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critic’s virtues may operate well or brilliantly, today as at any time, with no method but the application of his own intelligence and sensibility. He would not be a modern CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 243 critic in our sense of the term, however, and is not our concern here. Any critic, no matter what his method, needs the intelligence to adapt it specifically to the work with which he is dealing; the knowledge, both literary and otherwise, to be aware of the implications of what he is doing; the skill to keep from being picked up and carried away by his method to one or another barren and mechanical monism; the sensibility to remain constantly aware of the special values of the work he is criticizing as a unique aesthetic experience; and the literary ability to express what he has to say. There is no test for these personal ’characteristics. Even Shakespeare, the traditional touchstone, is not much help: the two men who have most distinguished themselves in contemporary criticism by disrespect for Shakespeare have been Waldo Frank, a professional exhorter to piety only.slightly concerned with literature of any sort, and John Crowe Ransom, one of the subtlest and most acute critical minds of our day. In the last analysis, these personal capacities are incalculable, and in a discussion of critical method objectified and abstracted from the living critic they can only be presumed or, more honestly, prayed for. One of the principal implications of modern criticism is its development toward a science. In the foreseeable future, literary criticism will not become a science (we may be either resigned to this or grateful for it), but increasingly we can expect it to move in a scientific direction; that is, toward a formal methodology and system of procedures that can be objectively transmitted. As an experiment can be copied and checked from the report, at any time and place by anyone capable of the necessary manipulations, so will critical procedures be capable of repetition by anyone with the requisite interest and ability. ‘the private sensibility’ is unique with the critic and dies with him; his methods will increasingly be capable of objective transmission. The reproducer, it goes without saying, will need a sensibility and other qualifications roughly comparable to the originator’s, in a sense that has not been true of physical science since the beginnings of the experimental method. (That is, a fool and a boor, granted elementary competence, will get the same results by repeating Boyle’s experiments that Boyle did). Furthermore, no matter to what extent the method of critical analysis becomes a body of objective procedures, with the words “evaluation” or “appreciation” the critic will always be entering a purely subjective area: whether the good man’s reasonable superstructure built on objective analysis or the bad man’s indefensible. whim or whimsy.

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244 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I The other principal implication of modern criticism is its development in the direction of a democratic criticism, Edlund Burke’s hopeful doctrine of “every man his own critic.” Burke writes in his essay on The Sublime and Beautiful: The true standard of the arts is in every man’s power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights. This is, piously, the view that the unaided power; of any man make him a critic. The directly contrary view is Francis Bacon’s in Novum Organum, that the adoption of his method would equalize all minds, as a compass or a rule equalizes all hands. Somewhere between the two lie the democratic possibilities for modern criticism: by extending method, more men can be capable critics, in most cases not professionally, but in their private reading and their lives. And the vested interests that possibility menaces are much bigger game than the priesthood of literary criticism. 8.2 It’s Ancestry MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM, we might say, begins with Plato, and is continued and extended by Aristotle. Actually, of course, they were its great forerunners, anticipating, as they anticipated so many things, much of contemporary critical practice. Plato turned his dialectical philosophic method, as expounded in Books V and VII of, The Republic on poetry, as well as psychological and social assumptions about its origin and functions. If his conclusion was to reject it philosophically as too far removed from the’ true Platonic reality, and socio-psychologically as harmful to the good society, his method was nevertheless the modern method of bringing to bear on it all the organized knowledge , he had. In Aristotle’s case, there has been a recent effort, by the neo- Aristotelian school of criticism at the University of Chicago, to insist that he applied no deductive knowledge or principles whatsoever to poetry, but merely examined poems inductively as formal

organizations unique in themselves. This view has been demolished by, among others, John Crowe Ransom (in “The Bases of Criticism” in “The Sewanee Review” Autumn, 1944) and Kenneth Burke (in “The Problem of the Intrinsic” reprinted as an appendix to A Grammar of Motives), Burke in- addition demonstrating that not only was Aristotle thoroughly CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 245 “Platonic” in his practice, but that so are the neo-Aristotelians, surreptitiously, precisely at their most successful. It takes no more than a reading of the Poetics to establish that, although Aristotle worked as inductively and close to the specific text as the neo-Aristotelians would have him, at the same time he continued much of Plato’s approach, deepening Plato’s charge of mimesis or imitation to give poetry philosophic validity, and substituting a sounder socio- psychological concept, catharsis, for Plato’s inadequate concept of poetic function as harmful stimulation of the passions. In addition to analyzing poetry by means of these remarkably explicit philosophic, social, and psychological a priori (assumptions, Aristotle also turned on it an embryonic anthropology, traditions of the primitive origins of Greek drama, that has turned out to be surprisingly accurate to later anthropological, archaeological, and philological research (despite such inevitable’ flaws as his concept of the Choric song as a mere “embellishment” to tragedy)” Aristotle thus anticipated the chief features and techniques of the literary criticism we have come to call “modern.” Later classical and medieval critics continued one or another of these modern strains, from Aristarchus and the scholiasts in the second century before Christ, writing an embryonic social criticism, to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, furnishing allegorical interpretations of literature very close to what we would now call “symbolic” readings. The modem environmental criticism of literature began with Vico’s La Scienza Nuova in 1725, which includes a social and psychological interpretation of Homer; it developed more fully (apparently independently of Vico) in Montesquieu’s work, particularly. The Spirit of Laws in 1748. After this Italian and French origin, the movement spread principally in Germany through the latter half of the eighteenth century, shifting its focus from history and law to literature and art. In the work of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder, it became an aspect of burgeoning German nationalism. Winckelmann began it in 1764 with his History of Ancient Art, which studies Greek plastic art in terms of its political, social, and philosophic background; Lessing continued it, principally in his Laocoon two years later, with particular emphasis on the relativity of forms in historical usage and the importance of Aristotle’s principles; Herder developed the environmentalist approach still further, increasing the method’s relativism by opposing folk art and Gothic to the Classic-worship of Winckelmann and Lessing, extending Vico’s dynamic historical concepts in his own

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246 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Philosophy of History and emphasizing a comparative method in all the fields he touched (making him the ancestor of our modern fields of comparative philology, comparative religion and mythology, and comparative literary study). All of this flowered in the next century in the work of the first really great modern critic, Coleridge, in England, and in a substantial school in France. The Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, is almost the bible of modern criticism, and contemporary critics have tended to see it, with Arthur Symons, as “the greatest book of criticism in English,” and with Herbert Read as “the most considerable.” On its first page it announces the manifesto for modern criticism: the application of Coleridge’s political, philosophic (including the psychological), and religious principles to poetry and criticism. The Biographia was thus a century in advance of its time, and only the inadequacy of the knowledge available to him kept Coleridge from founding modern criticism then and there. He is, however, with the exception of Aristotle, certainly its most important progenitor. His work found no one to carry it on, unfortunately, and when the doctrines of environmentalist criticism reappeared in England, in H. T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England in 1857, they were derived not from Coleridge but from his German predecessors and his French successors. Meanwhile, the German doctrine of literature as an expression of society was brought to France by Madame de Stael in Literature in Relation to Social Institutions (1800), which was responsible in part for such diverse progeny as the rationalist history of Guizot, the populist history of Michelet, and the sceptical history of Renan, as well as by the biographical literary criticism of Sainte - Beuve and the sociological literary criticism of Taine. Sainte - Beuve was the point at which the whole earlier tradition split in two. On the one hand, he saw criticism as a social science, “the natural history of literature,” with a methodical procedure that studies the author, in the words of Macclintock in Sainte-Beuve’s Critical Theory, in relation to “his race, his native country, his epoch, his family, his education and early environment, his group of associates, his first success, his first moment of disintegration, his peculiarities of body and mind, especially his weaknesses,” and much else. This is the tradition that continues in Taine, Brandes, Brunetiere, etc. On the other hand, Sainte-Beuve

insists, in his criticism of Taine, in “M. Taine’s History of English Literature,” that the critic must also “continue to respect and inhale the scent of that sober,

CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM) Introduction to Modern Criticism 247 delicately-perfumed flower which “is Pope’s, Boileau’s, Fontane’s.” This second tradition has been continued in the line through Arnold, Babbitt, and Eliot, equally indebted to him. Sainte- Beuve defines the combination of the two schools as the formula for the perfect critic, but admits that the hope of this reconciliation in one man is “an impossibility,” “a dream.” So it has proved to be for most of a century, at least, although in our time we might express the same hope with somewhat more reason. Taine himself claimed the historicaI imagination of Lessing and Michelet as part of his ancestry, and in the incidental literary anlyses in the latter’s History of France, some of them sharp class ― anglings (like the reading of Manon Lescaut as an expression of the small landed gentry before the Revolution), the resemblance to Taine is obviously more than a matter of historical imagination. At the same time, Taine’s three principal criteria for criticism - race, moment, milieu ― had all been anticipated by Sainte - Beuve, who got them from Hegel’s Zeit, Volke, Umgebung, which were in turn derived from Herder. Taine thus brought to a focus most of the earlier tendencies toward a scientific criticism, and his work logically enough became the target for all attacks on these tendencies. The Goncourts, for example, wrote very superciliously on meeting him, “This was Taine, the incarnation in flesh and blood of modern criticism, a criticism at once very learned, very ingenious, and very often erroneous beyond imagining.” Perhaps the sharpest and most perceptive recognition of his weaknesses and the weaknesses of a good deal of modem criticism, more perceptive than Sainte- Beuve’s strictures, came from Flaubert, who wrote in one of his letters, on the History of English Literature. There is something else in art beside the milieu in which it is practiced and the physiological antecedents of the worker. On this system you can explain the series, the group, but never the individuality, the special fact that makes him this person and not another. This method results

inevitably in leaving talent out of consideration. The masterpiece has no longer any significance except as an historical document. It is the old critical method of La Harpe exactly turned around. People used to believe that literature was an altogether personal thing and that books fell out of the sky like meteors. Today they deny that the will and the absolute have any reality at all. The truth, I believe, lies between the two extremes.

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248 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I In 1869, Flaubert wrote to George Sand on the subject of critics: “At the time of La Harpe they were grammarians; at the time of Sainte-Beuve and Taine they were historians. When will they be artistes really artistes?” It was a question not to be answered for half a century. The next major development in modern criticism came in 1912 and the years immediately following. That year Jane Ellen Harrison, a professor of Greek studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, published Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. The book includes “An Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy” by Gilbert Murray, to whom the book is dedicated, and “A Chapter on the Origin of the Olympic Games” by F. M. Cornford, one of Miss Harrison’s colleagues at Cambridge. Although most of it is Miss Harrison’s independent work, Themis thus constituted a kind of collective manifesto of what is known as the Cambridge school of Classical scholarship, which completely revolutionized the study of Greek art and thought by turning on ft the anthropological knowledge and theories of Sir James G. Frazer and his followers.1 Both Murray and Miss Harrison had published before, the latter in fact for more than a quarter of a century, but Themis is the first full statement of their ritual view of origins and the first really detailed application of anthropology to the analysis of literature, here the Greek drama. Since in addition to printing and using Murray and Cornford, Miss Harrison drew heavily - on unpublished work by another colleague, A. B. Cook, and by others, it also constitutes a genuinely collective production by the group. Shortly afterwatds, the same year, Cornford published From Religion to Philosophy, a similar anthropological tracing of the ritual origins of Greek philosophic thoughts.2 In 1913, Murray published Euripides, and His Age, a study of Euripides and his drama against the background of the ritual origin of tragedy, and Miss Harrison published Ancient Art and Ritual. The following year, Cornford published The Origin of Attic Comedy, which analyzed Greek comedy in the same terms, and Cook published Zeus, an application of anthropological material to still another area. Finally, in 1920, Miss Jessie Weston tried the method, of the Cambridge school, with great success, on non-Greek material in In fairness to indignant Oxonians, it should be pointed out that Oxford scholars, among them Murray and Andrew Lang, had sketched out the techniques for applying not only Frazer’s disreputable Cantabrigian anthropology, but Sir E. B. Tylor’s authentic Oxonian anthropology, to literature as early as 1907, in the symposium Anthropology and the Classics, edited by R. R. Marett, and that Murray had published The Rise of the Greek Epic the same year.

1912 was a watershed year for more than this. It also saw the publication of F. C. Prescott’s “Poetry and Dreams” in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the first detailed and authentic application of psychoanalysis to poetry by a literary man. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 249 her From Ritual to Romance an anthropological exploration of the origins of the Grail Romances in ritual terms. Although these books are, for all practical purposes, modern literary criticism, as the work of scholars writing in fairly specialized fields they failed to attract the attention of literary men sufficiently to inaugurate the new movement. In America in 1919, Conrad Aiken turned, Freudian and other psychologies on poetry in Scepticisms, and clearly formulated the basic assumption of modern criticism, that poetry is “a natural, organic product, with discoverable functions, clearly open to analysis.” Like,the Cambridge group, however, he lacked the literary influence to set criticism following out his assumption. It remained for I. A. Richards - Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924 to constitute the formal beginnings of modem criticism with a variant of the same statement that aesthetic experiences are “not in the least a new and different kind of thing” from other human experiences, and can be studied in the same fashion. It was, as we have noted, no new doctrine (not only had Aiken specifically anticipated it five years before, but John Dewey had stated substantially the same thing as his doctrine of the “continuity” of experience as early as his Studies in Logical Theory in 1903, and Aristotle had clearly operated on that assumption), but this time it was supported by the tremendous prestige of Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning, published the year before, it carried general conviction, and it bore fruit in a quarter of a century of modem literary criticism. The battle of course, is not yet won. The past century has seen critic after critic quarrel with every assumption or method of modern criticism, including every type of knowledge that might be brought to bear on literature, and even the basic assumption of continuity. At one end of the scale these attacks are the simple pettishness of James Russell Lowell in a review of Longfellow, mocking the modern critical view that “the form of an author’s work is entirely determined by the shape of his skull, and that in turn by the peculiar configuration of his native territory,” and Ludwig Lewisohn, in his Preface to Rank’s Art and the Artist, dismissing all modern criticism since Taine offhand for “leaving Hamlet out of the play.” At the other end of the scale they include the reasoned skepticism of Chekhov, writing to Suvorin in November 1888, noting the amount of “rubbish” by “blockheads” that scientific criticism, “working from irreproachable

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250 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I principles, has produced; or of Anatole France, in a criticism of Brunetiere in La vie litteraire, proposing the same balance and reservations Sainte-Beuve had earlier proposed. As a matter of prime theory a critical method is conceivable which, proceeding from science, might share the latter’s certainty.... All things in the universe are inextricably intertwined. In reality, however, the links of the chain are, in any given spot, so jumbled that the devil himself could not disentangle them, even if he were a “logician”.... One cannot foresee today, whatever one may say, a time when criticism will have the rigorousness of a positive science. One may even believe, reasonably enough, that that time will never come. Nevertheless the great philosophers of antiquity crowned their cosmic systems with a poetics. And they did wisely. For it is better to speak of beautiful thoughts and forms with incertitude than to be forever silent. Few things in the world are so absolutely subject to science that they will let science reproduce or predict them. And one may be sure that a poem or a poet will never be among those few... If these things sustain a relation to science, it is to one that is blended with art, that is intuitive, restless, forever unfinished. That science or, rather, that art exists. It is philosophy, ethics, history, criticism ― in a word, the whole beautiful romance of man. A number of critics have found themselves sharply split on the matter. Thus John Middleton Murry, in The Problem of Style, attacks “the fantastic dream” that criticism “might be reduced to the firm precision of a science,” and “the vain hope” of giving its language a constant and invariable significance,” but later in the same book proposes an equally scientific (or mechanistic) social and economic criticism, including a one: to-one correlation between economic and social conditions and artistic and literary forms, and even An Economic History of English Literature. Allen Tate, an outstanding product of the assumptions of modern criticism and practicer of its methods, in Reason in Madness, attacks the social sciences as the fundamental menace, as well as modem criticism itself, which he calls “the historica1 method,” and in which he lumps, along with history, the use, of the physical, biological, social, and political sciences in criticism. Similarly, John Crowe Ransom has at one time or another attacked the use of science in criticism, been violently opposed to social sciences like anthropology, and announced that he

does not share Max Eastman’s “sanguine expectations” for psychology, while himself drawing brilliantly on all three in his own criticism. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 251 Probably more damaging to modern criticism than the attacks by good men and the ambivalence in some of its practitioners has been its enthusiastic defense by men whose own practice ranges from weak to execrable. Thus Louis MacNeice, in Modern Poetry, announces a watered-down form of Richards’ continuity doctrine, that poetry is a normal activity, the poet being :“a specialist in something which every one practices,” but then fails to follow up that assumption in the ’book by turning any knowledge whatsoever on poetry. It would be hard to find two more violent enthusiasts for scientific criticism in recent times than Max Eastman, writing a manifesto in The Literary Mind for “a department of science which will have literature as its object of study,” and V. F. Calverton, in The New Ground of Criticism, eloquently advocating a criticism that will synthesize psychology, sociology and anthropology - and it would be equally hard to find two worse or more infuriating critics in our time. A comparable mistrust is inspired by Henri Peyre. He makes the very shrewd statement in Writers and Their Critics. Modern criticism is still groping for its method and enthusiastically experimenting with several techniques. It has not yet outgrown the primitive stage in which physics similarly fumbled before Bacon and Descartes chemistry before Lavoisier, sociology before Auguste Comte, and physiology before Claude Bernard. Then in the book Peyre reserves his sharpest attack for precisely those methods - of social, psychological, verbal, and other analysis ― and precisely those critics - Richards, Empson, Burke. and Blackmur ― who most clearly represent the attempt of criticism to outgrow the primitive tage he describes. At the same time, modern criticism has been regularly under attack by the invested enemy, the reviewers and the professional obscurantists. A characteristic illustration of the first, worth quoting for its typicality, is a review by Orville Prescott that appeared in The New York Times March 28, 1945. The book under discussion is Florence Becker Lennon’s study of Lewis Carroll, Victoria Through the Looking Glass.

Prescott writes: Miss Lennon has performed prodigies of research, but in spite of her conscientious labours her book is disappointing and tedious. The enchanting magic of the Alice books defies analysis. To seek its source in Freudian probings into Carroll’s complexes and CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

252 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I repressions is as fruitless as to attempt to find explanations for a butterfly’s flight or the lightning’s choice of a target. Genius mysteriously exists; and flowers into enduring treasures as inexplicably. That Carroll lived a blameless bachelor life is true; but then some men are bachelors from choice and quite content with their lot, in spite of Miss Lennon’s Freudian suspicions. That carroll likes the company of little girls better than that of boys or adults IS also true, and rather odd of him. But all Miss Lennon’s solemn pryings into his psyche, into the sexual symbols of his books just don’t seem to get anywhere. ... But Lewis Carroll, to whom “hardly anything ever, happened,” led a singularly blank life... But Lewis Carroll led a life without exterior conflict of any kind, and with few inner ones (just vague religious hesitations). He knew neither love nor close friendships. He was a good man and a good Christian. He tried to get his own salary reduced and he insisted on a publishing contract that insured that he himself would bear any possible loss. But his life was dull and colourless.... As these quotations should make clear, in the course of attacking Miss Lennon’s psychoanalytic study, Prescott gives all the reasons why a psychoanalytic study seems very much to the point, and in the course of insisting that Carroll’s life was uneventful, fills it full of the most remarkable events. Like many contemporary reviewers Prescott attacks modern criticism seemingly not so much out of malice as out of simple ignorance. In other cases, such as J. Donald Adams’ weekly column in The Sunday Times and his book The Shape of Books to Come, malice and a kind of shrill venom are added, and the picture clearly is of the happily superficial reviewer, fighting to preserve his status and investment in what he thinks is criticism against a mob of sans-culottes. The attack by the professional obscurantists is a more complicated matter. Perhaps the best example is Mark Van Doren, whose approach to criticism, consistent with his St. John’s College

approach to education, is opposed to the inroads of -any modern knowledge. whatsoever. In the Preface to The Private Reader Van Doren has written the most complete and eloquent attack ―on modem criticism with which I am familiar. He describes it as “deserts of ingenuity and plateaus CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 253 of learning,” reproaches it with ”doing all it can to arrest the lyric in its flight,” concludes that “it is at best a faulty science .. not an art.” To it Van Doren opposes a pure obscurantism: ”Arnold was wrong in the emphasis he placed upon ideas”; “We do not know that much about poetry, and we never shall”; “undiscussable,” “the mystery,” etc. The piece is remarkable for its tone of bitter elegy, beginning on a theme of exile (“contemporary criticism, a house in which I no longer feel at home”), rising to a wail of keening (“Our literary age is sick”), and ending .on the imagery of self-extinction (“My only ambition as a critic is henceforth to be one of those nameless strangers with whom writers dream that they communicate. Poetry itself can do with silence for a while.”) The final comment on Van Doren’s slogan of “private reading,” the bringing of nothing to bear on literature but the reader’s attention, was made accidentally by I. A. Richards. He writes in Interpretation in Teaching. The remedy, I suppose, is growth, which will occur if testing occasions enough force the adolescent survivals of the Child’s dream-world habit to withdraw into their proper place Unluckily, private reading ― when. it is only a partially controlled form of dreaming ― is a protection from such tests. It too often becomes a romantic,preserve for mental processes which are relatively extinct in fully waking life. Contemporary with modern criticism, along with embattled reviewers and obscurantists, are the violently controversial schools of aesthetic and philosophic doctrine that have enlivened the literary magazines in the past: Impressionists and Expressionists, Neo-Humanists and Naturalists, Classicists and Romanticists, Positivists and anti-Positivists, etc. Their current successor seems to be the largely pointless quarrel between the neo-Aristotelians and the neo-Platonists or neo-Coleridgeans. All of these schools and controversies have their function, but it tends to be one of debating large generalities and saying little so far as actual method is concerned. In one way or another, they are all contemporary blind alleys for the man really concerned with the analysis of literature. While the bricks are flying overhead, the serious modern critic will ‘tend to be down in the mine, digging away. He gets his hands dirtier, but he may also tum up a nugget now and then.

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254 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I 8.3 In the Woods Near Cabin John Behind my back the way is lost in green, And I think here is a peace beyond destruction, For no man aims from any coign my death. But this peace is subtle before the eye: A glance will shatter it if sharp enough. I look where the blight eats silently the leaf To lacy death, and silently the thrush Soars for the fly; the tendrils of the creeper, Tightening, crush the host, and the spider, still At his ancient station, waits between two trees. Stumbling in the undergrowth, I pitch and fall, Tearing my hand upon a thorn. It bleeds, And I remember suddenly in my blood

The motes warring for the mastery of me. ―Ernest Kroll 8.4 Keywords/Abbreviations  Aesthetics: Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art. It examines subjective and sensori- emotional values, or sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.   Democratic Criticism: Democratic criticism includes in its scope both the objective and the subjective. It takes account of the medium in space and time, and also of the subjective response. It requires personal absorption. It permits the fullest play of those CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 255 vital associations which are different in every person. The end of its work is not “good taste,” not knowledge, but life and character. 8.5 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions How is modern criticism different from the previous criticisms? Define modern criticism. “Modern criticism has vast organized bodies of knowledge.” Comment. What are the methods and disciplines established useful for modern criticism? Explain the features of contemporary criticism. “Modern criticism has a formal methodology and a system of procedures.” Comment. Discuss some of the modern critics mentioned in this chapter. What change came over in 1912 in literary criticism? Why has John Crowe Ransom attacked modern criticism on the use of science? B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions Modern criticism is also called __________. (a) New Criticism (b) Novel Criticism (c) Theoretical Criticism (d) Traditional Criticism

14. One of the important features of Modern Criticism is that each critic tends to have a __________ which shapes, informs or limits his work. (a) Style (b) Rules (c) Master metaphor (d) School 17. One of the principle implications of Modern Literary Criticism is its development towards a __________. (a) Goal (b) Science (c) Notion (d) Tradition CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

256 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I 4. Reason in Madness is written by __________. (a) Murrey (b) John Crowe Ransom (c) Allen Tate (d) Max Eastman 5. The Literary Mind is written by __________. (a) Louis MacNeice (b) V.F.Calverton (c) Henry Peyre (d) Max Eastman Answers: 1. (a), 2. (c), 3. (b), 4. (c), 5. (d). 8.6 References Hyman, Stanley Edgar (1948), “Modern Literary Criticism”, New Mexico Quarterly, University of UNM Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/view content.cgi?article=2857&context=nmq Johns Hopkins (2005), Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd Edition), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801880106, OCLC 54374476. Gelder, G.J.H. (1982), Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem, Leiden: Brill Publishers, pp. 1-2, ISBN 9004068546, OCLC 10350183. Murray, Stuart (2009), The Library: An Illustrated History, New York: Skyhorse, pp. 132-133, ISBN 9781616084530, OCLC 277203534. Regan, Shaun and Dawson, Books (2013), Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-

eighteenth-century Britain and France, Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press, pp. 125-130, ISBN 9781611484786. 12. Jones, E. Michael (1991), Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehaviour, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, pp. 79-84, ISBN 0898704472, OCLC 28241358. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 257 T “Contemporary Women’s Writing | Oxford Academic”, OUP Academic, Retrieved 2019-08-01. U Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, chap. L’Envoi, p. 381. V Speirs, Logan (1986), Eagleton, Terry (ed.), “Terry Eagleton and ‘The Function of Criticism’”, The Cambridge Quarterly, 15(1): 57-63. ISSN 0008-199X, JSTOR 42966605.

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UNIT 9 MATHEW ARNOLD: THE STUDY OF POETRY Structure: 9.0 Learning Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Summary 9.3 The Study of Poetry 9.4 Conclusion 9.5 Keywords/Abbreviations 9.6 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) 9.7 References

9.0 Learning Objectives In this unit, the students will study Mathew Arnold’s The Study of Poetry:  Many of the ideas for which Arnold is best remembered.   Why in an age of crumbling creeds, poetry will have to replace religion.   Why we will “turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” 9.1 Introduction Matthew Arnold was one of the foremost poets and critics of the 19th century. While often regarded as the father of modern literary criticism, he also wrote extensively on social and cultural issues, religion, and education. Arnold was born into an influential English family — his CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 259 father was a famed headmaster at Rugby — and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. He began his career as a school inspector, travelling throughout much of England on the newly built railway system. When he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford in 1857, he was the first in the post to deliver his lectures in English rather than Latin. Walt Whitman famously dismissed him as a “literary dude,” and while many have continued to disparage Arnold for his moralistic tone and literary judgments, his work also laid the foundation for important 20th century critics like T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and Harold Bloom. His poetry has also had an enormous, though underappreciated, influence; Arnold is frequently acknowledged as being one of the first poets to display a truly Modern perspective in his work. Perhaps Arnold’s most famous piece of literary criticism is his essay “The Study of Poetry.” In this work, Arnold is fundamentally concerned with poetry’s “high destiny;” he believes that “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” as science and philosophy will eventually prove flimsy and unstable. Arnold’s essay thus concerns itself with articulating a “high standard” and “strict judgment” in order to avoid the fallacy of valuing certain poems (and poets) too highly, and lays out a method for discerning only the best and therefore “classic” poets (as distinct from the description of writers of the ancient world). Arnold’s classic poets include Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer; and the passages he presents from each are intended to show how their poetry is timeless and moving. For Arnold, feeling and sincerity are paramount, as is the seriousness of subject: “The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.” An example of an indispensable poet who falls short of Arnold’s “classic” designation is Geoffrey Chaucer, who, Arnold states, ultimately lacks the “high seriousness” of classic poets. At the root of Arnold’s argument is his desire to illuminate and preserve the poets he believes to be the touchstones of literature, and to ask questions about the moral value of poetry that does not champion truth, beauty, valour, and clarity. Arnold’s belief that poetry should both uplift and console drives the essay’s logic and its conclusions.

The essay was originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology, The English Poets (1880). It appeared later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

260 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own [from The Hundred Greatest Men — ed.], as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present work [The English Poets — ed.] it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry “the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science;” and what is a countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge;” our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge?

The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize “the breath and finer spirit of knowledge” offered to us by poetry. But if we conceive thus highly of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 261 the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: “Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?” — “Yes” answers Sainte-Beuve, “in politics, in the art of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of thought, in art, the glory, the eternal honour is that charlatanism shall find no entrance; herein lies the inviolableness of that noble portion of man’s being”. [Les Cahiers — ed.]. It is admirably said, and let us hold fast to it. In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable. Charlatanism is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true. It is charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, whenever we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry, more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate them. For in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true, is of paramount importance. It is of paramount importance because of the high destinies of poetry. In poetry, as in criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of power in proportion to the power of the criticism of life. And the criticism of life will be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound or half-sound, true rather than untrue on half-true. The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most precious benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the present. And yet in the very nature and conduct of such a collection there is inevitably something which tends to obscure in us the consciousness of what our benefit should be, and to distract us from the pursuit of it. We should therefore steadily set it

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262 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I before our minds at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert constantly to the thought of it as we proceed. Yes; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read. But this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are fallacious. A poet or a poem may count to us historically, they may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they may count to us really. They may count to us historically. The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic. Then, again, a poet or poem may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet’s work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our poetic judgments — the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal. Both fallacies are natural. It is evident how naturally the study of the history and development of poetry may incline a man to pause over reputations and works once conspicuous but now obscure, and to quarrel with a careless public for skipping, in obedience to mere tradition and habit, from one famous name or work in its national poetry to another, ignorant of what it misses, and of the reason for keeping what it keeps, and of the whole process of growth in its poetry. The French have become diligent students of their own early poetry, which they long neglected; the study makes many of them dissatisfied with their so-called classical poetry, the court-tragedy of the seventeenth century, a poetry which Pellisson long ago reproached with its

want of the true poetic stamp, with its politesse stérile et rampante [sterile and bombastic politeness—ed.], but which nevertheless has reigned in France as absolutely as if it had been the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 263 perfection of classical poetry indeed. The dissatisfaction is natural; yet a lively and accomplished critic, M. Charles d’Héricault, the editor of Clément Marot, goes too far when he says that “the cloud of glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history.” “It hinders,” he goes on, “it hinders us from seeing more than one single point, the culminating and exceptional point; the summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a man, and hiding from us all trace of the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model. Above all, for the historian this creation of classic personages is inadmissible; for it withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds criticism by conventional admiration, and renders the investigation of literary origins unacceptable. It gives us a human personage no longer but a God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus; and hardly will it be possible for the young student to whom such work is exhibited at such a distance from him, to believe that it did not issue ready-made from that divine head.” All this is brilliantly and tellingly said, but we must plead for a distinction. Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious. True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes blinded with superstition; we must perceive when his work comes short, when it drops out of the class of the very best, and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value. But the use of this negative criticism is not in itself, it is entirely in its enabling us to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is truly excellent. To trace the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures of a genuine classic, to

acquaint oneself with his time and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary dilettantism unless it has that clear sense and deeper CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

264 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I enjoyment for its end. It may be said that the more we know about a classic the better we shall enjoy him; and, if we lived as long as Methuselah and had all of us heads of perfect clearness and wills of perfect steadfastness, this might be true in fact as it is plausible in theory. But the case here is much the same as the case with the Greek and Latin studies of our schoolboys. The elaborate philological groundwork which we require them to lay is in theory an admirable preparation for appreciating the Greek and Latin authors worthily. The more thoroughly we lay the groundwork, the better we shall be able, it may be said, to enjoy the authors. True, if time were not so short, and schoolboys wits not so soon tired and their power of attention exhausted; only, as it is, the elaborate philological preparation goes on, but the authors are little known and less enjoyed. So with the investigator of “historic origins” in poetry. He ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for his investigations; he often is distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he overbusies himself, and is prone to over-rate it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him. The idea of tracing historic origins and historical relationships cannot be absent from a compilation like the present. And naturally the poets to be exhibited in it will be assigned to those persons for exhibition who are known to prize them highly, rather than to those who have no special inclination towards them. Moreover, the very occupation with an author, and the business of exhibiting him, disposes us to affirm and amplify his importance. In the present work, therefore, we are sure of frequent temptation to adopt the historic estimate, or the personal estimate, and to forget the real estimate; which latter, nevertheless, we must employ if we are to make poetry yield us its full benefit. So high is that benefit, the benefit of clearly feeling and of deeply enjoying the really excellent, the truly classic in poetry, that we do well, I say, to set it fixedly before our minds as our object in studying poets and poetry, and to make the desire of attaining it the one principle to which, as the Imitation says, whatever we may read or come to know, we always return. Cum multa legeris et cognoveris, ad unum semper oportet redire principium [“When you have read and learned many things, you should always return to the one principle.” Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ — ed.].

The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets; the personal estimate when we are dealing with poets our CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 265 contemporaries, or at any rate modern. The exaggerations due to the historic estimate are not in themselves, perhaps, of very much gravity. Their report hardly enters the general ear; probably they do not always impose even on the literary men who adopt them. But they lead to a dangerous abuse of language. So we hear Cædmon, amongst our own poets, compared to Milton. I have already noticed the enthusiasm of one accomplished French critic for “historic origins.” Another eminent French critic, M. Vitet, comments upon that famous document of the early poetry of his nation, the Chanson de Roland. It is indeed a most interesting document. The joculator or jongleur Taillefer, who was with William the Conqueror’s army at Hastings, marched before the Norman troops, so said the tradition, singing “of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver, and of the vassals who died at Roncevaux,” and it is suggested that in the Chanson de Roland by one Turoldus or Théroulde, a poem preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth century in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, we have certainly the matter, perhaps even some of the words, of the chant which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigour and freshness; it is not without pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One thinks of Homer; this is the sort of praise which is given to Homer, and justly given. Higher praise there cannot well be, and it is the praise due to epic poetry of the highest order only, and to no other. Let us try, then, the Chanson de Roland at its best. Roland, mortally wounded, lay himself down under a pine-tree, with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy— “De plusurs choses à remembrer li prist, De tantes teres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France, des humes de sun lign, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l’nurrit.”

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266 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I [“Then began he to call many things to remembrance, — all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord who nourished him” — Chanson de Roland, iii, 939–42. Arnold’s note.] That is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it. But now turn to Homer— Hös phato tous d’eide katechen physizoos aia en Lakedaimoni auphi philei en patridi gaiei [“So said she; they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing, / There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon” — Iliad, iii, 243, 244 (translated by Dr. Hawtry). Arnold’s note.] We are here in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitet gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior. Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. Short passages, even single lines, will serve our turn quite sufficiently. Take the two lines which I have just quoted from Homer, the poet’s comment on Helen’s mention of her brothers;— or take his

A deilo, ti sphoi, domen Pelei anakti Thneta; hymeis d’ eston agero t’ athanato’ te. ei hina dystenoisi met’ andrasin alge’ echeton CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)