the experience of the author dur- ing the time of creation. By "experience of the author" we might mean, however, two different things: the conscious experience, the intentions which the author wanted to embody in his work, or the total conscious and unconscious experience during the pro- longed time of creation. The view that the genuine poem is to be found in the intentions of an author is widespread even though it is not always explicitly stated.16 It justifies much historical re- search and is at the bottom of many arguments in favor of spe- cific interpretations. However, for most works of art we have no evidence to reconstruct the intentions of the author except the finished work itself. Even if we are in possession of contemporary evidence in the form of an explicit profession of intentions, such a profession need not be binding on a modern observer. "Inten- tions" of the author are always "rationalizations," commentaries which certainly must be taken into account but also must be criticized in the light of the finished work of art. The "inten- tions" of an author may go far beyond the finished work of art: they may be merely pronouncements of plans and ideals, while the performance may be either far below or far aside the mark. If we could have interviewed Shakespeare he probably would have expressed his intentions in writing Hamlet in a way which we should find most unsatisfactory. We would still quite rightly insist on finding meanings in Hamlet (and not merely inventing them) which were probably far from clearly formulated in Shakespeare's conscious mind.

Artists may be strongly influenced by a contemporary critical situation and by contemporary critical formulae while giving

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expression to their intentions, but the critical formulae them- selves might be quite inadequate to characterize their actual artistic achievement. The Baroque age is an obvious case in point, since a surprisingly new artistic practice found little expression either in the pronouncements of the artists or the comments of the critics. A sculptor such as Bernini could lecture to the Paris Academy expounding the view that his own practice was in strict conformity to that of the ancients and Daniel Adam Poppel- mann, the architect of that highly rococo building in Dresden called the Zwinger, wrote a whole pamphlet in order to demon- strate the strict agreement of his creation with the purest prin- ciples of Vitruvius.17 The metaphysical poets had only a few quite inadequate critical formulae (like "strong lines") which scarcely touch the actual novelty of their practice ; and medieval artists frequently had purely religious or didactic "intentions" which do not even begin to give expression to the artistic principles of their practice. Divergence between conscious intention and actual performance is a common phenomenon in the history of litera- ture, Zola sincerely believed in his scientific theory of the experi- mental novel, but actually produced highly melodramatic and symbolic novels. Gogol thought of himself as a social reformer, as a "geographer" of Russia, while, in practice, he produced novels and stories full of fantastic and grotesque creatures of his imagination. It is simply impossible to rely on the study of the intentions of an author, as they might not even represent a re- liable commentary on his work, and at their best are not more than such a commentary. There can be no objections against the study of "intention," if we mean by it merely a study of the integral work of art directed towards the total meaning.18 But this use of the term "intention" is different and somewhat mis- leading.

But also the alternative suggestion — that the genuine poem is in the total experience, conscious and unconscious, during the time of the creation — is very unsatisfactory. In practice, this con- clusion has the serious disadvantage of putting the problem into a completely inaccessible and purely hypothetical x which we have no means of reconstructing or even of exploring. Beyond this insurmountable practical difficulty, the solution is also un- satisfactory because it puts the existence of the poem into a sub-

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jective experience which already is a thing of the past. The ex- periences of the author during creation ceased precisely when the poem had begun to exist. If this conception were right, we should never be able to come into direct contact with the work of art itself, but have constantly to make the assumption that our ex- periences in reading the poem are in some way identical with the long-past experiences of the author. E. M. Tillyard in his book on Milton has tried to use the idea that Paradise Lost is about the state of the author when he wrote it, and could not, in a long and frequently irrelevant exchange of arguments with C. S. Lewis, acknowledge that Paradise Lost is, first of all, about Satan and Adam and Eve and hundreds and thousands of different ideas, representations, and concepts, *rather than about Milton's state of mind during creation.19 That the whole content of the poem was once in contact with the conscious and subconscious mind of Milton is perfectly true; but this state of mind is in- accessible and might have been filled, in those particular moments, with millions of experiences of which we cannot find a trace in the poem itself. Taken literally, this whole solution must lead to absurd speculations about the exact duration of the state of mind of the creator and its exact content, which might include a toothache at the moment of creation.20 The whole psychological approach through states of mind, whether of the reader or the listener, the speaker or the author, raises more problems than it can possibly solve.

A better way is obviously in the direction of defining the work of art in terms of social and collective experience. There are two possibilities of solution, which, however, still fall short of solv- ing our problem satisfactorily. We may say that the work of art is the sum of all past and possible experiences of the poem: a so- lution which leaves us with an infinity of irrelevant individual experiences, bad and false readings, and perversions. In short, it merely gives us the answer that the poem is in the state of mind of its reader, multiplied by infinity. Another answer solves the question by stating that the genuine poem is the experience com- mon to all the experiences of the poem.21 But this answer would obviously reduce the work of art to the common denominator of all these experiences. This denominator must be the lowest com- mon denominator, the most shallow, most superficial and trivial

The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art 1 5 1

experience. This solution, besides its practical difficulties, would completely impoverish the total meaning of a work of art.

An answer to our question in terms of individual or social psychology cannot be found. A poem, we have to conclude, is not an individual experience or a sum of experiences, but only a potential cause of experiences. Definition in terms of states of mind fails because it cannot account for the normative character of the genuine poem, for the simple fact that it might be ex- perienced correctly or incorrectly. In every individual experience only a small part can be considered as adequate to the true poem. Thus, the real poem must be conceived as a structure of norms, realized only partially in the actual experience of its many readers. Every single experience (reading, reciting, and so forth) is only an attempt — more or less successful and complete — to grasp this set of norms or standards.

The term "norms" as used here should not, of course, be con- fused with norms which are either classical or romantic, ethical or political. The norms we have in mind are implicit norms which have to be extracted from every individual experience of a work of art and together make up the genuine work of art as a whole. It is true that if we compare works of art among themselves, similarities or differences between these norms will be ascer- tained, and from the similarities themselves it ought to be pos- sible to proceed to a classification of works of art according to the type of norms they embody. We may finally arrive at theories of genres and ultimately at theories of literature in general. To deny this as it has been denied by those who, with some justi- fication, stress the uniqueness of every work of art, seems to push the conception of individuality so far that every work of art would become completely isolated from tradition and thus finally both incommunicable and incomprehensible. Assuming that we have to start with the analysis of an individual work of art, we still can scarcely deny that there must be some links, some similarities, some common elements or factors which would ap- proximate two or more given works of art and thus would open the door to a transition from the analysis of one individual work of art to a type such as Greek tragedy and hence to tragedy in general, to literature in general, and finally to some all-inclusive structure common to all arts.

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But this is a further problem. We, however, have still to de- cide where and how these norms exist. A closer analysis of a work of art will show that it is best to think of it as not merely one system of norms but rather of a system which is made up of sev- eral strata, each implying its own subordinate group. The Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, in an ingenious highly technical analysis of the literary work of art,22 has employed the methods of Husserl's "Phenomenology" to arrive at such distinctions of strata. We need not follow him in every detail to see that his general distinctions are sound and useful: there is, first, the sound-stratum which is not, of course, to be confused with the actual sounding of the words, as our preceding argument must have shown. Still, this pattern is indispensable, as only on the basis of sounds can the second stratum arise: the units of mean- ing. Every single word will have its meaning, will combine into units in the context, into syntagmas and sentence patterns. Out of this syntactic structure arises a third stratum, that of the objects represented, the "world" of a novelist, the characters, the setting. Ingarden adds two other strata which may not have to be distinguished as separable. The stratum of the "world" is seen from a particular viewpoint, which is not necessarily stated but is implied. An event presented in literature can be, for example, presented as "seen" or as "heard": even the same event, for ex- ample, the banging of a door; a character can be seen in its "inner" or "outer" characteristic traits. And finally, Ingarden speaks of a stratum of "metaphysical qualities" (the sublime, the tragic, the terrible, the holy) of which art can give us contempla- tion. This stratum is not indispensable, and may be missing in some works of literature. Possibly the two last strata can be in- cluded in the "world," in the realm of represented objects. But they also suggest very real problems in the analysis of literature. The "point of view" has, at least in the novel, received consid- erable attention since Henry James and since Lubbock's more systematic exposition of the Jamesian theory and practice. The stratum of "metaphysical qualities" allows Ingarden to reintro- duce questions of the "philosophical meaning" of works of art without the risk of the usual intellectualist errors.

It is useful to illustrate the conception by the parallel which can be drawn from linguistics. Linguists such as the Geneva

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School and the Prague Linguistic Circle carefully distinguish be- tween langue and parole,23 the system of language and the indi- vidual speech-act; and this distinction corresponds to that be- tween the individual experience of the poem and the poem as such. The system of language is a collection of conventions and norms whose workings and relations we can observe and describe as having a fundamental coherence and identity in spite of very different, imperfect, or incomplete pronouncements of individual speakers. In this respect at least, a literary work of art is in exactly the same position as a system of language. We as indi- viduals shall never realize it completely, for we shall never use our own language completely and perfectly. The very same sit- uation is actually exhibited in every single act of cognition. We shall never know an object in all its qualities, but still we can scarcely deny the identity of objects even though we may see them from different perspectives. We always grasp some "struc- ture of determination" in the object which makes the act of cognition not an act of arbitrary invention or subjective distinc- tion but the recognition of some norms imposed on us by reality. Similarly, the structure of a work of art has the character of a "duty which I have to realize." I shall always realize it im- perfectly, but in spite of some incompleteness, a certain "struc- ture of determination" remains, just as in any other object of knowledge.24

Modern linguists have analyzed the potential sounds as pho- nemes j they can also analyze morphemes and syntagmas. The sentence, for instance, can be described not merely as an ad hoc utterance but as a syntactic pattern. Outside of phonemics, modern functional linguistics is still comparatively undeveloped; but the problems, though difficult, are not insoluble or com- pletely new: they are rather restatements of the morphological and syntactical questions as they were discussed in older gram- mars. The analysis of a literary work of art encounters parallel problems in units of meaning and their specific organization for aesthetic purposes. Such problems as those of poetic semantics, diction, and imagery are reintroduced in a new and more careful statement. Units of meaning, sentences, and sentence structures refer to objects, construct imaginative realities such as landscapes, interiors, characters, actions, or ideas. These also can be analyzed

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in a way which does not confuse them with empirical reality and does not ignore the fact that they inhere in linguistic structures. A character in a novel grows only out of the units of meaning, is made of the sentences either pronounced by the figure or pronounced about it. It has an indeterminate structure in com- parison with a biological person who has his coherent past.25 These distinctions of strata have the advantage of superseding the traditional, misleading distinction between content and form. The content will reappear in close contact with the linguistic substratum, in which it is implied and on which it is dependent. But this conception of the literary work of art as a stratified system of norms still leaves undetermined the actual mode of existence of this system. To deal with this matter properly we should have to settle such controversies as those of nominalism versus realism, mentalism versus behaviorism — in short, all the chief problems of epistemology. For our purposes, however, it will be sufficient to avoid two opposites, extreme Platonism and extreme nominalism. There is no need to hypostatize or "reify" this system of norms, to make it a sort of archetypal idea presid- ing over a timeless realm of essences. The literary work of art has not the same ontological status as the idea of a triangle, or of a number, or a quality like "redness." Unlike such "subsis- tences," the literary work of art is, first of all, created at a certain point in time and, secondly, is subject to change and even to com- plete destruction. In this respect it rather resembles the system of language, though the exact moment of creation or death is prob- ably much less clearly definable in the case of language than in that of the literary work of art, usually an individual creation. On the other hand, one should recognize that an extreme nominalism which rejects the concept of a "system of language" and thus of a work of art in our sense, or admits it only as a useful fiction or a "scientific description," misses the whole prob- lem and the point at issue. The narrow assumptions of behavior- ism define anything to be "mystical" or "metaphysical" which does not conform to a very limited conception of empirical real- ity. Yet to call the phoneme a "fiction," or the system of lan- guage merely a "scientific description of speech-acts," is to ignore the problem of truth.26 We recognize norms and deviations from norms and do not merely devise some purely verbal de-

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scriptions. The whole behaviorist point o£ view is, in this respect, based on a bad theory of abstraction. Numbers or norms are what they are, whether we construct them or not. Certainly I perform the counting, I perform the reading; but number presentation or recognition of a norm is not the same as the number or norm itself. The pronouncement of the sound h is not the phoneme h. We recognize a structure of norms within reality and do not simply invent verbal constructs. The objection that we have access to these norms only through individual acts of cognition, and that we cannot get out of these acts or beyond them, is only apparently impressive. It is the objection which has been made to Kant's criticism of our cognition, and it can be refuted with the Kantian arguments.

It is true we are ourselves liable to misunderstandings and lack of comprehension of these norms, but this does not mean that the critic assumes a superhuman role of criticizing our com- prehension from the outside or that he pretends to grasp the perfect whole of the system of norms in some act of intellectual intuition. Rather, we criticize a part of our knowledge in the light of the higher standard set by another part. We are not sup- posed to put ourselves into the position of a man who, in order to test his vision, tries to look at his own eyes, but into the position of a man who compares the objects he sees clearly with those he sees only dimly, makes then generalizations as to the kinds of objects which fall into the two classes, and explains the difference by some theory of vision which takes account of distance, light, and so forth.

Analogously, we can distinguish between right and wrong readings of a poem, or between a recognition or a distortion of the norms implicit in a work of art, by acts of comparison, by a study of different false or incomplete realizations. We can study the actual workings, relations, and combinations of these norms, just as the phoneme can be studied. The literary work of art is neither an empirical fact, in the sense of being a state of mind of any given individual or of any group of individuals, nor is it an ideal changeless object such as a triangle. The work of art may become an object of experience; it is, we admit, accessible only through individual experience, but it is not identical with any experience. It differs from ideal objects such as numbers precisely

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because it is only accessible through the empirical part of its structure, the sound-system, while a triangle or a number can be intuited directly. It also differs from ideal objects in one impor- tant respect. It has something which can be called "life." It arises at a certain point of time, changes in the course of history, and may perish. A work of art is "timeless" only in the sense that, if preserved, it has some fundamental structure of identity since its creation, but it is "historical" too. It has a development which can be described. This development is nothing but the series of concretizations of a given work of art in the course of history which we may, to a certain extent, reconstruct from the reports of critics and readers about their experiences and judgments and the effect of a given work of art on other works. Our conscious- ness of earlier concretizations (readings, criticisms, misinterpre- tations) will affect our own experience: earlier readings may educate us to a deeper understanding or may cause a violent reaction against the prevalent interpretations of the past. All this shows the importance of the history of criticism or, in linguistics, of historical grammar, and leads to difficult questions about the nature and limits of individuality. How far can a work of art be said to be changed and still remain identical? The Iliad still "exists"; that is, it can become again and again effective and is thus different from a historical phenomenon like the battle of Waterloo which is definitely past, though its course may be re- constructed and its effects may be felt even today. In what sense can we, however, speak of an identity between the Iliad as the contemporary Greeks heard or read it and the Iliad we now read? Even assuming that we know the identical text, our actual experience must be different. We cannot contrast its language with the everyday language of Greece, and cannot therefore feel the deviations from colloquial language on which much of the poetic effect must depend. We are unable to understand many verbal ambiguities which are an essential part of every poet's meaning. Obviously it requires in addition some imaginative ef- fort, which can have only very partial success, to think ourselves back into the Greek belief in gods, or the Greek scale of moral values. Still, it could be scarcely denied that there is a substantial identity of "structure" which has remained the same throughout the ages. This structure, however, is dynamic: it changes through-

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out the process of history while passing through the minds of its readers, critics, and fellow artists.27 Thus the system of norms is growing and changing and will remain, in some sense, always incompletely and imperfectly realized. But this dynamic concep- tion does not mean mere subjectivism and relativism. All the dif- ferent points of view are by no means equally right. It will always be possible to determine which point of view grasps the subject most thoroughly and deeply. A hierarchy of viewpoints, a criticism of the grasp of norms, is implied in the concept of the adequacy of interpretation. All relativism is ultimately defeated by the recognition that "the Absolute is in the relative, though not finally and fully in it." 28

The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (like a statue) nor mental (like the experience of light or pain) nor ideal (like a triangle). It is a system of norms of ideal con- cepts which are intersubjective. They must be assumed to exist in collective ideology, changing with it, accessible only through individual mental experiences based on the sound-structure of its sentences.

We have not discussed the question of artistic values. But the preceding examination should have shown that there is no struc- ture outside norms and values. We cannot comprehend and analyze any work of art without reference to values. The very fact that I recognize a certain structure as a "work of art" im- plies a judgment of value. The error of pure phen