THE VICTORIAN AGE (1832-1901)
Introduction:
That the literature of a particular era is intimately and even organically connected with its social background is too patent a truism to need reiteration. A history of English literature, according to Compton-Rickett, “needs to be limned on a background of its social activities, in order to be clearly seen and nicely appraised.”
It is particularly true of the Victorian age. Almost all the writers of the age show in their creative activity a keen awareness of their social environment, and many of them come forward as social critics. Compton- Rickert observes: “The closer approximation of literature to social life is very marked in the Victorian era. Kingsley writes passionate social tracts in the guise of a story; cheap bread inspires the muse of Ebenezer Eliot; Elizabeth Barrett voices The Cry of the Children and Thomas Hood immortalises the weary sempstress and the despairing unfortunate, Carlyle, after excursions into German literature and European history plunges into the political problems of the day. Ruskin, starting as critic of the art of painting, turns in the new century to the more complex art of life, and no man of letters has tackled industrial problems with greater insight and more brilliant suggestiveness.”
A Complex Age:
The Victorian era was an age of rapid flux and baffling complexity. Moody and Lovett aver: “Never before, not even in the troubled seventeenth century had there been such rapid and sweeping changes in the social fabric of England: and never before had literature been so closely in league or so openly at war, with the forces of social life.” It is hazardous to sum up an age in a formula; and it is particularly hazardous to sum up in this fashion the Victorian age. Two features make such a thing particularly difficult:
(i) The very rapid and sweeping changes which the age witnessed and
(ii) The complexity of social forces operating in the age at any given moment.
The words of A. C. Ward are very apt here: “One of the irritating characteristics of the Victorian age is its refusal to be covered by any of the commendatory or derogatory labels from time to time attached to it. It was an Age of Faith and an Age of Doubt; an Age of Morality and of Hypocrisy, of Prosperity and Poverty, of Idealism and Materialism, of Progress and Decline, of Splendour and Squalor. It was a solemn age yet it produced more humorous writers than any other single period: it was advanced in intellect yet immature in emotion. And though as an historical period it lasted for more than sixty years, disintegrating forces were pecking at its foundations forty years or more in advance of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901.” The literature of the age reflects this complexity and is also influenced by it.
The Development of Science:
The two most important features of the Victorian Age were
(i) the development of science; and
(ii) the progress of democracy.
We now propose to discuss at some length these features in all their important ramifications and, of course, their impact on contemporary literature. Now, for the development of experimental science.
The rapid development of physical science in the Victorian age transformed the material environment of the people and both directly as well as indirectly made it self felt in the literature of the age. The age witnessed a great outpouring of scientific literature. Such epoch-making works as Darwin’s Origin of the Species came out in this age. But more important than such direct influence was the indirect and almost ubiquitous influence which the rapid development of physical science exerted on Victorian literature. “The advancement of science”, says Compton-Rickett “has transformed man’s outlook upon life and has affected every channel of intellectual activity.” In what respects did this transformation come about? First, it encouraged a materialist outlook. The “other-worldliness” gave place to “this-worldliness.” Commercialisation of all human activity soon followed accompanied by a marked shift in the values of life. Materialism and commercialism inevitably lead men to restlessness as much as hectic activity. The “busy hum of men” was alien to all spiritual repose. Well could have another Wordsworth lamented:
The world is too much with us; lot? and soon;
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
No doubt, Victorian scientists started “seeing” much in Nature, but not in the Wordsworthian sense. To them Nature was non-human as a spider or a weed which is so nonchalantly cut up and read lectures upon.
Secondly, the development of science was instrumental in nurturing even among the literary writers, the peculiar scientific temper. Some of them even had a recourse to “scientific” methods in their literary works. Tennyson, for instance, followed as a poet the scientific method of description which puts a premium on the accuracy of detail. His nature poetry is, according to Compton-Rickett, “like the work of an inspired scientist.” In the historical literature of the age also the scientific temper seems to be at work. Carlyle, who was bitterly opposed to science in other ways, Buckle and many others adopted as historians the scientific method of discovering and orientating accurate facts and relating them to the psyche of an age. The method of induction and rigorous research was essentially scientific. In the realm of fiction, too, the invisible hand of science was definitely at work. About this aspect Compton-Rickett maintains: “In fiction, the scientific spirit is no less discernible: the problems of heredity and environment preoccupying the attention of the novelists. The social problem [sic] of the earlier Victorians, of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley and Reade, give place to points in biology, psychology, pathology. The influence of Herbert Spencer and of Comte meets us in the pages of George Eliot: while the analytical methods of science are even more subtly followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writings of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and the intimate Wessex studies of Thomas Hardy.”
Thirdly, the development of science caused a marked spiritual disturb?’ “which often took the shape of scepticism and, sometimes, of patent agonisticism. Mid-Victorian poetry is particularly shot with the tincture of this spiritual disturbance caused by the sudden crumbling of the age-old edifice of Christian values. Illustrating this point Compton-Rickett observes: “The questioning note in Clough, the pessimism of James Thomson, the wistful melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzgerald, all testify to the sceptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. It did not kill poetry, but it stifled for a while the lyric impulse and overweighted verse with speculative thought.” The last sentence is over-true, and should with advantage be considered with respect to the poetry of the Victorian age to see the striking difference which the development of science brought about in the general complexion of poetry. Only a handful of writers such as Browning remained undisturbed. Browning could write:
God’s in His Heaven-
All’s right with the world
All’s right with the world
But that opinion is very unrepresentative, being limited only to such incorrigible optimists as Browning who are rare not only in the Victorian age but in any other age. Arnold with his plaintive doubtfulness and Tennyson with his inquisitive note (In Memoriam) are much more typical in this respect.
Fourthly, the development of science led England to the Industrial Revolution which started, no doubt, about 1760, but found its real climax only during the Victorian age. This Revolution brought in the economic and social changes arising out of the replacement of industries carried on in the home with simple machines by industries in factories with power-driven machinery. On account of the excessive significance of the Industrial Revolution we will discuss it under a separate subhead.
The Industrial Revolution:
The Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. But on the side of debit, it converted the “merry England” into a sooty and squalid England and it also gave rise to a number of social problems which are the inevitable bane of industrialisation. With the conversion of the agrarian economy into industrial economy was created, on the one hand, a new class of privileged millowners and big industrialists and, on the other, a huge horde of ill-clothed and ill-fed labourers whose rights were yet to be protected over the years by a long succession of legislative measures. There was a virtual exodus of people from the country to the numerous towns which had started resounding with the grind and buzz of heavy machinery. The policy of laissezfairs as expounded first by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations was seized upon by the Victorian political economists like Mill, Malthus and Ricardo. and applied to the working of the new industrial system. This application was tantamount to the denial of all rights to the labour except perhaps the right to starve. Mayhew in his work London Poor paints a harrowing picture of the miserable life of the working classes of Victorian London. The intransigent political economists for a number of years succeeded in preventing the government from saving the poor from the merciless exploitation of the capitalists. Thus the Industrial Revolution proved much less than an unalloyed blessing.
The so-called political economy and the pontifical utterances of its champions did not go unattacked. Carlyle and Ruskin did their best to strike at the foundations of this “science” which Ruskin called “nescience.” Whereas Carlyle spoke as an inspired prophet, Ruskin combined the inspiration of a prophet with the hard core of a dialectical skill that he displayed effectively in Unto This Last which he called the greatest work of his life and which, incidentally, influenced Gandhi a great deal by helping him to form many opinions of his own. Most of Ruskin’s later works are imbued with the spirit of social reform. Dickens also displays in his novels a soft corner for the miserable poor, their wretched dwelling-places and their poor and squalid lives. His novel Oliver Twist, for instance, contains some very realistic pictures of London slums, and Hard Times is an unveiled and calculated attack on the contemporary political economy of the school of Gradgrind who figures among the chief protagonists of the novel. Dickens is nothing if not a social satirist. As Compton-Rickett puts it, “for the motley multitude that pour through the streets, for the hole-and-corner places of the City, for London as an incomprehensible terrifying, fascinating, delightful personality-every brick and stone alive with tragic humour-Dickens remains unrivalled.” Dickens was not only a realist, however, but a satirist, and a very brilliant satirist at that. We cannot entirely agree with Cross who opines: “The attacks of Dickens on science and political economy are hysterical curiosities.” If we remove the elements of fantasy we will get at a very small but a very genuine core of hard common sense.
The Progress of Democracy:
Basically, the whole progress of English political history is the movement from uncompromising royalism to uncompromising democracy. In the Victorian age this shift was considerably accelerated under the impact of various operating factors. Starting with the year 1832, several Reform Bills were enacted which progressively granted voting rights to more and more people, ultimately ending in universal adult suffrage. As a result the House of Common remained, in Compton-Rickett’s words, “no longer an oligarchy.” It was only then that the expectations raised by the French Revolution (1789) came to be fulfilled. The impact of democracy on the literature of the age is evident. One of its important manifestation is the keen interest which the writers of the age evinced in the hopes and fears of the poor people and in “low life” as a whole. Most Victorians, it is true, believed in a kind of caste system and what Thackeray called snobbery, and sniffed at each other like dogs when two of them met. But almost all writers stood for the demolition of these artificial social barriers and the recognition of the inalienable humanity of the underdog. No writer worthy of note seems to be unaware of the process of rapid democratisation of the political system. The common man comes and stays as the hero of most works of literature. This process brought in its wake increased educational opportunities for the poor. There was thus a rapid expansion of the reading public who became the new patron;; of literature. The writer was thus compelled to cater for these new classes of readers. The democratic spirit of Victorian literature has thus to be studied with reference to the readers also. The unprecedented expansion of journalistic activity is also to be considered likewise. The serialised novels of Thackeray, Dickens and others are a peculiar product of their age.
Sex and Domestic life:
As regards sex, the Victorians were extremely prudish. Even a trivial impropriety of dress (not to speak of the modern “topless” and the “mini skirt” which, in the opinion of the house in the annual debate of the Oxford Union held in 1966, “does not go far enough”) would send the Victorian martinets into paroxysms of rage. They were indeed very touchy about sex which they treated with a hush-hush incommodiousness. Even Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot and others who were stark realists in everything else, did not lift the lid off the animality of their characters. They approached the beast of sex very gingerly, and with gloves on. Thackeray, who gives in Vanity Fair the interesting career of a smart little meretrix (Becky Sharp), does not show even by suggestion the little animal that is in her. All this is done to avoid shocking the susceptibilities of the readers. Victorian parents were quite domineering. Even now-a-days, when a teenager finds her father not very forward in letting her have her own way with her “dates”, she can be heard complaining: “Oh, I have a Victorian sort of papa!” Mr. Murdstone’s cruelty to David Copperfield is an instance of the authority which a Victorian father exercised.
Even too much of drinking was held culpable in the Victorian era. Gone were the days of coffee-house boozing so rampant in the eighteenth century which produced such lovers of wine as Addison, Steele, and Dr. Johnson. The last named wrote (it seems in earnest): “He who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.” And Walter Scott wrote in 1825 : “Sots are excluded from the best company.” Dickens eyes drunkards with sinister fascination. In his early novels he indeed deals with intemperance in his usual light-hearted vein, but in later works he treats the subject with grim and didactic purposiveness. Dickens is, in fact, reflecting the marked shift in public opinion and taste.
The Influence of Science on Victorian Literature
Introduction:
According to Compton-Rickett, the two most important features of the Victorian era were: (i) the progress of democracy, and (ii) the development of science.
While not denying the fact that the Victorian age was a very complex age defying neat labelling, we can still maintain that the two above-mentioned tendencies were then the most powerfully operative. Physical science has always remained progressive.
Every new sun brings in some new addition to the stock of scientific knowledge. However, it was around the middle of the nineteenth century that the progress of science was tremendously accelerated, to continue as such till our own times. Victorian Columbuses discovered many new Americas in the realm of science. While the unprecedented development of science made for material prosperity, it also brought about a revolution in the habits of thought as also the traditions of Christian faith. This revolution in thinking could not but score a deep impression upon contemporary literature. Literature is the record of the consciousness of a nation, and, therefore, goes on changing itself with the changes in national consciousness. The Victorian age was an age of sharp flux generated mainly by the development of science, and the literature of this age mirrors this flux quite authentically.
In the Victorian age science expanded in all its departments such as geology, anthropology, chemistry, botany, astronomy, and zoology. Natural phenomena were no longer viewed with the sense of wonder of the primitive man of the smugness of an all-believing Christian but with the searching eyes of a scientist bent upon knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The change in the temper of the times can be illustrated by an example. Wordsworth, the pioneer of the Romantic Movement and the “archpriest of Nature,” had complained against the physical analyst’s tendency to dissect everything to get at the truth of its structure, nature, and existence. He had lamented that “we murder to dissect.” In the Victorian age, however, Ruskin, who himself was a sensitive aesthete critical of the passion for dissection, had to admit that to dissect a flower could sometimes be as proper as to dream over it. The Royal Society was established as early as 1662, but even in the eighteenth century it was a popular pastime with writers (particularly the Tory satirists like Pope and Swift) to laugh at the pretensions of scientists known contemptuously as “the virtuosi.” Swift’s satire on the experiments of scientists in the kingdom of Laputa is too well-known to need any mention. In the Victorian age the time was fit for laughing at the conservating ignoramuses like Swift rather than the experimental scientists who were working real wonders.
The Direct Influence:
The unprecedented development of science in the Victorian era influenced literature both directly and indirectly. Much of the literature of the age is permeated with the Spirit of science which influenced it more indirectly than directly. Our intention here is not to trace the development of scientific literature or even any other department of non-creative literature. However, it is of interest to note that the Victorian age saw the appearance of a large number of books which were literary as well as scientific. The rigorous differentiation between science and literature, which our modern age of excessive specialisation makes, persistently, was not much known to the Victorian age. Quite a few writers of the age seem to be standing on the no-man’s-land between the territories of science and literature. Most of these writers had taken upon themselves the role of the “popularisers” of science. T. H. Huxley was the most outstanding of such nodescript writers as could be classified both as scientists and as literati. He was pleased to call himself “the bull-dog of Darwin.” He propagated the teachings of Darwin as enshrined in his epoch-making work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Huxley with his lucid style and amazing combative powers did very good work for defending Darwin in particular and science and freedom of thought and expression in general. Huxley, as Samuel C. Chew says, “possessed gifts of style which could popularize science by lucid and readily intelligible presentation, as in the renowned lecture On a Piece of Chalk. He did useful work in advancing the cause of popular education, though as Arnold argued, he laid too much emphasis upon the value of the natural sciences as a discipline as the expense of the older humane curriculum.” It is of interest to note that another scientist of the age-John Tyndall-gave equal importance to science and literature in his proposed curriculum.
Another direct influence of the development of science is discernible in the vast polemical literature which appeared in the age either to defend or to attack the principles of Darwin. All important men of letters were divided into the Gnostics and the Agnostics. Tennyson suggested the formation of a society to counteract the heresies of Darwinian Agnostics. He said: “Something must be done to put down these agnostics.” However, ultimately both the Gnostics and the Agnostics were admitted to a learned society, known as the Metaphysical Society, which discussed the spiritual disturbance engendered by Darwin and others. People of such diverse interests as Tyndall, Huxley, Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Ruskin, Mark Pattison, Gladstone, Browning and the Duke of Argyll were associated with the Society.
The Indirect Influence:
More important than such direct influence was the indirect and -almost ubiquitous influence which the development of physical science exerted on the literature and literati of the Victorian era.’The advancement of science”, observes Compton-Rickett, “has transformed man’s outlook upon life and has affected every channel of intellectual activity.” How and in what respects, we propose to discuss now. In doing so we will mostly confine ourselves to creative literature.
Materialism and Anti-materialism:
The development of science, naturally enough, led the people of the age to adopt a materialistic creed. The “other-worldi ness” gave place to “this-worldliness.” In spite of the desperate efforts of some intellectuals to reconcile religion and morality with science, the two drifted inevitably apart. Materialism and commercialism led the people to hectic activity and restlessness. The “busy hum of men”, in Milton’s words, was alien to all spiritual repose, and well could have another Wordsworth lamented:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Contemporary scientists “saw'” much in Nature, but not in the Wordsworthian sense. To them Nature was as non-human as spider or a weed which is so nonchalantly cut up for reading lectures upon.
This rising wave of materialism which came in the wake of the development of science dismayed a number of sensitive writers such as Carlyle, Arnold and Ruskin, who directed their strokes at the very foundations of the superstructure of Victorian materialistic values. Literature is nothing if it does not make a man aware of the higher values of life and turn him away from the blind cult of Mammon-worship. Thackeray in his magnum opus, Vanity Fair, attacked the rank materialism and insufferable snobbery which characterised the age of Queen Victoria. Matthew Arnold called the English aristocracy and nobility “barbarians,” the middle classes “Philistines”, and the common people “populace.” He showed how all these classes suffered from spiritual narrow-mindedness and insensitiveness. He campaigned for making them pervious to the higher values of life and the much-needed enlightenment which would wean them from the craving for gold. His force was mostly exerted against “Philistinism.” Carlyle raised a prophet-like voice against the brutality of the age of the machine. He upheld vigorously the human values which were then fast disintegrating. Even the scientist John Tyndall, in his essay mentioned above, praised Carlyle for his message of action. Ruskin reserved the vials of his wrath for all the so-called blessings of science and the Industrial Revolution. Among other things he condemned his contemporaries’ tendency to make money by hook or crook, not for any laudable purpose, but just for the sake of making more money. A man making money was compared by him to a cricketer making runs which in themselves meant nothing at all. Dickens in his own peculiar way took the Grandgrind-like materialists to task.
The Growth of the Scientific Temper:
The development of science was also instrumental in nurturing in Victorian writers the peculiar scientific temper. Under its influence some of them had a recourse to scientific methods in their literary works. Tennyson, for instance, followed as a poet the scientific method of description which puts a premium upon the accuracy of detail. His nature poetry is, according to Compton-Rickett, “like the work of an inspired scientist.” In the historical literature of the age also the cientific temper seems to be at work. Carlyle, who was bitterly opposed to science in many ways, Buckle, and many others adopted as historians the scientific method of discovering ascertaining and orientating accurate facts and relating them to the psyche of an age. The method of rigorous research, rational discussion, unimpassioned examination, and induction was essentially scientific. The desire for rational truth became the guiding-star of not only the historians but also the “fictitious historians,” namely, the novelists. The English novel had at its back a pretty long tradition of realism starting with Defoe. In the later Victorian age the stress on realism was not only reinforced but many other scientific tendencies also started operating upon the novel. Compton-Rickett avers in this connexion: “In fiction the scientific spirit is no less discernible: the problems of heredity and environment preoccupying the attention of the novelists. The social problems of the earlier Victorians, of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley and Reade give place to points in biology, psychology, pathology. The influence of Herbert Spencer and of Comte meets us in the pages of George Eliot; while the analytical methods are even more subtly followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writings of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and the intimate Wessex studies of Mr. Thomas Hardy.” Among the major Victorian poets who adopted”the methods of science may be mentioned Robert Browning who used the psychoanalytic approach for his task of the exploration of the human soul, which he did with the intellectual curiosity of a Darwin or Newton. According to a critic, “Browning is the greatest English poet who wrote by a rational impulse.”
Spiritual Disturbance:
The development of science in the Victorian era also caused a marked spiritual disturbance which took quite often the shape of scepticism and sometimes of patent agnosticism and even downright free thinking. Mid-Victorian poetry is particularly shot with the tincture of this spiritual disturbance caused by the sudden collapse of the age-old edifice of Christian values. Illustrating this point, Compton-Rickett observes: “The questioning note in Clough, the pessimism of James Thomson, the wistful melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzgerald, all testify to the sceptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. It did not kill poetry, but it stifled for a while the lyric impulse and overweighted verse with speculative thought.” The last sentence is overtrue and should be considered with reference to the poetry of the Romantic Age to see the striking difference which the development of science created in the general complexion of Victorian poetry. Only a handful of writers, such as Browning, remained undisturbed and could still say:
God’s in His heaven— All’s right with the world.
But the rest became victims of growing doubts regarding the ultimate values of life. Darwin and others had knocked the bottom out of the concept of the divine origin of the universe, and had “proved” that human beings were the descendants of not Adam and Eve, but apes who themselves had descended from other forms of life. Christianity was destroyed, but nothing could fill the vaccuum. The doubts and the consequent spiritual restlessness caused by science were shared by all the poets, but the answers they gave were different. Even the normally complacent Tennyson struck an inquisitive note in In Memoriam. Arnold expressed his plaintive doubtfulness in numerous of his poems and groped about in search of a spiritual stance. His mournful pessimism finds good expression in Dover Beach where he says that the world,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
or certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
or certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Fitzgerald struck the note of fatalism-epicureanism. If you are here just for a while to be swept into nothingness by the relentless hand of time, why not them drink and be merry?
The moving finger writes and having writ
Moves on, not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line;
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Moves on, not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line;
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A cup of wine, a book of verse and thou
Singing beside me in the wilderness,
And wilderness is paradise enow!
A cup of wine, a book of verse and thou
Singing beside me in the wilderness,
And wilderness is paradise enow!
Hardy adopts the Schopenhaurean philosophy of pessimism. He has a deterministic attitude towards life and bears the ironies of fate as the mechanistic workings of an insensitive power. And so forth.
Some Exceptions:
Some of the Victorian writers-including a few major ones-remained unaffected by the development of science and the forging of the scientific temper. The Pre-Rephaelite Movement as also the ‘Tractarian Movement show no influence of science at all. The former as concerned chiefly with painting. Its protagonists like Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris favoured art for the sake of art and envisaged poetry as a branch of aesthetics. Their main concern was with the appreciation and creation of beauty and not with breaking their heads or hearts on dialectic activity. The Tractarian Movement, which involved such important writers as Newman, was religious in nature and had nothing to do with science.
Tennyson as a Representative of His Age
Introduction:
Tennyson is, in the words of W. J. Long, “probably the most representative literary man of the Victorian era.” His work is an authentic epitome of all the important features of his age. Whatever be our estimate regarding his greatness as a poet-and most modern critics are convinced of his mediocrity-there can be no doubt about the representative value of his work. He is as good a representative and chronicler of his age as Chaucer, Spenser, and Pope were of their own respective ages.
Tennyson’s career as a poet extended over more than half a century during which period many changes occurred. In his poetry he kept pace with the changing times. Stopford Brooke says: “For more than sixty years he lived close to the present life of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with its movements; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his poetry.” It does not mean, however, that he had no individuality of his own: he did have individuality, though it was not he alone but also the ethos of his age that found utterance in his poetry. He was the Poet Laureate, but we can even call him the national poet without any hesitation. He indeed fixed for the future generations the essence and the spirit of his age. Tennyson did not concern himself much with the externals of contemporary life, such as the international conflicts: except for the Cremian War we will find little mention of contemporary upheavals and conflicts in his poetry; but the deeper currents of contemporary thought and feeling run in his poetic compositions and are worthy of examination by a student of the Victorian ethos. In this sense he bears a curious resemblance to Chaucer, the unofficial chronicler of the later fourteenth century.
A Champion of Order:
The victorian age was singularly unemotional and stood for balance, order, and discipline. The radicalism, revolutionism, and even the individualism of the romantics like Shelley had already become a thing of the past. All enthusiasm, excitement, or prophetic fervour was eyed with suspicion by the sane Victorians who were terribly afraid of disorder and anarchy. Even the Victorian “Chartists” (those who stood for the extension of political power to the working-classes) believed in constitutional means to effect political changes and would have been offended at being dubbed “revolutionaries.” Evolution not revolution, was the slogan. England and the Continent had enough of excitement. What was needed now was calm thinking and constructive action. The Victorians, as a critic puts it, “had enough of tremendous thoughts in familiar shape. They now wanted familiar thoughts in tremendous shape.”
Now, Tennyson reflects adequately the Victorian respect for balance and order, and the corresponding fear and contempt for lawlessness and disorder. Many a time he expresses his love of England, which is partly generated by her political stability. Order in England is not only a reason of Tennyson’s pride in his country, but also his love for it. At a place he says about England
It is the land that free men till,
That sober-suited freedom chose;
The land where girl with friends and foes,
A man may speak the thing he will.
A land of settled government;
A land of just and old renown.
That sober-suited freedom chose;
The land where girl with friends and foes,
A man may speak the thing he will.
A land of settled government;
A land of just and old renown.
Attention may be directed to the last but one line of the passage quoted above. “Nothing is,” proclaims Tennyson “that errs from law.” According to Compton-Rickett, the Victorian age witnessed a shift from individualism to collectivism. In other words, individual impulses came increasingly under the discipline of social conventions. Tennyson is an exponent of this shift in thought. His love of order is reflected in the most quoted of his lines:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And god fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And god fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
From the first line it must be noted what the old order changes yielding place to a new order, not to disorder or chaos. Tennyson is not for stagnancy or the status quo, but he is not for change that would hurl everything into chaos. In these beliefs he represents his age.
The Rise of Democracy:
This moral terror of revolution and anarchy makes Tennyson, necessarily, a reactionary, or, at least, a conventionalist. The Victorian age was, so to say, a “middle-aged” period, wedded to a plethora of social conventions. Nevertheless, it witnessed a gradual change from aristocracy to democracy. According to Compton-Rickett, an important feature of the Victorian age was “the steady advance of democratic ideals.” Things moved surely though steadily towards the ultimate Chartist goal of universal suffrage. How far does Tennyson reflect this change in his poetry? It must be understood that Tennyson was not another Ruskin. He clung to old order of aristocracy but when he found the swelling tide of democracy impossible to be checked, he persuaded himself to strike a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. He was an aristocrat by birth, upbringing and his ways of thinking, but we cannot but admit that he had a genuinely sympathetic interest in the common people and common things. If he wrote The Princess, Maud, and The Idylls of the Kings, he also wrote such poems as Dora and Enoch Arden which are concerned with poor people.
Female Suffrage and Education:
Tennyson’s conservatism is also apparent from his views on female suffrage and education, which, in the Victorian age, were burning topics. He did not associate himself with the loud-mouthed suffragists of his age. Nor did he think highly of formal education for the fair sex. He could have readily agreed with Addison that “family is the proper sphere for a woman to shine in.” Like Addison he was for keeping a wedge between the two sexes either of which was supposedly designed by God for a particular function and was endowed accordingly.
Man for the field and woman for the hearth,
Man for the sword and for the needle she,
Man to command and woman to obey,
All else confusion.
Man for the sword and for the needle she,
Man to command and woman to obey,
All else confusion.
The last line should be considered with reference to Tennyson’s love of order, which we have detailed above.
The Princess (1847), one of the major poems of Tennyson, deals with the contemporary issue of female education which aroused an acrimonious strife between its supporters and opponents. Of course, Tennyson ranged himself on the side of its opponents. Higher education in his view was likely to kill the essential feminity of women. In the poem just referred to he shows the apparent untenability of the views of Princess Ida on female education. She establishes a university for women and, very like a Victorian “suffragette”, shrieks for the rights of women. She even refuses to marry the prince to whom she was betrothed in her childhood. But where does all this end? Ida’s intransigence is gone and she marries the prince. Tennyson implies that she is “reformed” as she gives up her cry for equality, loses her obstreperousness, and agrees to be, what Coventry Patmore would call, “the aneel in the house.”
Love, Sex, and Social Taboos:
Tennyson is a representative Victorian in his attitude to love and sex. About these things Victorians were indeed quite prudish. Even a trivial impropriety of dress (not to speak of the modern “topless” and the “mini-skirt”, which, in the opinion of the house in the annual debate of the Oxford Union held in 1966, “does not go far enough”) would send the Victorian martinets into paroxysms of rage. They were indeed very touchy about sex which they were prone to treat with a hush-hush incommodiousness. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others who were stark realists in everything else did not dare lift the lid off the animality of their characters. They approached the beast of sex gingerly, and with gloves on. Tennyson is no exception. In his treatment of love and sex he has neither the frank conviviality of Fielding, nor the voluptuousness of Marlowe or Spenser, nor the ribaldry of Chaucer of the Miller’s Tale. He does not think of love in terms of the Platonic transcendentalism of Shelley; he does think of it as an earthly.
Passion, but refuses to excoriate it, not to speak of exploring its interior. Unbridled passion he looks down upon, especially when it is non-conjugal. Such passion would be destructive of social order and has to be viewed as a disintegrating and mischievous force. Too often does he proffer the sermon of rising above one’s animality.
A rise and fly
The reeling faun, the sensual feast,
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
The reeling faun, the sensual feast,
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
Tennyson’s lovers are always full-dressed. They love each other like perfect Victorians and are invariably married. A typical instance is provided by The Lady of Shallot in which we are introduced to “two young lovers” walking together in the moonlight. Before the reader should get scandalised, Tennyson reassures him that these lovers were “lately wed. “Marriage and procreation are exalted by Tennyson as the symbols of order and human immortality. But licentiousness is to be curbed as it is symptomatic of disorder.
Religion, Science, and “the Victorian Compromise”:
According to Compton-Rickett, the progress of scientific thought was one of the two most important features of the Victorian era (the other one being, as already pointed out, “the steady advance of democratic ideals”). The progress of science tended to undermine the very foundations of the Christian faith by calling into question many a scriptural “truth.” Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, which traced the descent of human beings from apes, gave a serious blow to Genesis and shook the Christian belief in the immortality of the human soul, not to speak of a plethora of minor points of the Christian doctrine. Needless to say, all this caused an earthquake in the realm of contemporary thinking and brought many an adamant-built edifice tumbling to the ground. All Victorian writers, in some way or other, give expression to the doubts and the consequent spiritual disturbance generated by scientific discoveries. Some of the Victorians clung to the old faith and aspersed what they called the new-fangled opinions, others went over to the side of science and turned agnostics, and still some others tried in panic to effect some sort of compromise between the two conflicting forces (of science and belief). Tennyson, on the whole, may be classed with the third group-the one which stood for what is often called “the Victorian Compromise.” He was too greatly affected by the development of science to remain an orthodox Christian, but still he was not so much affected as to turn an unqualified agnostic like, say, T. H. Huxley. In his poetry we often meet with an evidence of his groping for a moral stance, though it is true that he has fewer doubts than Arnold and he is much more of a facile optimist than most of his sensitive1 and introspective contemporaries. “No poet,” says a critic, “was more exercised by religious problems than he; and no poet was more sensitive to scientific thought than he. ” But his attitude was an attitude of compromise and he propounded a via media between materialistic science and dogmatic Christianity He was not much of a sceptic, though he could say:
There remains more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
In Memoriam, no doubt, the ultimate questions of life, death, and immortality are somewhat probed into. Likewise, in The Two Voices and elsewhere doubt and faith are tentatively probed. But the whole thing ends in a reassuring note of faith in God:
The sun, the moon, the stars, the hills and the plains, Are not these,
O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns?
O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns?
He believes
That nothing walks with aimless feet.
That not one life shall be destroyed.
That not one life shall be destroyed.
And there are men who are not just ape-like but “Godlike”–obviously not the descendants of apes.
Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust.
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust.
Such “trust” may be pejoratively called facile optimism or smug complacency but it is essentially Victorian, even more Victorian than the much-publicized “Victorian Compromise.”
Conclusion:
These fundamental aspects of Victorian thought (along with such minor elements as militant patriotism and colonialism) entitle Tennyson to be considered a representative Victorian. He was indeed a great poet, even though his representative value may be much greater than his intrinsic value. “It will be right,” to conclude with Lyall, “for the future historians to treat Tennyson as a representative of the Victorian period and to draw inferences from his work as to the general, intellectual and political tendencies of the nineteenth century.”
Matthew Arnold as a Critic of His Age
Introduction:
Matthew Arnold was both a distinguished poet and prose writer of the Victorian era. He wrote on varied topics such as literature, education, politics, and religion. But whatever topic he handled, his approach was always critical and more often than not, constructive. The same critical attitude is discernible in much of his poetry also.
As lago said of himself Arnold, too. is “nothing if not critical.” All of his critical work, it may be pointed out. is of a piece. Criticism, whether literary or social or political or educational, performs, according to Arnold, the same function and demands the same qualities of intelligence, discrimination, knowledge, and disinterestedness. Criticism is nothing if it is not related to life. Life is the main thing. So Arnold’s criticism of literature, society, politics, and religion all tends towards being a criticism of life. So does his poetic activity. Thus criticism with Arnold denotes a comprehensive activity which embraces all the departments of life. He himself defines criticism as “the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus criticism with Arnold is a definite kind of approach to life. J. D. Jump observes: “Writing on literature, education, politics and religion, he tries to encourage a free play of the mind upon the material before it and so to help its readers to get rid of any stock notions and pieces of mental petrifaction which may be hampering their thought.” In other words. Arnold stood for the annihilation of all tyrannical dogmas, prejudices, and orthodox notions. That there was a pressing need for such a campaign in England cannot be gainsaid. “Matthew Arnold,” to quote Hugh Walker, ‘inherited the teacher’s instinct, and he was profoundly influenced by his sense of what his country needed. To be useful to England was always one of his greatest ambitions; and he knew that England was always one of his greatest ambitions; and he knew that the way to be useful was to supply that wherein England was deficient.’ Obviously it was the rational and dispassionate appraisal of the life “wherein England was deficient.” And that explains his donning of the mantle of a critic
The Bearing of Arnold’s Literary Criticism on Life and Society:
As a critic Arnold is best known as a literary critic. But his literary criticism has a close bearing on society and life in general. He was extremely impatient of the slogan “Art for Art’s Sake” which was raised by the Pre-Raphaelites, aesthetes, and some other nondescript groups. Consequently, his literary criticism is submerged in the criticism of society. According to him, “poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism.” Criticism, according to him, should be “sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.” In his own literary and critical essays he is often led to specifically social criticism. In his lectures on Homer, for instance, he expatiates upon the frailty of intellectual conscience among his countrymen. Likewise, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Times” he points out the absurdity of numerous false notions which have a free play in England owing to the absence or weakness of such intellectual conscience. In a word, Arnold is a critic of his age even while he is engaged, apparently, in literary criticism.
Social Criticism in Arnold’s Poetry:
Arnold’s oft-quoted remark that poetry is, or should be, “a criticism of life” has provided a juicy bone for numerous critics to gnaw at. Most critics have, however, spurned it as a frivolous truism. Thus George Saintsbury dismisses it as such, because as he observes in A History of English Criticism, “all literature is the application of ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry is simply a vain repetition.” Likewise, T. S. Eliot (in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) observes that Arnold’s dictum about poetry makes no sense. He holds that life is an awful mystery and we cannot criticise it properly; it can only be done just vaguely. However, J. D. Jump makes bold attempts to defend Arnold. “A good deal of nonsense,” observes he, “has been written about this phrase (“a criticism of life”) by commentators who were so impatient to reject it that they could not wait to understand it…It would be difficult to find fault with this as an account of the ideal attitude of a poet, or other creative artist, towards his experience.”
How far and in what way is Arnold’s own poetry “a criticism of life”? Hugh Walker answers this question in the following words:
“His much-condemned definition of poetry as ‘a criticism of life’ is at least true of his own poetry. Even in the literary sense, there is a surprising quantity of wise criticism in his verse…But Arnold’s verse is critical in a far deeper sense than this. In all his deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, in Resignation, in the Obermann poems, in^4 Southern Night, Arnold is passing judgment on the life of his age, the life of his country, the lives of individual men. In the last-named poem the fate of his brother, dying in exile in the attempt to return to the country of his birth, becomes the text for a sermon on the restless energy of the English and on the ‘strange irony of fate’ which preserves for the members of such a race graves so peaceful as theirs by ‘those hoary Indian hills’ and ‘this gracious Midland sea.’
“In all this Arnold is quite consistent with himself. Holding that what Europe in this generation principally needed was criticism he gave this criticism in verse as well as in prose…”
Quite often Arnold’s criticism of life in his poetry does not go beyond the expression of a sense of resignation. Such a criticism is definitely negative. If Keats escapes from life, Arnold resigns himself to it. Life with him is not something to be enjoyed, but something to be suffered. Resignation to life is also of two kinds: one escapist, and the other Stoic. In the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse the resignation is of the first kind. Sick of the fury, fret, and fever of life, the poet appeals to the monastic cloister to take him into its fold.
On, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
This desire to “possess my soul again” is a recurring feature of Arnold’s poetic expression. His most insistent counsel to the people is to “possess their souls.” He felt that with the relentless and catastrophic advance of the materialistic values in his age human beings had lost contact with their inner spirit which is the abode of all the higher values of life.
The other kind of Arnoldian resignation is more assertive and valiant and much less negative. It arises from a pessimistic insight into the arcanum of life. It is an acceptance of the human predicament, arecognition and an adjustment to the fact that duty is not usually attended by a meet reward. Duty is still to be performed and the event left to God. We are ordained to spend life
In beating where we must not pass
And seeking what we shall not find.
And seeking what we shall not find.
Nature herself is resigned to the pain of existence:
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange, scrawl ‘d rocks; the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange, scrawl ‘d rocks; the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
Science and Faith:
Like most other Victorian writers, Arnold expresses in his work the conflict between science and faith which his age witnessed. The unprecedented development of experimental science had come to shake the very foundations of Christianity by calling into question Genesis and much else besides. Arnold felt that he was breathing in a kind of spiritual vacuum. Like Janus he looked both ways. Neither like T. H. Huxley could he align himself completely with the new mode of thinking (by turning an agnostic) nor could he cling to the ruins of a crumbling order. Spiritual disturbance often manifesting itself in despair was the natural outcome of such a predicament. Arnold found himself shuttlecocking
between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
The other powerless to be born.
This desperate groping for something like a firm moral stance finds expression in much of his most typical poetry. As Moody and Lovett maintain, Arnold’s “prevailing tone is one of doubt and half-despairing stoicism.” Dover Beach is the finest embodiment of Arnold’s dominant mood. He refers to the crumbling of the religious edifice:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
He is keenly aware of the terrible confusion caused by the conflict between science and faith, between advancing materialism and retreating Christianity:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. Where ignorant armies clash by night.
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. Where ignorant armies clash by night.
He compares modern civilization to Rachel:
Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had—one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash ‘d contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome
The strife, the mixture in her soul are ours.
Her genius and her glory are her own.
She had—one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash ‘d contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome
The strife, the mixture in her soul are ours.
Her genius and her glory are her own.
What is, after all, the way out of his confusion!” In Arnold’s opinion, “says Hugh Walker, “that which the time demands above all things is the discovery of some shore, not false or impossible, towards which to steer. We need some Columbus to guide us over a trackless ocean to a new continent which he discerns, though we cannot. Our misfortune is that we can find no such pilot. Goethe, the ‘physician’ of Europe’s ‘iron age,’ had laid his finger on the seat of the disease, but he failed to find a cure. Arnold never conceived himself to be capable of succeeding where Goethe had failed. On the contrary, he rather teaches that the problem had grown so complex that scarcely any intellect could suffice for its solution. This feeling of almost insuperable difficulty is the secret of Arnold’s melancholy. It gives a sense of brooding pause, almost of the paralysis of action, to his verse. It is the secret of his attraction for some minds, and of an alienation amounting almost to repulsion between him and many others. It makes him, in verse as well as in prose, critical rather than constructive.”
“Culture and Anarchy”:
Among Arnold‘s works dealing with social and political questions, the pride of place must go to Culture and Anarchy (1869) which was obviously occasioned by the mass agitations preceding the passage of the Reform Bill of 1869 which granted voting rights to the working classes of towns and thus almost doubled the electorate. The Victorian age is generally known to us as an age of peace and prosperity and most of all, political stability (in spite of the numerous unsuccessful attempts made on the life of Queen Victoria). But behind the imposing facade of order, Arnold perceived some anarchic forces at work. Anarchy, according to him is essentially antonymous to culture. When everybody is bent upon “doing as one likes”, culture is in danger. What: makes for culture? It is, in his words, a “view in which the love of our neighbours, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it-motives eminently such as are called social-come in as parts of the ground of culture and the main and preeminent parts.” Culture is thus a social passion of doing good. And anarchy is its very negation. Arnold was convinced of the progress of democracy, but he desired that the transition to democracy should not be allowed to destroy the social edifice. He was against unchartered freedom which allowed all to have their own ways. “The moment,” writes he, “it is plainly put before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; because we are believers in freedom and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated.” He supports a “firm state-power” to hold such anarchic tendencies in check. The state should not be representative of any single class, because all individual classes have been depraved by the contagion of materialism-the higher classes have been materialised, the middle classes desensitised, and the lower classes brutalised. Along with Culture and Anarchy may be mentioned here Friendship’s Garland (1871) in which is contained, according to Hugh Walker, “the very best of Arnold‘s criticism on the social rather than the political side.”
Educational Criticism:
A word in the end about Arnold‘s educational criticism. Arnold was an Inspector of Schools and then the Professor of Poetry of Oxford. He was, naturally, interested in educational reforms and wrote quite a few tracts in this connexion. Many of the reforms which he advocated have since been implemented. Compton Rickett observes: “There were no more liberal-minded, clear-sighted educational reformers in the Victorian era than he and Thomas Henry Huxley.”
Pessimism in Victorian Poetry
Introduction:
In the texture of Victorian poetry there runs a noticeable strand of pessimism, mostly the work of the group of poets consisting chiefly of Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, James Thomson, and Edward Fitzgerald. By pessimism we mean, if not a philosophy of life, at least a well reasoned-out attitude towards life based on a temper of mind that looks on the dark side of things. To feel or express melancholy is not necessarily to be a pessimist unless this melancholy is well thought-out. Who is more subject to moods of melancholy than Shelley, for instance? And Shelley is an optimist for all that.
The Origin of Pessimism:
Victorian pessimism, in most cases, is the outcome of a deep-seated spiritual disturbance to which the sensitive poets of the age were eminently prone. The age experienced a protracted battle between the advancing forces of science and agnosticism and the retreating forces of Christianity and faith which had been holding the fort for times immemorial. While the tremendous advance of science destroyed much of the existing faith, it could not provide another spiritual anchor. Many thinkers and poets, then, felt lost, without moorings or a rudder. They found themselves blundering
between two worlds; one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
The other powerless to be born,
Some attempted some sort of compromise, and failed; others were knocked about on the flood of doubt and despair and ensuing melancholy which settled into pessimism. Some like Thomas Henry Huxley went over to open agnosticism and started singing paeans of the powers of science. Some, like Macaulay, dazzled by the material splendour and prosperity ushered in by the development of science, gravitated towards a posture of smug, “Victorian” complacency. Robert Browning kept his chin above the commotion of all doubts, and complacently believed:
God’s in His Heaven–
All’s right with the world.
All’s right with the world.
But such optimism was essentially alien to Victorian spirit, and it is not surprising that he was taken to task by a number of his contemporaries and a still larger number of his successors.
From what has been said it should be clear that pessimism of (some of) the Victorians arose from impersonal grounds, not subjective experience. The only possible exception is, perhaps, James Thomson whose life was, indeed, far from happy—though it was he himself (and not his circumstances) who was to blame for it. The rest of Victorian pessimists were well-placed and materially prosperous individuals. Between them and pessimists like Voltaire, Swift, and Schopenhauer may thus be drawn a line, as the pessimism of the latter was nurtured, if not generated, by their unhappy lives as individuals. All Victorian pessimistic poets were endowed with the following two qualities:
(i) A sensitive, acutely impressionable mind, with a tendency towards self-introspection.
(ii) A searching intellect.
Their poetry reflects both of them quite abundantly. It was their tendency to be too intellectual and to subject everything to a searching intellect that was perhaps responsible for much of their pessimism. Compton-Rickett observes in A History of English Literature: “It was the endeavour to intellectualise the visions of imaginative life that led Arnold, Clough, Fitzgerald, and James Thomson into that mood of wistful melancholy, that crystallised soon into a more or less pessimistic criticism of life.”
After these preliminary remarks let us now consider the pessimistic note in the poetry of some important Victorian poets.
Tennyson (1809-1892):
To include Tennyson among the Victorian pessimists is, on the face of it, as egregious a solecism as to include Hercules among the fair sex! Tennyson is usually considered a sleek optimist with a certain irritating cocksureness regarding the transcendent power of God. He is not a pessimist; but there are melancholy and pessimistic moods which he gives expression to now and then-though only to sweep them aside soon after. “For me”, says Harold Nicholson, “the essential Tennyson is a morbid and unhappy mystic.'” Robin Mayhead contradicts this opinion, for according to him, “some of Tennyson’s most successful poetry has nothing to do with the morbid and the melancholy.” However, he adds, that it must “be granted that this trait is certainly of capital importance.”
Tennyson’s In Memoriam, one of his major works, is an elegy which contain not only the expression of the poet’s personal grief at the death of his friend Arthur Hallam but also grapples with the ultimate issue of human predicament. Life, death, and the whole creation are discussed with recurring references to the evolutionary theory which, even before Darwin, had started rocking the times. At moments the poet’s faith wavers and he is inclined to be pessimistic, but all doubts are ultimately cleared with a reassert!on of faith in God and man— His favoured creature. Tennyson salutes
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event,
To -which the whole creation moves.
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event,
To -which the whole creation moves.
According to Robin Mayhead, in In Memoriam we find “a progress from the initial stunned grief, through gradual acquiescence, to a condition of peace and serenity in which passionate regret is replaced by the consciousness of union with the spirit.” It was not for nothing that Queen Victoria said to Tennyson : “Next to the Bible In emoriam is my comfort.”
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):
Arnold is the most consistently pessimistic of all the major victorian poets. According to Middleton Murry; “Arnold’s most consistent achievement was in the kind which we call elegiac.” “He is,” observes Garrod, “the greatest elegiac poet in our language not by virtue merely ofThyrsis but by virtue of the whole temper of his Muse. His genius was essentially elegiac.” Thyrsis is, of course, a formal elegy written by Arnold at the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. But almost all the rest of Arnold’s poems are also characterised by a sort of elegiac tone, melancholy brooding, and Stoic resignation. Much of his pessimism comes from his ill-adjustment to the changing conditions of his times. As has been said in the beginning, the advance of science in the Victorian age had given a rude shock to the body of Christian beliefs. Arnold was neither too much influenced by science so as to turn a downright atheist, nor so little as to remain an unquestioning believer. He found himself standing on the parting of the ways and shaken by the gusts of opposing winds. This spiritual disturbance took the form of despairing pessimism at the consciousness of spiritual vacuity as well as a searching introspection combined with a groping for a moral stance. In Dover Beach he observes that “the Sea of Faith” has now withdrawn and the world as he sees it
Hath really neither joy, nor light, nor love,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant, armies clash by night.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant, armies clash by night.
Whatever little “certitude”, “peace”, or “help for pain” is possible, can be secured from true love-of course, man-woman love. Hence his ppeal:
Ah love, let us be true
To one another.
To one another.
Likewise, in The Buried Life he points out what companionship may do to alleviate “the fret and worry of life ”
Only but this is rare
When a beloved hand is laid in ours…
The eye sinks inward, and heart lies plain,
And what we mean, wesay, andwhatwe would, we now….
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, Rest.
The air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwanted calm pervades his breast.
When a beloved hand is laid in ours…
The eye sinks inward, and heart lies plain,
And what we mean, wesay, andwhatwe would, we now….
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, Rest.
The air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwanted calm pervades his breast.
But, mostly, Arnold strikes the note of melancholy loneliness.
Yes! in the sea of life enisled
With echoing strains between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild
We mortal millions live alone.
With echoing strains between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild
We mortal millions live alone.
Loneliness is a feature of nature also.
Alone the sun rises and alone spring the great steams.
Arnold’s attitude to life is, mostly, of pessimistic resignation. He believes that life is a thing to suffer rather than to enjoy. But resignation is also of two kinds : one escapist, and the other, Stoic. In the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse his resignation is of the former kind. Sick of the fever, fret and fury of life, he appeals to the monastic cloisters to take him into their fold:
Oh hide me in your gloom profound;
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
But more often Arnold’s resignation is of the Stoic kind. It is usually accompanied by a paralysis of action. Arnold knows the inherent lot of men
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new.
Who hesitate and falter life away
And lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new.
Who hesitate and falter life away
And lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Sometimes, like Hardy, he finds man like a straw knocked about by the waves of the dark sea of destiny:
We are all like swimmers in the sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.
And whether it will leave us up to land,
Or whether it will roll us out to the sea,
Back out to sea, to the waves of death,
We know not.
Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.
And whether it will leave us up to land,
Or whether it will roll us out to the sea,
Back out to sea, to the waves of death,
We know not.
Arnold’s pessmism, however unmitigated and melancholy, is yet of a manly character and singularly free from the weakness of sentimentalism or excessive self-pity or clever attitudinisation. Observes Compton-Rickett: “No whining, no luxury of grief, no sentimental pessimism. Neither is there any joy, any real peace. It is the serenity of a troubled but brave spirit.”
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861):
Clough was a lifelong friend of Arnold and his death was the subject of Arnold’s elegy Thyrsis. He resembles his friend a great deal, provided we ignore the very obvious points of contrast. F. L. Lucas calls him “a half-hewn Matthew Arnold, left lying in the quarry.” We have in Clough the same brooding melancholy, spiritual unrest, and disturbing introspection as we find in Arnold. Clough’s mind was deeply exercised by the Science-Faith conflict which influenced Victorian thought and poetry. His was a searching intellect which probed into the mysteries of the ultimate questions of God, human, destiny, life and death. However, in his inquiries and analyses he does not approach the dignity and stature of Arnold. For one thing, he does not have the single-mindedness and emotional integrity of his friend. His is not an unrelieved pessimism-in the Bothie the dominant note is that of high spirits and holiday tranquility. G. D. Klingopulos observes:”Clough’s work is not by any means entirely sombre, much ;s humorous and faintly satirical.” For an instance of his cutting sarcasm sss the following lines from The Latest Decalogue:
Thou shalt have one God only, who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped except, the currency…
Thou shall not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped except, the currency…
Thou shall not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
“Say not the struggle nought availeth,” a usual anthology piece, puts fr-vard an optimistic message of action and hope for the best. During the dark years of the Second World War the poem was used by Sir “Winston Churchill as a morale-boosting text. It contains in Ulysses like terms what is called the philosophy of action, not the Stoic endurance which characterises Arnoldian attitude. Comparing the two poets. Hugh Walker observes: “Clough is the more hopeful poet of the two. Arnold lays the whole stress upon courageous endurance, the doing of duty in spite of the certainty of defeat. Clough sees all the western land bright in the sunshine, and the tide breaking in elsewhere if not here.”
Clough’s Dipsychus is a good example of the Victorian conflict between two spiritual voices. But, as is usual with Clough, the note of seriousness in the poem is often broken by sallies of wit and humour.
James Thomson (1834-1882):
James Thomson in The city of Dreadful Night and the shorter Insomnia struck a note of the intensest, nightmarish pessimism. As a young boy he had been fed on Calvinistic doctrines which he later found to be inadequate in the changing context of the times. Absolute despair, unrelieved by any “silver lining,” was the outcome. He himself was subject to insomnia and at night he nsed to feel lonely and gloomy. This personal experience gives a touch of reality to the ghoulish pictures he draws in the poems mentioned above. His pessimism does not have the brooding energy or Stoic fortitude of Arnold’s or Clough’s. It is the issue of a morbid mind which puts one in mind of Poe. It is not for nothing that he is often labelled as the English Poe or the English Leonardi. In the words of Hugh Walker, “his pessimism was founded on the conviction that there was no hope for humanity any more than for himself, and that the appearance of progress was a mere illusion.”
As a man, Thomson was not altogether an unalloyed melancholiac lost to all sense of humour, fun, or humanitarianism. He definitely had more sides to his personality. He was, says Compton-Rickett, “in his happier moments, an affectionate and steadfast friend, a delightful companion, and an unselfish worker in the cause of humanity.”
Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1888):
Edward Fitzgerald is chiefly known for his verse translation of the Persian Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam. This work, says David Daiches, “puts an altogether more attractive face on pessimism. Thomson alternated between hedonism and despair; Fitzgerald expressed a hedonism grounded on skepticism.” Fitzgerald’s pessimism is inherent in his acceptance of the evanescence of life and its purposelessness. This acceptance makes him cry a halt to all maddening activity and prompts him to devote whatever time he has been granted in this world to sensual pleasures. His pessimism is of the Epicurean kind. His paradise is earthly, somewhat drugged, but overflowing with Oriental splendour and luxury. Wine, women and verse are its chief features.
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of-wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!
A jug of-wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!
Fatalism is an important ingredient in Fitzgerald’s pessimism.
The moving finger writes and having writ
Moves on, not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Moves on, not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
And, again:
Oh threats of Hell and hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown for ever dies.
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Later Pessimistic Poets:
The pessimism of some later Victorian poets is more “modern” than “Victorian.” Such poets include Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), John Davidson (1857-1905), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), with some lesser ones who may not detain us here.
After the adverse reception to his last novel Jude the Obscure, Hardy gave up the rest of his life to poetry. His Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, but his highest poetical achievement, The Dynasts, came only after the end of the Victorian era. Hardy, as Legouis, says, “was the poet of disillusionment.” His poetry has the qualities of sincerity and technical excellence. Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-96) and Ballads and Songs (1894) are also charged with pessimism. He, say Grierson and Smith, was “a little of the spasmodic; apt when strongly moved and angry to over-spur his Pegasus and grow a little shrill.” However, he is splendid not unoften, particularly in his ballads. Dowson was particularly influenced by Verlaine, the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century. Housman’s Shropshire Lad came out in 1896. This work is steeped in a stoically pessimistic and somewhat oppressive spirit. In it, to quote Joseph Warren Beach, “the fragrance of gallant youth and love is distilled in the glittering alembic of fate and death and ‘gather ye rosebuds’ sung to a bitter, but haunting tune.”
The Oxford Movement in English Literature
Introduction-the Aims:
One only Way to life:
One faith, deliver’d once for all;
One holy Band, endow ‘d with Heaven’s high call;
One earnest, endless strife:
This is the Church, the Eternal framed of old.
One faith, deliver’d once for all;
One holy Band, endow ‘d with Heaven’s high call;
One earnest, endless strife:
This is the Church, the Eternal framed of old.
These lines from a poem by John Keble (the “founder” of the Oxford Movement) give us some help to answer the question as to what the Oxford Movement was about. This Movement was, fundamentally, religious in nature, and one of its aims was to rehabilitate the dignity of the Church and to deliver it from the grasp of secular authority.
But that was only one of the manifold issues which the Movement dealt with. Some other issues may also be mentioned here. One of them was the growing strength of Liberalism in religion and politics. The protagonists of this movement came forward to combat tooth and nail all such Liberalism as appeared in the Church as Latitudinarianism. The Oxford Movement had nothing to do with politics, but it favoured Conservatism or Toryism (of course, in religion). As W. H. Hutton points out in The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII, it “was certainly not a Tory movement, but it was opposed to liberalism in all its aspects. To the philosophy of conservatism the Oxford leaders were much indebted.” Further, the Movement was opposed to rationalism in matters concerned with the Church. The Victorian age witnessed a rapid and tremendous expansion of physical science and even more than in the eighteenth century (the age of prose and reason) there was a temptation in the nineteenth to put religion to the test of rational scientific examination. T. H. Huxley, for instance, became an agnostic after failing to be convinced ot the truth of Christianity, considered rationally and scientifically. The Oxford Movement stressed the absurdity of examining the Church in the light of reason. The Oxford men put special emphasis on faith as something superrational. “The main-spring of the Oxford Movement,” observes Hugh Walker, “was the dread of rationalism.” According to the same critic, the “problem” for Newman (the chief force of the Movement) “was how to check the growth of rationalism as he saw it in England.”
Anti-Rationalism:
This aggressive anti-rationalism manifested itself in the Oxford men’s affirmation of the miracles associated with the history of the ancient church and numerous saints. The people, influenced by science in their age, were already finding it too hard to give credence to the numerous Scriptural miracles, and the Oxford men were adding new ones which had never been seriously believed except perhaps by the very orthodox Roman Catholics. This flagrant anti-rationalism, certainly out of tune with the times, naturally alienated many otherwise sympathetic people.
Romantic:
This anti-rationalism was somewhat “romantic.” Indeed between the Romantic Movement and the Oxford Movement there is something curiously common. The “romantic” interest in the Middle Ages for their mystery and splendour is one of these common factors. As Moody and Lovett put it, the Oxford Movement stood for “the restoration of the poetry, the mystic ritual and service which had characterised the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.” It was this medievalism which was probably responsible for the ultimate entry of Newman into the Roman Catholic fold. The romantic tendency of the protagonists of the Oxford Movement is also apparent in a different way-their poetry. As Eugene R. Fairweather points out, “their poetic sensibility-which cannot be ignored, in view of the fact that Keble, Newman and Williams were all fluent, if’minor’, poets-was ‘romantic’ in tone.”
Anti-Erastianism:
But the fundamental factor which sparked off the Movement and which was taken congnizance of and condemned by almost all the ‘brethren” was the increasing interference of secular authority in the affairs of the Church. All of them were at daggers drawn with Erastianism (the control of the Church by the State). The chief aim of the Oxford Movement, in the words of one of its protagonists, was to convince the people that “the Church was more than a merely human institution; that it had privileges, sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ.” Moody and Lovett observe in this connexion: “Newman and his friends wished also to defend the Church, in view of its divine character, against the interference of the state, which was disposed to reform it along with Parliament and other institutions, curtailing its powers and revenues.” Thus the Oxford Movement stood for Anti-Erastianism.
The History of the Movement:
These were the most important points which shaped the Oxford Movement. But the “brethren” were by no means a united lot. A brief survey of the history of this Movement will show this.
Newman was the soul of the Movement. But, generally, the name of John Keble is mentioned as the man who started the Movement. In July 1833 Keble preached a sermon at Oxford before the judges of assize, on national apostasy and against the Erastian and Latitudinarian tendencies of the day. His speech formally inaugurated the Movement, and even Newman accepted Keble as its “true and primary author.” But it must be noted that Keble only provided the spark; the fuel had already been piling for long. Keble was a quiet, simple, and modest man not of much literary pretension, but known for his anonymous book of sacred poems, The Christian Year, published in 1827. According to Hugh Walker, “there is nothing great in his life or in his works.” Anyway, he is the accepted pioneer of the Oxford Movement.
Keble’s sermon was followed by the generation of intense feeling in like-minded men of Oxford. They included Newman, Froude, Pusey and many more. Their concerted action crystallised in the publication of Tracts for the Times, the first of which came in September 1833. It was entitled Thought on the Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy. The publication of the tracts continued till 1841 with contributions from many hands. However, Newman who wrote some twenty-nine of them was, as Hugh Walker puts it “the soul of the Tracts.” None approached him in the clarity of thought as well as of expression.
The avowed aim of the Tracts was to create public opinion in I favour of “the privileges of the Church and against Popery and Dissent.”” However, slowly and steadily the trend of thought as expressed in the Tracts showed evidence of moving towards the Church of Rome and away from the Church of England. Things came to a head iffthe famous (rather notorious) Tract XC, which came from Newman’s pen. In it Newman showed his Romish tendency by taking upon himself the task of arguing that the thirtynine Articles were in no way opposed to the Council of Trent. In other words, he was making plea for the Church of Rome and undermining a universally accepted Anglican view. This tract created a tremendous commotion. All the Anglican bishops condemned it vociferously. Newman’s conversion was complete after he had read articles by Wiseman, the able leader of the English Roman Catholics.
The general hostility which Newman provoked made it impossible for him to continue staying at Oxford. So he took refuge at Littlemore. He resigned his ecclesiastical living at Oxford in September 1843 and joined lay communion. Some of his ardent followers also joined him at Littlemore.
Meanwhile, W. G. Ward, an ebullient and energetic follower of Newman, published what W. H. Hutton calls “a heavy and exasperating book”-The Idea of a Christian Church. Ward openly favoured the Roman Church pointing to what he described as the “most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected sight! We find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually possessing members of English churchmen.” It was a very provocative book. The scandalised members of the University at a convocation held on February 13, 1845 withdrew from Ward the degrees of B. A. and M. A. The book had a wide influence but it is poor literature. Well did Jenkyns. the Master of Balliol, tell Ward : “Well. Ward, your book is like yourself; fat, awkward, and ungainly.”
Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism was formally complete when on October 9,1845 he became a member of the Church of Rome. Later, in 1879, the Pope made him a cardinal. But after 1845 the Oxford Movement spread beyond Oxford. The “brethren” were no longer perfectly united. Some like Ward accepted Roman Catholicism, but others like Pusey continued their work staying within the Anglican fold.
The Literary Aspect of the Movement:
The Oxford Movement was basically a religious movement. Directly, it had nothing to do with literature. However, the numerous writings which it threw up had some repercussion on contemporary literary taste and style. Previously also, divines (such as Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and Tillotson), had exerted some influence on literature even when they had written’on purely religious themes. W. H. Hutton maintains in this context: “The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the history of English religion more definitely than to the history of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own definite members on the literary taste of its age.” But out of the whole mass of the literature the Movement gave rise to, we can pick out as good literature only a handful of poems and Apologia, which is, in Hugh Walker’s words, “eminently and emphatically literature.” As for the rest of the works, they are biblia abiblia (=books that are no books).
Some Tractarians Considered-Keble:
John Keble (1792-1866) was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and an Anglican preacher. It was he, as we have already said, who started the Oxford Movement with his famous sermon of 1833. He could boast of no intellectual calibre, though he was a saintly, simple, and humble figure. He, as Compton-Rickett puts it, “gives us the emotional atmosphere of the movement.” His literary merits are negligible, but some of his poetry is enjoyable for its sincerity and emotion.
Newman:
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was the spirit behind the Movement. Hurrell Froude called him the “indicating number,” the rest of the Tractarians being just so many ciphers. His contributin to literature is also the most considerable. His pellucid sincerity and simplicity, which are his distinguishing marks as both man and as writer, are abundantly visible in his best work Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). which he wrote in self-defence in reply to Charles Kingsley’s charge of dishonesty against both himself and his new Church. Newman was stung into action and immediately took up the task of writing an apology to explain his conduct. As he puts it, he made his fingers “walk twenty miles a day” so as to finish his work quickly. The Apologia is characterised by what Hugh Walker calls a “palpitating humanity which vivifies every line.” In this work Newman has poured his heart and soul out. “It has,” says W. H. Hutton, “the merits of a letter rather than of a book.” But Newman is a finished artist. The greatest recommendation of his prose is its directness and simplicity. This crystalline simplicity, however, is the outcome of a rigorous art and abundant energy in check.
Newman’s other works, like the Essay of the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), The Idea of a University Defined (1873), and religious novels Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856), have also the same qualities of style. Mention may also be made of Newman’s verse. He wrote well, but the only memorable poem written by him is the famous prayer poem “Lead Kindly Light.”
Hurrell Froude:
Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836) was a link between Keble and Newman. He was, doubtlessly, a brilliant young man. He is now chiefly known for his posthumous Remains (1836). He wrote two of the Tracts for the Times and some poems. He was, as he himselfsaid, quite “hot-headed,” and he offended quite a number of people.
Pusey:
Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) was a man of very wide learning. He gave his name to the protagonists of the Oxford Movement (who came to be commonly termed “Puseyites”)- But in almost every respect he is inferior to Newman. As Compton-Rickett observes, “he is far less attractive as a personality, more questionable in his methods and immeasurably inferior as a literary craftsman.” Considered from the literary point of view, Pusey’s work is indeed hopeless. His style is, to quote Hugh Walker, “crude, ungainly and confused.”
Ward:
William George Ward (1812-1882) was an extremely talented man who followed Newman’s lead in conversion to Roman Catholicism. We have already referred to The Idea of a Christian Church (1844) which is his best known work. His Essays on the Philosophy of Theism (collected in 1884) were written to controvert the views of Mill. His style is inelegant and cumbrous, but his ideas stirred his times.
Church:
Richard William Church (1815-1890) is, after Newman, the best of those connected with the Oxford Movement in the literary quality of their work. His clear and vigorous style, his sympathy and eclecticism are apparent in his monographs on writers as diverse in their nature and art as Dante, Spenser, and Bacon. Church also wrote a quite objective history of the Oxford Movement, published posthumously in 1891. With a rare degree of self-effacement, he refrains from mentioning his own name in this history, even though he had played an important role in the Movement.
Conclusion:
Apart from those mentioned, there is “a whole Hydra more.” But, to use Dryden’s words
To speak the rest, who better are forgot,
Would tire a well-breath’d Witness of the Plot.
Would tire a well-breath’d Witness of the Plot.
So we end here.
What tangible effect did the Movement produce? To quote Eugene R. Fainveather, “the Oxford Movement, for all its profound conservatism, seriously altered the accepted patterns of Anglican thought and practice.” For one thing, it directed the attention of the people to “personal holiness,” and was responsible for reviving or confirming the practices of serious prayers, formal piety, and fasting. It re-orientated the common views about apostolic authority, and, with some success, discovered a link between the Church of England and the Pre-Reformation-Church (of Rome). It made the Church of England conscious of the onslaught of Liberalism and Erastianism. Thus the Oxford Movement was more than a passing ripple on the surface of “the sea of faith.”
The Naughty Nineties in English Literature
Introduction:
Lo! how upon Parnassus ‘slopes they romp.
The sons of Wat, Dow, David, John, and Thomp.
The sons of Wat, Dow, David, John, and Thomp.
The last decade of the nineteenth century was characterised less by “naughtiness” than revolt, decadence, and not a little confusion. The age of Queen Victoria extended beyond the end of the nineteenth century, but in the last ten years of the century many powerful forces could be seen at work pulling down the edifice of Victorianism.
The process of destruction (partly; Tor reconstruction) was attended with quite a bit of uneasiness. Therefore we can easily agree with Joseph Warren Beach that the last years of the nineteenth century were “the somewhat miscellaneous and uneasy period.” Some ultra-Radicals like Oscar Wilde could be called “naughty”, too, but the revolt or transition in its totality cannot be decorated with the same epithet. For that matter, most of the outstanding Victorians had been critics and revolutionaries who stood against their time-spirit. Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Rossetti may be noted in this context. On the other hand, those who, more or less, identified themselves with this spirit-Miacaulay and Tennyson, for instance- are now ranked lower.
The Nature of the Revolt:
“Victorianism” is a complex agglomeration of several values, and the revolt of the nineties against Victorianism is also quite complex. According to Compton-Rickett, this revolt has three prongs. First, it reiterates the old revolutionary formula of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, in a new setting. Secondly, it worships power rather than beauty. And thirdly, it challenges the older values of art and life. But such generalisations touch but a party of reality-as most generalisations do. However, our point holds that in the nineties there was abroad a spirit of criticism, scrutiny, and revolt. The “Victorian Compromise,” was on top of the casualty list. In the socio-political field Gladstonian Liberal pacificism gave place to commercial imperialism. The Fabian Movement exalted enlightened socialism. Orthodox morality and priggishness associated with typical Victorians were swept away and a less restricted moral code was put into operation by a number of literatures. The Victorian conflict between Faith and Science which had disturbed sensitive souls like Matthew Arnold was now resolved-mostly in favour of Science, but in a few cases, in favour of Faith. Formerly, even agnostics like T. H. Huxley had to take notice of religion, even if only to criticise it. But now the attitude became one of indifference rather than of criticism or active acceptance. But all these revolutionary tendencies were not a harmonious lot. At many points they crisscrossed each other, and they affected different men of letters in different ways. For example, socialism and egalitarianism could not go well with imperialism.Oscar Wilde was a protagonist of the Aesthetic Movement, and yet he was a keen socialist. Rudyard Kipling was a blatant imperialist, but had connexions with the Pre-Raphaelites. The Fabians, like the Webbs and Shaw, supported the capitalistic Liberals and even their imperialistic wing. In a word, the revolt of the nineties looks to us confused-but not so “naughty.”
The Literary Tendencies:
The nineties were a period of hectic literary activity. Poetry and the novel flourished well-as they did in the previous years of the Victorian age. But the period also witnessed a revival of the drama. The Aesthetic Movement of Pater and Oscar Wilde was calculated to wean literature from the usual Victorian tendency of dealing with social questions, and to exalt the sense of beauty, especially of literary form. There was also a movement for the revival of Irish literature in which Moore and Yeats played major roles. In poetry some voices echoing the past could also be heard, but, mostly, the tendency was to make new experiments. The same was the case with the department of fiction. In the literature of the nineties, considered as a whole, two distinct tendencies (among a welter of others) may be especially noted:
(1) The pessimistic tendency found in the work of Hardy, Housman, Gissing, and others.
(2) The Continental tendency. The men of letters in the age looked more and more towards France. The older Victorians were mostly insular, making exception for the limited influence of Germany. But now the Russian Tolstoy and the Scandinavian Ibsen came to be admired and emulated.
Let us not consider at some length the achievement of the nineties in various departments of creative literature.
POETRY
Introduction:
Many new tendencies are discernible in the poetry of the nineties. Even then, this department of literature is, of all, the most conservative–mainly perhaps because of the reason that however revolutionary a poet may be, he has to draw upon a fund of poetic language and other apparatus established and sanctified by a long tradition and more or less well set in the mind of the reader. In this period we hear the voices of such traditionalists as Stephen Philips (1864-1915) and Robert Bridges (1844-1930). Philips’Poems (1897) have pronounced echoes of the great Victorian masters. Bridges, the Poet Laureate, was a very conscious artist, but like the Cavalier lyricists he combined artistry and spontaneity with felicitous results.
Religious Poets:
Among the poets who used and even advanced the traditional Victorian poetic techniques may be mentioned the two Roman Catholic poets-Francis Thompson (1859-1907) and Alice Meynell (1850-1922) who were influenced by Coventry Patmore, and some of whose best poems were published in the nineties. Thompson often recalls the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century-particularly Crashaw. He is bold, colourful, and even flamboyant. Alice Meynell wrote about love as well as religion. But her work is just mediocre.
The Pessimists:
The pessimistic poets of the nineties fall into a group of their own. They include Hardy (1848-1928), John Davidson (1859-1905), Ernest Dowson (1867—1900), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), and sonic lesser ones. After the adverse reception to his last novel Jude the Obscure Hardy gave the rest of his life to poetry. His Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, but his highest poetical achievement The Dynasts came only in the twentieth century. Hardy, as Legouis says, “was the poet of disillusionment.” His poetry has the quality of sincerity and technical excellence. Davidson’ s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893 -96) and Ballads and Songs (1894) are also filled with pessimism. Davidson, say Grierson and Smith, was “a little of the spasmodic, apt when strongly moved and angry to overspur his Pegasus and grow a little shrill.” However, he is splendid quite often, particularly in his ballads. Dowson was particularly influenced by Verlaine, the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century. Housman’s Shropshire Lad came out in 189? The work is steeped in a stoically pessimistic spirit. In it, to quote Joseph Warren Beach, “the fragrance of gallant youth and love is distilled in the glittering alembic of fate and death, and ‘gather ye rosebuds’ sung to_a bitter but haunting tune.”
The Imperialists:
Among the “imperialists” the most outstanding were Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and W. H. Henley (1849-1903) who, to use the words of Legouis, were “poets of effort and action.” Kipling was bom in India and was for a number of years editor of the daily Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore. His Barrack-Room Ballads and the Seven Seas were published in the nineties. In his exquisite mastery of rhythm he comes close to Swinburne. Henley in The Song of the Sword (1892) tried to breathe the spirit of adventure into prosaic people. His poetry is not only robust but robustious. His typical note rings in the following lines:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods maybe
For my unconquerable soul.
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods maybe
For my unconquerable soul.
The Decadents:
Lastly, we have to consider briefly the group of poets known as the “decadents.” They were influenced by Pater’s aestheticism, but their acknowledged leader was Oscar Wilde. They published a periodical, The Yellow Book, which continued between 1894 and 1897. The periodical was illustrated by Aubery Beardsley. The decadents loved to shock the reader’s morality, and, as such, wrote on daring subjects in a daring manner which amply fulfilled, their desire.
FICTION
Introduction:
The spirit of revolt is much tnore intense in the fiction than the poetry of the eighteen-nineties. Tljiis revolt in fiction is, according to Moody and Lovett, two-fold.
(1) First, there is the tendency to “restore the spirit of romance to the novel.” This tendency is shown by such novelists as Conrad, tevenson, Barrie, and Kipling.
(2) The second tendency is shown by such writers as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. “These writers regarded the novel as a social document, and in some cases as a medium of propaganda.” Previous to them such Victorian novelists as George Eliot, Charles Reade, and Charles Kingsley had done the same. But what distinguishes the social critics and propagandists of the nineties “is the severity of their criticism and the depth of their antipathy to the age in which they had grown up nd which they chose to depict.”
” The First Group:
R. L. Stevenson’s Island Nights Entertainment, The Ebb Tide, and DavidBalfour appeared in the nineties. These novels are gripping stories of adventure, and are full of the spirit ofjoie de vivre which makes them interesting reading for the juveniles. Kipling’s stories are also interesting -especially those with an Indian setting which he knew so well. Sir J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister (1891) and Sentimental Tommy (1896) appeared in the nineties. His novels are mostly the psychological studies of their heroes, though the element of adventure is also very much there. Conrad’s novels concern the adventures of sea-life but they are not just stories of adventure or action. Joseph Warren Beach observes: “What most fascinated him was the soul of man struggling desperately with the vast indifferent forces of nature, or still better with subtle lures of his own spirit—power, prestige, ambition, cowardice, or sheer malevolence.” Thus his novels have a depth absent from the flashy stories of Stevenson and Kipling.
The Second Group:
H. G. Wells wrote novels of science as well as of serious social criticism. However, his only novel which appeared in the nineties is The Time Machine (1895) which is a fantastic romance based on the imaginary development of physical science. It was in the novels to come that he appeared as a social critic. None of the novels of Bennett and Galsworthy appeared in the nineties and therefore they may here be ignored.
Other Novelists:
Among the rest of the novelists who were neither romancers nor social critics the most prominent place ought to be given to Thomas Hardy. His two major novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and (his last) Judethe Obscure (1896) appeared in the period under review.. Tess is the tragedy of a simple village maid, and Jude that of a naive young man who would be a scholar. These novels, as Hardy’s rest, are permeated with a pessimistic, deterministic point of view which onceives human beings as mere puppets in the hands of dark, mechanistic forces of the universe. Jude had some sensuous scenes which were condemned by many of Hardy’s contemporaries, and it was this fact that made him bid farewell to novel-writing.
Gissing’s Odd Women (1893) and New Grub Street (1891) were first published in the 1890’s. Gissing’s novels wear an atmosphere of gloomy oppressiveness created by his indulgence in the stark and seamy realities of life. “In truth,” say Moody and Lovett, “Gissing’s was a root out of dry ground, with little beauty of form, or amplitude of style, but urged upward by a stern, concentrated force of personality which carried it to a permanent place in English literature.”
Among the lesser novelists may be mentioned George Moore who in Esther Waters (1894) gave an authentic picture of a servant girl; Israel Zangwill, who wrote about the life of Jews; and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
DRAMA
The Revival:
The last years of the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic revival. The drama which in the Victorian age had all alone been lying moribund sprang once again to life. Not only were many plays written but they were read, enjoyed, staged, and admired.
The Social Drama:
The most vigorous drama of the age was concerned with social and domestic problems and was considerably influenced by Ibsen. Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) were its most outstanding practitioners. Jones’s plays Michael and His Lost Angel and Mrs.Dane’s Defence are the most notable of all his works. He also wrote some satirical comedies of manners. As for Pinero, to quote Moody and Lovett, “he cast a wider net, and caught in it the insincerities and hypocrisies inseparable from a complex and sophisticated social life.” Oscar Wilde’s plays like Lady Windermere ‘s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (-1895) may also be noted here, though the tone of his social criticism is much lighter and anything but “earnest.” He excels in wit of the kind of Sheridan’s.
Shaw is, doubtlessly, the greatest of all the dramatists of this period. His collection Pleasant and Unpleasant-appeared in 1898. He combined his most exquisite wit with a very marked propagandist aim. He was anti-romantic and had a perpetual craving for correcting the most commonly held opinions-“romantic” or otherwise-which were supposed to be correct.
Irish Drama:
In the nineties some Irish writers, under the influence of Ibsen, started the Irish National Theatre in Dublin, where plays written by Irish dramatists were to be acted. The experiment continued till 1901. Among the Irish dramatists the most outstanding were J. M. Synge (1879-1901) and W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). “Synge’s genius,” say Moody and Lovett, “consisted in his ability to give his characters a place in nature, and constantly to draw poetry from this surrounding nature.” Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (1896) and The Countess Cathleen (1899) were staged in the eighteen-nineties. The merit of his plays consists not only in the delineation of characters but in the use of the devices of symbolism and dream-like atmosphere.
CRITICISM
Pater and Others:
Pater and Oscar Wilde were the promoters of the slogan, “Art for Art’s Sake,” which was too.often heard in the nineties. Pater was the chief spokesman of the school of aesthetic criticism which exalts beauty at the cost of everything else, including, of course, the content. Pater had a special praise for exquisite craftsmanship and his own style, which is extraordinarily finished, illustrates his predilection. Pater influenced Wilde a great deal. Wilde’s Intentions came in 1891. Legouis observes about him: “He spiced the doctrine of’art for art’s sake’ with a certain cynicism; wit, paradox, and mocking humour give a keen edge to his beautifully wrought prose.”
The Essay from Lamb to Stevenson
Introduction:
The essay from Lamb to Stevenson had a very prosperous career. The popularity of this genre can be imagined when we points out that in this period there were almost as many essayists as there were writers. For the sake of convenience we can divide the essayists of the period into four, more or less well-defined, groups as given below:
(1) The major romantic essayists—Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey.
(2) Other essayists who wrote for magazines. (The four major essayists just named also wrote mostly for magazines). The other essayists belonging to this category include Robert Chambers, Thackeray, etc.
(3) The historian-essayists; that is, those who wrote essays on historical events and personalities. Those belonging to this group include Carlyle, Macaulay, and Eroude.
(4) The essayists who belong to the latter half of the nineteenth century. They include R. L. Stevenson, Alexander Smith, John Skelton, and some others.
Now let us consider these four groups in detail one by one.
The Major Romantic Essayists:
Among this group, Charles Lamb (1775-1834) undoubtedly enjoys the pride of place. Hugh Walker calls him the essayist par excellence, and another critic, “the prince of essayists.” With Lamb we find the completion of the change in the English essay from objectivity to subjectivity and from formality to familiarity. Most of his essays were published by him in the London Magazine. Later they were issued in two collections entitled Essays ofElia (1823) and Last Essays ofElia (1833). Since the time of their first appearance, Lamb’s essays have been attractive reading for generation after generation of readers. Lamb is so subjective that from his essays (of course, with some modifications) we canrc: onstruct his inner and outer biography. Lamb takes the reader into confidence and exchanges heart beats with him with the most charming and button-holing familiarity which completely disarms even the most cussed reader. Add to his subjective charm, his tenderness, his broad human sympathy, his sense of pathos, and, above all his ubiquitous humour which gives a particular tone to his essays from end to end. He “romanticises” everyday things and experiences by projecting upon them the roseate light of his bizarre imagination. Many of his essays are like lyrics through which his personality-a strange combination of the imp and the sage-peeps constantly. His style is queerly archaic and does not recommend itself as a model.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) comes close to Lamb as an essayist. He wrote critical essays as well. We cannot rank him high among the English critics on account of his marked and implacable prejudices, his indulgence in a lot of woolly verbiage, and his lack of any well-defined critical locus standi. His criticism is pre-eminently impressionistic, and, as such, may be called romantic. His essays on non-literary topics, however, claim a high placement. Apart from the charm of his personality, his intimacy with the reader and the refreshing vigour of his style (which, unlike Lamb’s, is not marred by any leaning on seventeenth-century stylists), there is in his essays a wonderful note of gusto andjoie de vivre. Hazlitt’s life was far from happy, and he was prone to fits of melancholia, but he loved life with a tremendous gusto some of which he imparts to the reader of his essays. As R. L. Stevenson (who tried at times to ape him) once remarked, all of us may be fine gentlemen, but none of us can write like Hazlitt. To quote” W. E, Henley, “at his highest movements Hazlitt is hard to beat; and has not these many years been beaten.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) cannot be placed very high in the hierarchy of English essayists. He was much influenced by the essayists of the age of Queen Anne-particularly Steele and Addison. However, instead of the didactic fervour and social charm of those essayists he had the charm of self-revelation. Hunt’s essays are, to use the words of Moody and Lovett, “kindly spirited” and “mildly humorous.” That they are such will be evident from the persual of “Coaches and Their Horses,” “The Month of May”, “Deaths of Little Children,” and “A Visit to the Zoological Gardens.” Leigh Hunt’s style is easy, voluble, and charming, but it cannot be called a great style because of the absence from it of any overwhelming vigour, strength of conviction, or even any unmistakably individual feature. He wrote some critical essays also which are of mediocre quality. But at least one of his shorter poems, “Abou Ben Adhem” has been enjoying incessant popularity.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was a very peculiar man, and still more peculiar writer. Much of his prose cannot be strictly considered as belonging to the province of the essay. He himself divided his works into three sections to one of which he was pleased to give the name of essays. But his “essays” are, indeed, too voluminous His prose style is near poetry: it is colourful, gorgeous, and musical and has a peculiarly dreamy grace. In the nineteenth century he wrote the prose which was written by seventeenth-century masters. But at his best he makes you spell-bound with the subtle cadences of his language which at times becomes almost incantatory. But during his uninspired moments—and they come pretty often—he is often vulgar and tawdry.
Other Essayists Writing for Magazines:
The magazine enjoyed a singular popularity among readers in the nineteenth century, and many essayists turned to it for the publication of their compositions. Let us consider some of the major contributors apart from the ones just discussed.
Miss Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) contributed many sketches of village life to the London Magazine in which Lamb’s essays were also then being published. Between 1824 and 1832 she wrote quite a number of such essays, which were later published in one volume under the title Our Village. She often suggests Crabbe on account of her love of realistic details. But she is quite different from him on account of her geniality and corresponding lack of censoriousness. Her character-sketches are, doubtlessly, the best of her writings. Her tone is intimately personal and, as such, an asset to her as an essayist.
Robert Chambers (1802-1871) with his brother William started an organ Chamber’s Journal in 1832, which was meant for imparting useful knowledge to the middle classes of society. Robert Chambers wrote hundreds of essays over and above his copious journalistic work and his serious treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) which anticipated the work of Darwin. As an essayist Chambers is almost always interesting in spite of the tremendous vastness of his thematic range. “Everywhere,” he wrote, “I have sought less to attain elegance or observe refinement, than to avoid that last of literary sins-dulness,” He was indeed a very successful journalist and eminently readable. His two most outstanding qualities as an essayist are his numour and his astonishingly accurate and expansive knowledge.
Hugh Miller (1802-1856) was an extremely busy and popular journalist with unmistakable literary ability. His Footprints of the Creator was a very influential book in which he tried to controvert the views of Chambers as expressed in Vestiges of the Natural History of Great;;;::. For sixteen years he was editor of the paper The Witness owned by himself. Much of what he wrote for the paper was of ephemeral interest, though some of it is of interest even today. About a thousand articles written by him for The Witness were later collected and published as Essays Historical and Biographical, Political and Social, Literary and Scientific. “The Essays,” maintains Hugh Walker, “are journalistic,but it is the journalism of a man of literary genius, and of one who, like Scott, had as much sense as genius. They show that he possessed a keen and penetrating eye, wide sympathies, and clear intelligence. The biographical ones display a just appreciation of character, the critical ones genuine literary taste, and the social ones sound and balanced judgment.^”
Dr. John Brown (1810-1882) also contributed to The Witness. He was a man of multifarious ability, and the topics of his essays are, accordingly, varied. However, the best of his compositions are about dogs, not men and their affairs. He seems to be an exquisite canine psychologist. His description of the dog named Toby is unbeatable. Toby’s tail, we are told, “was a tail per se: it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman’s baton; the machinery for working it was of great power and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original.” But Brown could be serious as well as humorous. He was an art critic of some merit, too. Hugh Walker observes “An imagination akin to the poetic humour, ready power of illustrating from literature and from art, and a sound psychology, are the qualities which give Brown’s papers their value.” But, all told, Brown is a conspicuous member of only the second string of English essayists.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) is better known as a novelist; but he wrote quite a few essays, especially in Fraser ‘s Magazin, Roundabout Papers, The Book of Snobs, Sketched and Travels in London, the Christmas Books, and the Sketch Books are mainly collections of essays. Thackeray is always informal and extremely rambling. To take an example, consider his essays “On a Joke I heard From the late Thomas Hood.” In it Thackeray nowhere tells the-joke! His essays are delightful, light reading. He himself wrote: “In these humble essay-kins, I have taken leave to egotise. I cry out about the shoes which pinch me…I prattle about the dish which I love, the wine which I like, the talk I heard yesterday…A brisk and honest small-beer will refresh those who do not care for the frothy out-pourings of heavier taps—Some philosophers get their wisdom with deep thought, and out of ponderous libraries; I pick up my small crumbs of cogitation at a dinner-table…” In his essays Thackeray is serious, humorous, chivalrous,cynical, and sentimental by turns.
The Historian-essayists:
“Of the historian-essayists homas Carlyle (1795-1881) is by far the richest and profoundest,” says Hugh Walker. Carlyle was not only a historian but a prophet. He wrote essays on critical, biographical, historical, social, and political subjects, during his writing career from Richter (1827 to Shooting Niagara (1867). His essays cannot be placed beside his major works, but they do have value of their own. As a historiographer Carlyle believed in the view that history was nothing but a collection of the biographies of heroes (whom he worshipped). As a critic he displays a wonderful catholicity and sympathy. He gives not only his favourite Novalis his due but also shows proper appreciationpf such writers as Didoret and Voltaire for whom he had little intellectual or emotional sympathy. His style is always strident and forceful, and is full of prophetic inspiration and a rare strength of conviction.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) entered upon his career as a writer with his essay on Milton, which appeared in The Edinburgh Review in 1825 and which was to be the first of the famous series–Critical and tiistorical Essays. His very first essay sky-rocketed him into the firmament of eminence. As an essayist he is represented by his contributions to the journal above named and the various biographical sketches he wrote for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Macaulay can be given credit as a historian for his wonderful gift of forceful and vivid narration which forces itself upon the reader. But as a critic he has-very little merit. His judgments on Bacori, Milton, Addison etc. are readable but utterly indefensible. His lachrymosic praise of Addison with corresponding denigration of Voltaire and Swift, for example is altogether untenable. What matters for the reader of today is his wonderful style. “It” says Hugh Walker, ‘is energetic, vivid, picturesque. It has a boundless fertility of illustration. There is no style more rousing. The reader of Macaulay may be stirred to active opposition; the one thing that is hardly possible is that he should be left indifferent.”
James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), was a disciple of Carlyle whose Life he wrote. Froude has a place among English essayists on account of his Short Studies of Great Subjects. He has a gift of clear and fluent style, but he lacks the important qualities of humour and self-revelation,, and, as such, much of his merit as an essayist is compromised. The essay in Froude’s hand shows clear marks of decline if not decadence.
Lastly, in this group we have to consider Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) who wrote much, but not much excellent. With him the literary historian passes away.
The Essayists of the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century:
Alexander Smith (1829-1867) was a good deal overrated in his age both as a poet and prose writer. As an essayist we have to consider him as the author of the volume entitled Dreamthrop (1863) which contains a dozen essays. Smith is almost always delightful, and he understands his craft. His style is limpid and flowing. Most of his thoughts are trite, but they are. expressed well. He himself was of the view that “the world is not so mucn in need of new thoughts, as that when a thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like,current coin, be called in, and from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new:” He_excels in gripping description. Many of his essays give us pictures of village life, and “A Lark’s Flight” gives a powerful description of a hanging.
Sir John Skelton (183.1-1897), better known by his pseudonym” “Shirley,” “had,” according to Hugh Walker, “a very pleasant style and a deft touch.” He published quite a number of essays on an extensive range of topics. “He,” says Hugh Walker, “was learned enough to be instructive and humorous enough to be amusing. He touched literature, and life and nature, and all with skill. The odour of Russia clings to many of his pages, the air of the heather and of the sea hangs about others; for he had a keen feelings for nature, and a happy knack of imparting his own sentiment. Sometimes…the style isjust a little too chatty, but in an essayist the fault is less than the vice of stiffness would be.”
A. K. H. Boyd (1825-1899) as an_essayist is good only in parts. He is simple to the point of being trivial: He announced his abhorrence of loose and rambling style, and considered Bacon and even Tacitus to be his models. But we find no sententiousness in him. Nevertheless, he charms in his own simple way though he can often be bafflingly sly.
Sir Arthur Halps (1819-1875) is quite arid and dull. Charles Kingsley (1818-1875) is much superior to him. Hugh Walker maintains: “As essayist Kingsley’s merits are, in the critical essays, vigour, rapidity and decision, in the descriptive essays, the combination of the heart of a poet with the high spirits of a sportsman.” Kingsley was at heart a boy, and many of his essays palpitate with Ihejoie de vivre.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) as an essayist, on the other hand, was too old. He was all too serious. His output as a prose writer is very large, and a number of his books-such as Unto This Last, A Joy for Ever, and Sesame and Lilies-can easily be considered as collections of essays. He is seldom personal and still less humorous, even though he sometimes uses his gift of biting sarcasm. At any rate his temperament is fundamentally different from that of a natural essayists like Charles Lamb or R. L. Stevenson.
With Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) we come to the greatest essayist of the Victorian era. He is better known for his stories of adventure, such as Treoswe Island and Kidnapped, but the collection of essays-Virginibus Puerisque (1881)-is also a delightful, intimate, and self-revelatory book. After Lamb and Hazlitt, Stevenson in spite of the fact that he fought all his life a losing battle against a fatal disease, was an optimist to his fingertips. He made much of life. He modelled himself on Hazlitt and captured some of his gusto and the joy of living. As a stylist he is considered with Pater as a “fine” writer. He polished his style to the extreme without making it tawdry or flashy. He had a wonderful sense of detail both as an observer and as a stylist. And this sense pays.
Trends in Modern 20th Century Poetry
Introduction:
After 1900 the English scene becomes terribly chaotic. In the field of poetry-as also in other fields of literature-we find a tremendous activity. Thousands of poems are written, and thousands published, every day. The sales are indeed limited, but almost every poet, however “minor-” does find some audience.
The chaos in the field of poetry is due to the fact that in modern times no 1 iterary tradition is respected aF all, and, on the contrary, all emphasis is made to fall on individualism, for whatever it may be worth. When every man navigates his poetic craft by the light of his own individuality and his personal sense of direction, the voyage becomes adventurous and therefore, interesting; but ship-wrecks are many. That is why in the modern age we are familiar all too well with the jetsam and flotsam of literature.
The Decline: Tradition and Innovation :
Many have sincerely felt that in the twentieth century no great poetry was written and none is being written now. As a critic has put it, there have been many poetic persons in the twentieth century, but no poets. It is said that as civilisation advances poetry declines. Poetry indeed has declined, though it is somewhat debatable if civilisation has advanced. At the beginning of the new century at least, there was no poet of any stature. Thus A. C. Ward in Twentieth Century Literature avers: “When the twentieth century opened Tennyson had been dead nine years, and there was a widespread impression that English poetry had died with him.” He further says: “The poetry of the period shows a general decline, not in general level of execution but in genius and breadth of range.” But, he admits finally: “There has been no dearth of great poets or great poems that will stand the test of time and become a part of the imperishable literary heritage of England.”
As in modern painting, we find a lot of experimentation and innovation in modern poetry. Most of the poets have broken away from tradition completely, as they feel that poetry should change with the changing times. Many movements, schools, and groups have appeared and disappeared over the years. Imagism, Surrealism, and the so called “Apocalypse” school have had their day. Some poets, mostly belonging to the early years of the century, remained, on the other hand, sticking to the traditions of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, etc. Among these poets may be mentioned Robert Bridges, William Watson, and sir Henry Newbolt. Still many more combined tradition with innovation: A. E. Housman, for instance, poured his most withering and oppressive pessimism (which appears to be “modern”) into the mould of the ballad-one of the oldest of literary forms. Even T. S. Eliot-who with Hulme, Hopkins, and Ezra Pound has been a tremendous shaping influence on modern poetry-looks too often to Donne and the fellow metaphysicals. Thus, in a word, even innovators are influenced, little or much, by the poets before them.
Modern Themes:
Modern poetry exercises a great freedom in the choice of themes. Gone are days when it was believed that the job of the poet was only to create “beauty.” T. S. Eliot offers a representative view: “The essential advantage of a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness: to see the boredom and the horror and the glory.” He is free to write poems on themes ranging from kings to cabbages and from the cosmos to a pin’s head. Some poems have been written on pretty unpromising subjects which are peculiar to our machine age. Consider, for instance, such poems as Richard Aldington’s Machine Guns, Kenneth Ashley’s Goods Train at Night, Sheila Smith’s The Ballad of a Motor Bus, and Sir Edmund Gosse’s The Charcoal Burner.:
Unflinching Realism:
This thematic revolution is indicative of the unflinching realism of the poets of the .twentieth century. Pastoralism, romanticism and suchlike tendencies are things of the irretrievable past. Gone are the days of piping shepherds “piping down the valleys green”, the knights cantering on moonlit heaths, and damsels with dulcimers. As Ronald Bottrall wistfully observes,
Nightingales, sunset or the meanest flower
Were formerly the potentialities of poetry,
But now what have they to do with one another,
With Dionysus or with me?
Were formerly the potentialities of poetry,
But now what have they to do with one another,
With Dionysus or with me?
The searching realism of modern poets often brings them face to face with repulsive facts which would have scandalised a goody-goody Victorian. But our poets handle them most daringly. Prostitution, war, slum-dwellers, and other such “unpoetic” themes find adequate treatment in modern poetry. Our century has witnessed two terrible holocausts in the two global wars. The terror, ugliness, and brutality of war became a major theme in the poetry of “the war poets” like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen who themselves fought as soldiers. Bitter satire permeates the former’s poems like “Counter-Attack” (“set out to present in brutal verse the realities of war without gloss or evasion”) and “Suicide in Trenches.” In the latter he refers to the suicide of a young soldier:
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With cramps and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain,
No one spoke of him again…
Sneak home and pray you ‘II never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
With cramps and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain,
No one spoke of him again…
Sneak home and pray you ‘II never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Some war poets, such as Rupert Brooke, however, seem to have loved war as a test of their valiance and patriotism, and they treated it in their poetry accordingly.
Pessimism:
The two wars and impending danger of a third (and perhaps the last) have cast a gloomy shadow on much of the poetry of the twentieth century Well has the modern age been called “the age of anxiety.” In spite of our material prosperity we are full of tensions and anxieties which are almost an inseparable feature of modern living. Add to them the disappearance of religious faith. A note of disillusionment and i autumnal gloom is, then, natural in our poetry. This note can be heard in the poetry of many major poets like Housman, Hardy, Huxley, and T. S. Eliot. “God’s in his heaven” type of optimism is a thing of the past. Housman refers to the Supreme Power in this most blasphemous phrase: “Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.” Hardy in his greatest work The Dynasts also expresses his disbelief in God and his concept of determinism. Huxley was manifestly and professedly an agnostic. T. S. Eliot was quite religious but his attitude towaras life as we find itjn such poems as The Waste Land and 7he HoUowMen. is far from optimistic. To quote a few lines from the latter:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
The pessimism of twentieth-century poets is-not of the nature-of the somewhat stylised melancholy of Shelley or what David Daiches describes as “the Tennysonian elegiac mode with its lingering enjoyment of self-pity.” It is more intellectual and more impersonal.
Humanitarianism:
This pessimistic realisation of sad realities of Ij’fe is partly responsible for the note of fellow-feeling and humanitarFanism which is to be heard in the work of some modern poets. The” realisation-of human suffering spurs them to align them selves with the suffering. Even in the Victorian age there were poets like Thomson, Hood, and Mrs. Browning who demanded justice for the down-trodderw- The twentieth-century poets like Galsworthy, Gibson, and Masefield also voiced their indignation against social repressfon. In Gibson’s “.Farm Holiday” we notice the grim struggle for existence waged endlessly by workers living from hand to mouth:
All life moving to one measure:
Daily bread, daily bread–
Bread of life and bread of labour
Bread of bitterness and bread of sorrow
Hand-to-mouth and no tomorrow
Death for housemate, death for neighbour.
Daily bread, daily bread–
Bread of life and bread of labour
Bread of bitterness and bread of sorrow
Hand-to-mouth and no tomorrow
Death for housemate, death for neighbour.
Masefield in “consecration” thus unveils the stark realities of life:
Others may sing of wine and wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of . the earth.
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of . the earth.
Galsworthy in “Stupidity Street” strikes a note of sympathy for even birds:
I saw with open eyes
Singing-birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For people to eat Sold in the shops
Of Stupidity Street
Singing-birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For people to eat Sold in the shops
Of Stupidity Street
In their solicitousness for the working classes, some modern English poets have gone over to the side of radical socialism, and even communism.
Romantic Tendency:
Such prosaic social concern is basically inimical to all romantic tendency Most modern poets, as we have said earlier, scorn all romanticism-even the subdued kind of romanticism as in Tennyson. Hulm’e, a major influence on’Eliot and others, asserted in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism” in the few Age: “I object to the sloppiness which doesn,t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other.” Others have also freely tilted against the traditional romanticism. Still, a few modern poets manifest unmistakable romantic tendencies. Among these poets may be mentioned Walter de la Mare, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, and Edward Thomas. Yeats’s imagery is often redolent ofmythical splendour. Flecker in his poetic drama Hassan tries to evoke the Oriental splendour-though “in a style stripped of romantic excess and a mood purged of romantic subjectivity.” However, the most important romantic poet of all is de la Mare who is pre-eminently a poet of childhood and supernaturalism. To quote Chew, some of his poems ‘”where ghosts and demons walk beneath a waning moon, are morbid, terrible, and dreadful’ But some others* in which the world of nonsense intermingles with the world of dreams, are quite delightful-especially to children.
Nature:
Another “romantic tendency to be found in some modern poets is interest in nature. Nature fascinates some poets because she offers such a wonderful contrast with the hubbub and ugliness of an industrialised and over-sophisticated age. “In the face of modern industrialism,”‘ says A. C. Ward, “they [modern poets] solace their souls by retiring to the country and celebrating the beauties of unspoiled Nature.” Such poets as Masefield, Robert Bridges, W. E. Davies, and Edmund Blunden may not find any mystic significance in mature, but they are, all the same, charmed by her unsophisticated beauty. Masefield in “Sea-Fever” expresses a strong desire to run away from the dreary life into “the lonely sea and the sky.” Edmund Blunden points his finger lovingly at the little-noticed things of nature. Davies poetry has the feature of childlike curiosity in the natural objects everybody finds around himself.
Religion and Mysticism:
Religion and mysticism also find a place in the work of some poets of the twentieth century. Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, who wrote religious poetry towards the end of the preceding century, seem to have inspired a number of poets in this century. The name of Mrs. Alice Meynell deserves to be mentioned. In the poetry of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, too, we have something religious now and then. Ralph Hodgson’s The Song of Honour is a notable poem pulsating with religious feelings. Even in the poetry of such poets as Yeats there are mystical strains.
Complexity and Psychological Profundity:
Complexity and psychological profundity are some other qualities of the more representative poetry of today. The reaction against the earlier naivete of poetry was initiated by Eliot and Ezra Pound in the second decade of the present century. The publication of Hopkins’s work in 1918 was also a force in the new direction. Daiches observes: “Complex, allusive, using,abrupt contrasts and shifting counter-suggestion to help to unfold the meaning, eliminating all conjunctive phrases or overt statements that might indicate the relation of one scene or situation to another, depending entirely oh ‘the music of ideas’, on the pattern of symbolic suggestion set up as the poem moves, Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922)…was the first major example of the new poetry, and it remains a watershed in both English and American literary history.”
Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle-all Americans and Richard Aldington-an Englishman-were the pioneers of Imagism in poetry. Visual images before they were matured by intellect were sought to be expressed by them without any respect for conventional phraseology. Moody and Lovett observe: “The Imagists defined poetry as the presentation of a visual situation in the fewest possible concrete words, lightened of the burden of conventional adjectival padding, and unhampered by general ideas or philosophical ormoral speculations.” Form and substance were to be identical. As an instance of the Imagist poetry consider the following lines from Hilda Doolittle’s “Garden” :
O wind, rend open the heat,
Cut apart the heat
Rend it to tatters;
Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air;
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts
The point of pears.
And rounds the grapes.
Cut apart the heat
Rend it to tatters;
Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air;
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts
The point of pears.
And rounds the grapes.
Many of the major poets of the century have shown the influence of the Imagist doctrines in their work.
Diction and Metre:
This movement has also revolutionalised the concept of poetic diction and metre. Traditional “poetic diction” saccharine poeticisms. and even regular metre have been discarded almost completely. As Moody and Lovett point out, “Imagism did modern poetry a tremendous service by pointing the way to a renovation of the vocabulary of poetry and the necessity of ridding poetic technique of vague and empty verbiage and dishonest and windy generalities.” Though rhyme has almost completely gone, yet as Daiches puts it, “rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity” is still used. A language with the flow and turns of common speech is mostly employed. Verse libre (free verse) is the most usual mode of all serious poetry of today. In the twentieth century many experiments have been made on the technique and diction of poetry. Doughty, for example, as Grierson and Smith put it, “manhandled” English. The American poet Cummings refused to start every line of his poetry with a capital letter, and so on. Many of such experiments have been interesting-but interesting only.
English Poetry between the Two Wars
Introduction:
The years between the two world wars (1919-1939) witnessed prolific poetic activity. It was a period when tradition and innovation went side by side. In the direction of innovation we can find such groups as the Imagists, Symbolists, and Surrealists working, whereas we also find some traditionalists fighting a last-ditch battle against the forces of change.
However, most of the poets of the age combined tradition and innovation; and even the most daring inovators did not, or could not, cut at the root of the essential continuity of English poetry. In general the changes which came upon poetry may be aptly summed up in the words of Samuel C. Chew: “Poetry became obscure, experimental, irregular, antagonistic to didacticism, indifferent to any social value, the private language of small coteries, with much dependence upon verbal subtleties and patterns of association so complex, unstable, and fleeting as sometimes to become presently incomprehensible to the writers themselves.” Poetry did become considerably unpopular. Chew remarks: “It is a question whether poetry became esoteric because the public had abandoned it or whether the public abandoned it because it had become esoteric.”
But in spite of all this experimentation, many old and some new poets of the period were broadly traditional in thqir craft.-When the First World. War ended in 19:18, Hardy, Bridges, and Yeats were yet active. According to Grierson and~Srmth”, the most important poetic works of the first decade of the period under review are Hardy’s Late Lyrics, Yeafs Tower, Bridges’ Testament of Beauty, and Laurence Binyon’s “greatest poems” The Sirens and The Idols. Strangely enough, these critics do not mention Eliot’s The Waste Land which appeared fn 1922 and which was as potent an influence on the current of English poetry as had been, say, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.
Anyway, let us first consider these works before proceeding further.
Hardy, Bridges, Binyon, and Yeats:
A year or two of elation followed the termination of hostilities in 1918, before the period of depression arrived. But Hardy remained as depressed as ever-come war, come peace. All his poems are full of the spirit of atheistic pessimism, though there are passages lit by his childlike interest in the elemental simplicities of nature.
Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was the Poet Laureate. His Testament of Beauty came in 1929 when he was eighty-five. But even at this ripe age he displays a wonderful alacrity of perception which enlivens his mature philosophical speculation. “It,” says Legouis, “is a philosophical poem of remarkable vitality and energy, and is interspersed with beautiful passages of natural description and human wisdom.” Bridges employs a hitherto untried poetic measure which he calls “loose Alexandrines.”
Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) who succeeded T. S. Eliot in the Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard (1933-34), published his two above-mentioned poems as also Collected Poems in the first decade of the interregnum under review. Binyon called each of these two poems “an age,” though they are altogether alien to any English age. What are they, then? “They,” observe Grierson and Smith, “are symphonies in verse, each developing a theme in successive movements in different measures.” The Sirens was suggested by the first transatlantic flight. The theme is man’s power over nature, which goes on increasing day by day. Man is really great,
And where light is, he enters unafraid.
The Idols is directed against the terrors and superstitions which are man’s own creation and which hold him captive. Binyon makes a plea for the demolition of these false gods.
Yeats started his writing career as a poet in the nineteenth century. The period between the two wars brings us to consider his later poetry as we find it in his Tower. His later poetry is very different from his early poetry. Grierson and Smith point out the difference in these words: “The difference between Yeats’s early and later poetry reminds one of the early and later poetry of Donne, but he has changed in the opposite direction, from the ideal to the real, the.spiritual to the sensuous. Some of his later poems are almost definitely bawdy.” In ‘the later part of his career Yeats came under the modernistic, Imagist influence of Ezra Pound. Consequently, his later poems are full of concrete but delicate images and particulars redolent of ancient myths. But the appearance of, what Samuel C. Chew calls, “a most unexpected sensuality” in his poetry is quite baffling indeed. Another feature of his later poetry is its recurring expression of passionate regret at the passing of youth. This regret conditions much of the symbolism employed by him. Chew observes: “The gyre, the spiral, and the winding stair are constantly recurring symbols of the cyclic philosophy which he had evolved from reading and from life.”
The Georgians:
Before we consider some important modernistic movements which came between the wars, let us dispose of some important “Georgians” who were writing before the First World War and who continued writing between the Wars too. The most important of these poets are Walter de la Mare, Masefield, and Gibson.
De la Mare was a poet of childhood and the supernatural, before the first World War. However, after the War, at least for once, he became a realist of the grimmest kind. Inhis”77ze VeiF (1921) he focused his attention, to quote Grierson and Smith, “on the dreadful figures of the criminal in the dock, the drug addict,the suicide. However, his “indulgence” in realism did not continue long, for in The Fleeting (1926) he returned to the hocus-pocus of supernatural and dream poetry for which he always had a strong predilection. In some poems his religious feelings also find a good expression. He was a congenital, incorrigible dreamer and the last of his Collected Poems is, in fact, an argument for a life of dreams:
And conscience less my mind indicts
For idle days than dreamless nights.
For idle days than dreamless nights.
But not to speak of nights, even his days were seldom without dreams.
About Masefield’s poetry between the Wars, Grierson and Smith maintain: “Mr. Masefield celebrated the return of peace to England with a long poem on fox-hunting, the typical sport of the England he loves. Reynard the Fox is modelled on Chaucer’s Prologue; the meet gives Mr. Masefield the same opportunity to bring English people of different ranks together as the Canterbury pilgrimage gave Chaucer. Mr. Masefield has not Chaucer’s witty touch, nor his.universality: his characters are more Trollopian than Chaucerian, recognisable contemporary English types, not the lineaments of universal human life. But as contemporary types they are very well done and as a whole Reynard the Fox is the best sustained and evenest in execution of all Mr. Masefield’s long poems. In Right Royal he applied similar methods, not quite so successfully, to the other typical English sport of horse-racing. The verse he has written since then has not added much to his fame as a poet.” One drawback of Reynard the Fox may be pointed out here: it is that the weight of the Prologue is not well borne out by the story which follows, unlike what we have in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Wilfred Wilson Gibson, one of the leaders of the Georgian School of poets who opposed post-Tennysonian prettiness, continued writing poems and plays beyond the First World War. His poems on the War are instinct with bitterness, stark realism, and a controlled but devastating irony. He was, from first to last, a poet of the “people”-peasants and workers who were victims of social and economic inequalities. In his unflinching realism and unadorned style he often reminds one of Crabbe; but whereas Crabbe was diffuse and detailed, Gibson often secures his effects through telling condensation. Gibson did not mind using in his poetry some elements of the dialect of Northumberland to which he belonged. To the technique of poetry his contribution is minimal.
Let us now cast a hurried glance on the rest of the poets who were not appreciably influenced by the modernistic movements. Ronald Macfie in his long ode War expressed the point of view of the pacifist when he described the impact of the War on civilian life. The poem ends on a strong note of optimism where Macfie envisions an age of love:
The love that sighs in every wind
And breathes in every flower.
And breathes in every flower.
John Freeman, by profession a businessman, wrote good poems on the themes of nature and childhood. Edmund Blunden, an editor of Clare, shows the same painstaking fidelity to his paintings of nature as Clare does. He, quip Grierson and Smith, is “so solid that some readers find him stodgy.”
The Imagists:
The Imagist Movement in English poetry was a product of the War years, but it did considerably influence the poetry between the two Wars. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Aldington, and F. S. Flint were the protagonists of this movement. The Imagists in Some Imagist Poets (1915) enunciated some clear principles which John M. Manly and Edith Rickert sum up as follows in Contemporary British Literature:-
1. to use the language of common speech butto employ the exact word;
2. to create new rhythms for-the expression of new moods;
3. to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject;
4. to present an image, not vague generalities;
5. to produce poetry that is hard and clear;
6. to aim at concentration, since concentration is the
very essence and poetry.”
very essence and poetry.”
Apart from the poets mentioned above D. H. Lawrence also came under the influence of the Imagist Movement, though this influence was not to continue for long. As the critics just quoted above observe: “though Lawrence never succumbed to technical conservatism, he was too mystical, too passionately and destructively critical a nature to content himself with the limitations of an essentially sensational medium, and his later work, rough and fragmentary as much of it is, is a more direct expression of his prophetic denunciations and visions than his purely imagist work.”
T. S. Eliot and the Innovators:
T. S. Eliot, the greatest of the modern poets, started his career as a poet during the course of the War with his Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) but his greater and more characteristic works come later-r/ie Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and the rest. Eliot was the founder of the modernistic school of poetry which even today is quite flourishing. He himself as a poet came under the influence of numerous schools and writers. The Imagist Movement, the views of Hulme, the Symbolist Movement of France, the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins which was first published in 1918 many years after his death, Freud’s ideas, and the poetry of Donne may be mentioned among them: Donne’s “unified sensibility” was with Eliot something worthy of the most assiduous imitation. In his attempts Eliot produces even more jolts than his master. His poetry is very heavy readings as it is thick with recondite allusions and quick transitions from mood to mood which simply baffle even a; sound and painstaking Hreader. Ambivalence and paradox are the rule rather than the exception.
Most critics of today consider The Waste Land to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It is an image of the modern restlessness, anxiety, and despair. Though at the end the thunder promises the arrival of the life-giving rain, no rain falls. The framework’of the poem is provided by the legend of the Holy Grail. Fertility will not come to the earth till the Holy Vessel has been found. The treatment of this simple theme is the most abstruse, so much so that Eliot had to take upon himself the work of annotating his own poem.
The Hollow Men sketches the spiritual emptiness and purposelessness of modern men.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together,
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together,
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
In Ash Wednesday, however, we meet with a note of spiritual assurance which is essentially inimical to despair.
Miss Edith Sitwell and her brothers, Osbert and Sachverell Sitwell, made some robust experiments. Edith used bold and artistic imagery, and her peculiarity was her constant utilisation of the effects of synaesthesia-that is, interchanging senses. Osbert struck an astringently satirical note and enjoyed taking pot-shots at dowdiness and tawdiness. Sacheverell was very learned but was quite satisfied indulging in the baroque.
Some poets like Herbert Reade and Robert Graves came under the influence of the psychoanalytic studies of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Graves, for some time, saw nothing but sexual symbols in everything. Reade wrote “surrealistic” poetry which is expressive of the unconscious and has to be read most carefully to get at something. These experiments, as is known, paved the way for the stream-of-consciousness novel.
The Irish Poets:
Between the Wars there was a tremendous resurgence of literary activity in Ireland. The chief moving ‘force was Yeats himself. The oaier notable Irish poets of the period were G. W. Russell (“AE”) and J. M. Synge. Russell, according to Grierson and Smith, “was a much less versatile and melodious poet than Yeats, but a purer mystic, never; astray by that will-o’-the-wisp, that hpcus-ppcus of evocation and incantation which had such an attraction for Yeats. “Synge was chiefly matist whose very few poems have the same qualities as his plays.
The Young Poets of Eliot Tradition:
The most important poets of the second decade of the period between the Wars are Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. All of them are followers of Eliot, and they have tried to establish a neo-metaphysical tradition. But there is a difference-their interest in social reform and their communistic leaning. Auden is learned but his technique is unpredictable. “He,” observe Moody and Lovett, “ranges freely from the most cryptic and condensed utterance to a patody of music hall rhythms, folk-ballads, and nursery rhymes.” He is indeed a clever poet. Cecil Day Lewis is the most manifest of revolutionaries. Spender is a poet less of revolution than of compassion. His communism is conditioned by his strong liberal convictions. His heart bleeds when he finds the jobless poor loitering in the streets and turning.
Their empty pockets out,
he cynical gesture of the poor.
he cynical gesture of the poor.
Write an essay on Georgian poetry
Introduction:
Like the adjective “Victorian,” “Georgian” has two implications. First, it denotes a specific historical period and, second, it describes a set of literary characteristics associated with a specific group of poets belonging to that period. The Georgian era spans the reign of George V (1910-1936).
The so-called Georgian poets aimed at reviving public interest in poetry. But that could be done only by reviving poetry itself, which was lying moribund at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Tennyson died in 1892, it was commonly said that English poetry had also died with him. Those who called themselves Georgians wanted to assert their identity as also to imply that they were worthy of a rank comparable to that of the great Victorians before them.
Georgian Anthologies:
The name of Edward Marsh is important as he was the editor of the five anthologies, each entitled Georgian Poetry, which appeared successively from 1912 to 1922. The idea of bringing out such books of poetry was first mooted by the poet Rupert Brooke. In order to arouse curiosity and create public interest in poetry, Brooke proposed to write a sheaf of poems himself but to make it appear as the work of “twelve different writers, six men and six women, all with the most convincing pseudonyms/’ But Marsh was of the view that an anthology of poems written by living poets would be a better proposition. Marsh’s proposal was seconded by several poets such as John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, and W. W. Gibson. Consequently, in late 1912 the first Georgian anthology entitled Georgian Poetry, 1911-12 was published by Harold Monro from his Poetry Bookshop situated in a Bloomsbury slum. The book was an instant and respectable success in its aim of stimulating public interest in poetry. A.C. Ward remarks in this context: “However little future attention may be paid to the neo-Georgians of 1912-25, they did stir the public to buy-and to read-poetry, even before the war threw men back upon elementals expressible only in poetry.”
Georgian Characteristics:
The Georgian anthologies represented the work of as many as forty poets, but none of them a really major one. Further, it must be understood that unlike, say, the Metaphysicals or the pre-Raphaelites, the Georgians did not constitute a school. They were a group rather than a school. They had no doctrine, no declared critical or aesthetic principles. Each of them had his own predilections. Still they shared a lot in common. For example, most of them strive after lucidity of style by eschewing archaism, grandiloquence, and hackneyed phrases and poetic diction.
Their themes are derived from nature, familiar objects, and common experience. A few of them are fond of conjuring dream-worlds of their own and even supernaturalism, but most of them execute a sort of another “return to nature” in the manner of the great Romantics who preceded them by about a century. The Georgians are, therefore, sometimes compared to Wordsworth and Blake, the two great poets of nature and childhood who celebrated purity and innocence as against the corruption and constraint of urbari culture. However, this comparison should not be taken very far. The Georgians’ interest in nature is that of a picnicker rather than a mystic. And Blake’s daring defiance of organized authority and quest for disturbing truths are foreign to their sedate temper.
Though in theory the Georgians were no path-breakers yet, having a lot of talent, they turned out good work. Cazamian identifies in their work “two main tendencies, but not new.” These are:
1. Consciousness of aesthetic form. This desire for beauty of form and expression draws them “towards the ideal of a classical and refined inspiration”. This tendency is apparent in Abercrombie, Hodgson, Graves, etc.
2. The second tendency is evinced by a far larger group of
Georgians. Rather than seek formal perfection they just try to please and soothe by means of what Cazamian calls “a vehement effort towards a direct, simple utterance. They look to familiar, concrete subjects, and to spontaneous language and prosody, for the virtue of thoseimmediate effusions of which literature at periodic intervals tries to refresh itself.”
Georgians. Rather than seek formal perfection they just try to please and soothe by means of what Cazamian calls “a vehement effort towards a direct, simple utterance. They look to familiar, concrete subjects, and to spontaneous language and prosody, for the virtue of thoseimmediate effusions of which literature at periodic intervals tries to refresh itself.”
Some Individual Georgians Considered:
As we have already pointed out, the Georgians were a large group of forty poets. We take up here the more important of them for brief individual treatment.
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), was, as has been pointed out at the beginning, the originator of the idea of bringing out “Georgian” anthologies. Brooke was indeed exceptionally handsome. Add to it his intense patriotism and poetic talent and you can well understand the reason he became a cult hero at the beginning of the First World War. He joined the War but died of an illness before taking part in the campaign.
Brooke’s poems about the War, such as The Soldier” amply show his dashing nature and patriotism. While in the poetry of most war poets, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, war is presented as a horror and an evil, Brooke represents it as a glorious enterprise and an opportunity to prove one’s mettle and patriotism. Brooke’s nature poems show his real interest in nature. A.C. Ward observes: “His love of Nature was neither mystical nor metaphysical. He saw and touched and enjoyed; that was enough.”
Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962) was an exceptionally talented poet. His poems show a lot of emotional force and sincerity as well as an impeccable ear for music. Somewhat like Lawrence, he evinces an uncanny rapport with animals. His well-known poem “The Bull” subtly presents the plight of a bull who was once the leader of his herd but has now been ousted by a young rival. The unfortunate beast, now aged and
infirm and forsaken, stands alone dreaming of his glorious past while vultures hover over him waiting for him to turn into dead beef.
infirm and forsaken, stands alone dreaming of his glorious past while vultures hover over him waiting for him to turn into dead beef.
See him standing dewlap-deep
In the rushes of the lake,
Surly, stupid, half-asleep.
In the rushes of the lake,
Surly, stupid, half-asleep.
Vividness and compression are important features of Hodgson’s poetic style.
James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) was chiefly concerned with the creation of beauty. He is known mainly for his oriental play Hassan which is full of melodious and enjoyable lyrics. For his beautiful music and sensuous richness and particularity he reminds one of the Pre-Raphaelites: but, as A.C. Ward puts it, “his verse reeked of the unguent pot and the perfume jar.”
Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938), one of the original contributors to Georgian Poetry had a much more austere style and discriminating imagination than most Georgians. He disliked lushness and looseness. In his blending of emotion and intellect he reminds one of the Metaphysicals. but as a literary critic he had a pronounced Classicist bend.
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was a prominent figure among the Georgians. Almost frankly escapist, his poetry is chiefly doncemed with the creation of dream-lands far away from the humdrum world of reality. The imaginary world created by him has often touch of the supernatural and the weird. Now and then, however, he manages, like Coleridge, to blend delicately the real and the bizarre, the psychological and the supernatural. As a children’s poet de la Mare is good at recapturing the world of lost innocence of childhood.
W.W. Gibson (1878-1962), the longest surviving of the Georgians, had several phases to his poetic career. His most characteristic poetry, however, is marked by stark realism and humanitarian concern at the pitiable, penurious plight of the industrial labourers. His war poems, too, are very bitter and gloomy. He has a gift for withering and mordant irony which transfigures his-sombre rhetoric. He is often compared to Crabbe, but whereas Crabbe was diffuse, Gibson often impresses with a telling conciseness and undermining irony.
W.H. Davies (1879-1940) is, according to Cazamian, “Probably tne central figure of this group.” His genius is inclined to lyricism. He specializes in composing brief, musical, spontaneous poems. Like most I-eorgians, Davies was sensitive to and appreciative of nature which be approached without any intellectual presuppositions. A.C. Ward curves: “Davies flew to Nature for solace and forgetfulness, pursuing -~oy. eschewing Sadness. The central fact in his poetry is not that he saw little more than externals, but that he was grateful to Nature for hanging a solacing veil between his susceptibilities and the world’s pain.”
The Georgians’ Contribution to English Poetry:
The place of the Georgians in the history of English poetry is not very prominent. In their time they reacted against the decadent Romanticism of the early twentieth century. Their freshness of approach to nature and their colloquial and genuinely lyrical style were welcome. However, as a group they lacked the strength and originality and the intellectual-critical base which characterizes the true Modernist poets-chiefly Eliot and Pound-who were very soon to write a new chapter in the history of literature. Isolated from its historical context the term “Georgian poetry” has now come to signify, in Abrams’ words, “verse which is mainly rural in subject matter, and traditional rather than experimental in technique and form.”
English Poetry Since 1930
Introduction:
In the twenties the English poetic scene was dominated by the Modernists like T.S. Eliot and Pound. The traditionalist Georgians represented only a pleasant diversion as compared to the central current of Modernism. After the twenties, all the new forces and trends defined themselves in relation to that central current alone. They were either for or against, or partly this and partly that. The most important of these new forces, trends, or movements were three, and in the following chronological order:
(i) The Oxford poets or left-wing intellectuals
(ii) Poets of the Apocalypse
(i) Movement poets
The Oxford Poets:
Let us consider these three one by one. The group of Oxford poets comprises the following:
(i) W.H. Auden (1907-73)
(ii) Stephen Spender(1909-
(iii) Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72)
(ii) Louis MacNeice (1907-63)
All of them were connected with Oxford University and” were more or less committed leftists and propagators of Communist ideology. For them poetry was not a pastime but a serious commitment to the realization of political aims. In its most didactic shape, poetry in their hands becomes political action, a contribution to the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie and the ruling elite. That the Oxford poets were inclined to action rather than merely reflection and aesthetic creation is shown by the fact that at least two of them, viz. Auden and Spender, were involved in the Spanish Civil War with which England had no direct concern. This active involvement with the problems of the day gives the poetry of this group a special vitality and authenticity, but at the same time it makes it a little dated. A.C. Ward rightly observes: “The poetry of the nineteen-thirties was saturated in bloody sweat of that decade. This fact gives it a documentary importance which may seem, as time passes, to outweigh its poetic merit The poet turned politician may serve his age as politician, but he may in so doing abrogate his more important function as visionary. While no poet can be unaware of temporalities, he is poet only in so far as he is in constant touch also with the eternities, applying to policy the measure of Truth.”
Considered from the point of view of poetic technique, the Oxford poets were decidedly Modernist. They show a strong influence of T.S. Eliot (who patronized them) and the Imagists as also Hopkins and the French Symbolists. Excessive compression, bizarre similes and metaphors (which are often surrealistic), arid Metaphysical juxtapositions are some of the chief characteristics of their poetry. Interestingly, though they were champions of the masses as against the elite, they cannot really be called poets of the masses. Their work is too difficult, too intellectually demanding for the common people to be their cup of tea.
Now let us briefly consider these poets individually.
W.H. Auden is the guru of the Oxford group. Now, when only three years intervene between the twentieth century and the next, it can be confidently said that next to Eliot, Auden is the most important poet of the twentieth century. When he went up to Oxford University at the age of eighteen, he twice became editor of the journal Oxford Poetry. In 1956 he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford. But before that he emigrated to America in 1939 and acquired American citizenship in 1946.
In the thirties Auden was the voice of his generation. Linda Williams observes: “His verse is full of topical reference to the social, ‘and international crises of the time; it gives direct expression to the anxieties of the contemporary intelligentia as perhaps no other writing has done.” R.G. Cox points out “the immediate sensitiveness with which he has registered the changing moods and opinions 6f his time.” With the passage of time Auden lost much of his leftist ideological sharpness-sp much so that after 1940 he became committed to Anglo-Catholicism.
Spender was a passionately political poet. In his poetry he also propagated the cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. For some time he remained a member of the Communist Party but in 1950 he contributed to The God that Failed, a collection of anti-Communist essays edited by R.H.S. Grossman. Unlike Auden, Spender does not flinch from expressing his deeper personal emotions. With all his political hardness, he has something of the romantic in him.
The early poetry of Day-Lewis was overtly propagandist and he also supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. However, with the passage of time he became more versatile, and more and more personal and pastoral putting one in mind of the Georgians and Hardy. In 1968 he became the Poet Laureate.
An Irishman by birth, MacNeice associated himself with Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis because he too had socialistic leaning. But unlike others he was not a committed leftist. Linda Williams observes: “He excelled in witty, sensuous verse of rhythmical versatility and with a strong element of caustic pessimism.”
Poets of the Apocalypse:
The Greek root of the word “apocalypse” signifies disclosure. In literature apocalypse means a visionary composition, Such as the Book of Revelation (the last Book of the New Testament). Among English poets Blake and Yeats are well known for their apocalyptic poetry which tends to intimate truths and visions inaccessible to rational thinking.
In the history of twentieth-century poetry “New Apocalypse” was the most powerful movement of the forties. It was started by Dylan Thomas (1914-53) and carried on into the fifties by his disciple W.S. Graham (1918-86) and some others much less significant. The New Apocalypse was essentially a neo-Romantic movement and like the earlier Romantic Movement of Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. was both a revolt and a revival. It revolted against both the Classicist impersonality and conciseness of Eliot and Pound as well as the propagandist concern of the school of Auden. Passion and emotion were to be restored to poetry and dry rationality and excessive concern for form and linguistic precision were to be shown the door.
Dylan Thomas has indeed been a great poet of the twentieth century. He can be very whimsical and exasperatingly obscure, but he is very forceful and genuine. There is often an incantatory element in his poetry which casts a spell on the reader despite all its obscurity. Consider, for example, his well-known poem “Altarwise by Owl-Light.” a sequence often sonnets. What exactly this poem is about is yet to be agreed upon by critics. Some say it is about Jesus, others that it is about Hercules, and still some others that it is about Thomas himself. Thomas himself said: “Those sonnets are only the writings of a boily boy in love with shapes and shadows on his pillow They would be of interest to another boily boy. Or a boily girl. Boily-girly.” Splendid muddle, but interesting.
Graham’s poetry is remarkably vigorous. It is mostly about problems of personal identity. He is often named with David Cascoyne and George Barker as well as Dylan Thomas as a reviver of the Romantic spirit in the twentieth century.
The Movement:
It was but natural that the Romantic excesses of the New Apocalypse should be challenged by new forces which disapproved of irrationality, indiscipline, whimsicality, mysticism, and looseness. This inevitable challenge came in the fifties from what are called “New Lines”or “Movement”‘ poets. New Lines (1956) was the title of the anthology of post-war poetry edited by Robert Conquest. The contributors to this volume came to be known as the “Movement poets.” They were, chiefly:
Kingsley Amis (1922-)
D.J. Enright (1920-)
Roy Fuller (1912- ) ,
Donald Davie (1922- )
Philip Larkin (1922-85)
D.J. Enright (1920-)
Roy Fuller (1912- ) ,
Donald Davie (1922- )
Philip Larkin (1922-85)
Rejecting the neo-Romanticism of the New Apocalypse, the Movement poets went back to their Classicist predecessors like Eliot and Pound and even farther back to the English Augustans like Dryden, Pope, and Jonson and some even went back to Hardy and the Georgians. In Linda Williams’ words, the work of the Movement poets “is characterized by thoughtfulness, irony, self-doubt, humility, and the search for completely honest feeling. These qualities are in accord with the imaginative temper of Thomas Hardy’s poetry.”
Amis is better known as a novelist than as a poet. He was an “angry young man” of the fifties who also became a Movement poet. Both as poet and novelist he has a middle-brow ethos. Enright is a novelist and critic as well as a poet. His poetry is markedly anti-Romantic and humanistic. About Fuller, Linda Williams observes: “He began writing in the 1930s, and published two volumes of poetry whilst he was in the Royal Navy during World War II: The Middle of a War (1942) and A Last Season (1944) (his first volume appeared in 1939). Subsequent text have shown certain attributes of Movement irony, but with a broader technical and emotional scope, as well as a tendency to experiment with versification.” Davie is well known for his critical book Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) which has been called “the Bible of the Movement.” According to Linda Williams, his “rational, cool and technically pure poetry perhaps epitomizes the verse of the Movement.”
Philip Larkin is as distinguished a member of the Movement as Auden was of the group of left-wing intellectuals or Thomas of the New Apocalypse. Larkin is apolitical conservative. Eschewing political radicalism, he shows concern for the humour and pathos, comedy and tragedy of everyday experiences of common men. He combines Modernism and Classicism. In one important respect, however, Larkin is against Modernism-its emphasis on catholicity and internationalism. In Linda Williams’ words “Philip Larkin exemplifies Movement poetry, in his deflationary, perfectly formed phrases, in his almost xenophonic stance against other cultures and cultural forms.” This makes him a somewhat parochial poet. But this parochialism is in perfect conformity with his general attitude of humility which makes him fond of safety, order, self-discipline, and even a bit of banality and boredom.
Major Concerns of the novel in the twentieth century
Well has the twentieth century been called “the age of interrogation.” A spirit of relentless enquiry is abroad testing the age-old beliefs in every field of life and literature. “The new philosophy calls us all in doubt,” as it did Donne centuries before us. With the encouragement of inquisitiveness has come emancipation-with a vengeance.
Values are fast crumbling. In this background of crumbling values the time-honoured conceptions about the nature and function of the novel have also bowed their way out. It has come to be realised-for good or ill-that a novel can be made about anything. With the arrival of a new age none of the tacit obligations which had been ruling the novel was held as valid any longer-even that of using an intelligible language. The novel could now be realistic or unrealistic, conform to an organised story or dispense with plot, present scenes and episodes or expatiate on dreamy fancies, and so forth. Experimentation has become an essential activity of every important novelist, worth the name. J. B. Priestley puts it like this : “If we are asked what has been happening to the English novel during this period we are tempted to reply, ‘Everything’ and to let go at that.” However, to be specific, we can say with David Daiches that the modern novel differs from the traditional novel in three important points which are given below.
(i) First, its changed conception of what is significant inhuman life. Formerly, the novelist was pre-eminently occupied with the task of sketching the ups and downs in the social and economic status of his characters, particularly, the major ones. Even such incidents as marriages and emotional activities wore social and economic colour. But the novelist of today considers social and economic status, and, therefore, the fluctuations in it, as less significant occurrences in the life of a person.
(ii) Secondly, the conception of time has changed, affecting some of the modern novels. Time is no longer conceived as a movement of moments each of which passes away irretrievably. It is rather considered as a continuous flow, having no divisible parts (moments). All moments are always present.
(iii) Thirdly, modern psychology has had its impact on the very conception of the novel.
These three changes are radical changes. The other points, such as the distrust of didacticism, emancipation from rigid moral codes, and freedom from goody-goody religion are only shifts, not changes, for they are only relative or quantitative.
The Early Masters-Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy:
It was only in the twenties and thirties that the technique of the novel underwent radical changes. In the early years of the century the old masters like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy conformed obediently to the form of Victorian novel, though they added quite a few things even staying within this form. What links these three novelists is their awareness of social problems. Galsworthy even suggested solutions for the problems.
Of them H. G. Wells was the most creative and energetic, though his contribution to the form and technique of the novel is minimal. His novels can be divided into three broad categories as follows:
(i) Fantastic romances or what is called “science fiction.” Two Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Wonderful Visit are examples of this kind. They are all imaginative, but like a good storyteller with his mind working like a powerful dynamo, Wells keeps the attention of the reader always under his control.
(ii) Novels of character and humour, like Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly. In such novels he gives a sympathetic but interesting and unsentimental picture of the lower-middle class English life.
(iii) The discussion novels, like Tono Bungay, which searchingly consider the deeper problems and aspects of human life and the ideal of progressive civilisation.
Wells cannot be classed among the great novelists of the century because of his lack of depth and his poor appreciation of the side of art. As David Daiches points out, he “had little sense of artistic form and no awareness of the significance for fiction of new concepts of time and consciousness, was essentially a Baconian and a Victorian, and his best novels are really good Victorian minor fiction”.
Galsworthy’s technique is as Victorian as Well’s. His Forsyte Saga, a combination of six novels, is a realistic picture of middle-class life, but treated with symbolism. He tried to sketch in these novels the struggle of Beauty against the Idea of Property or Possession. Irene is Beauty and her husband Soames Forsyte is the idea of Possession, exacting even forcibly his marital rights from her. Galsworthy excels in subtle analysis, in truth and diversity of character-drawing, in the poetical quality of the descriptions of natural scenery, and above all a sensitive, delicate, and flexible style, which may be sometimes audaciously colloquial. However, as an artist, he suffers, like Wells. David Daiches maintains; “His humanity-and social observation exceeded his ceative and imaginative powers as a literary artist.”
The same observation may as well be applied to Arnold Bennett whose greatest novel was The Old Wives”Tale (1908). In Riceyman Steps (1923) he gave a good regional novel. As L B. Priestley puts it, “Arnoiu Bennett was at once the historian, the philosopher, and the troubadour of our ordinary human life.”
Other Conventional Novelists:
Among the other important conventional novelists-that is, those who bother still to tell a story and are not tangibly influenced by the modernistic conception of chronology and the subconscious-may be mentioned Maugham, Hugh Walpole, Swinnerton, and some others. Somerset Maugham started with the realistic studies of London life, such as Liza of Lambeth, but then he turned his gaze to the life in the Pacific. China and Malaya provide the backdrops of, respectively, The Trembling of a Leaf and The Painted Veil. Maugham is sometimes disconcertingly frank about sexual matters and his greatest character-Rosie of Cakes and Ale-is nothing more than a meretrix. But still she is a woman in a million-the eternal, warm-blooded lover, incidentally a nymphomaniac and adulteress, yet sublime in her tranquil beauty and kindness of heart, untamed by the parochialism which others cannot escape.
Hugh Walpole and Swinnerton were content to stay within the pale of tradition. Walpole‘s plots are full of interesting and, not unoften, surprising incidents. Thackeray and Trollope were his obvious models. Frank Swinnerton’s novels of suburban London are in the Arnold Bennett tradition; but his title masterpiece Nocturne is all his own. J. B. Priestley also followed tradition; and his way of telling stories is quite reminiscent of Dickens’. In him the spirit of the twentieth-century left-wing reformer is clearly to be felt. His characters, though definitely “alive”, are yet products of commonplace observation.
New Forces–James, Lawrence, and Forster:
Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster struck out new paths-but in different directions. James was the novelists’ novelist just as Spenser had been the poets’ poet. The modern novelist could learn a lot from James’s fastidious care for form and style. Like Meredith, James gave himself to probing the minds of sensitive characters. The subtle refinements of his style and the niceties of his art are too much for the general reader, though they please the tribe of novelists. He put into some of the prefaces of his novels his conception of the art of the novel. These criticisms are of very great value-especially to a novelist. There are few novelists of today who can beat him in the technical side of their craft.
D. H. Lawrence came out with a new kind of novel based on a deep study of the sexual passion combined with mystic symbolism and a prophetic strain. But in some of his novels there are also, what David Daiches calls, “a murkiness and a hysteria.” D. H. Lawrence was extremely critical of modern sophisticated civilisation which believed in curbing man’s natural instincts. To discover again a free flow of passionate life became for him almost a mystical ideal. He wrote boldly in the preface to his very controversial novel Lady Chatterley ‘s Lover : “I want men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely, and clearly.” Elsewhere he writes: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect…All 1 want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind or moral, or what-not. I conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, for ever upright and yet flowing.” Here, then was the “fleshly school” of the novel. Sons and Lovers, like some other Lawrence novels, is unmistakably autobiographical. It tells how a family of boys are so dominated by their mother’s affection that when they grow up they cannot love, but lust. Some of his subsequent novels, like The Rainbow, were banned in certain quarters on the ground of obscenity. As if in revenge, Lawrence published Lady Chatterley ‘s Lover which met the same fate and which even today is banned in some countries in the unexpurgated form. Indeed Lawrence sometimes did go too far but it stands to reason whether his novels are pornographic in the true sense of the term. A word about his style. A critic observes: “To style, in the ordinary definition of the word, he was indifferent. He seems to hack his meaning out of the word, as his father [a coal miner] had hacked coal from the pits. But the effects are original. He invented a language in which sexual experience can be described correct to its every fine shade.” What is Lawrence‘s place in the development of the English novel? David Daiches observes : “The fierce individuality of Lawrence’s genius kept him aloof from schools and influence and though one can trace some Lawrentian elements in later novelists, he cannot be said to have bequeathed a significant legacy to English fiction, or at least not one that is yet clearly visible : his increasing popularity in the middle 1950’s might yet alter this situation.”
Forster’s popularity has now considerably declined, and he is now known only for A Passage to India (1924) which, indeed, is a masterpiece. The novel sketches the impact of the British rule on India. Forster is everywhere a crusader against materialism and lack of sensitiveness. His favourite leitmotif is the struggle of a sensitive and often artistic character against the humdrum world of crude realities around him. Forster is convincing enough, but he is inimical to realism and particularly the realistic novel. Moody and Lovett point out: “The surface manner of Forster’s novels is realistic, but his impatience with realism is apparent in his introduction into his plots of sudden acts of violence or accidents and in his wilful juxtaposition of a romantic figure in a realistic environment; as in The Longest Journey (1907) or a realistic figure in a romantic environment, as in A Room with a View (1908).” ”
The Psychological Novel:
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson are the greatest among the psychological novelists of the twentieth century. It is in their novels that we find the old tradition disappear completely and the three changes listed earlier by us completely realised. They discarded the conventional concept of time and directed their attention to exploration of the layers of human consciousness and even the unconscious. Moody and Lovett observe: “Development-depthwise rather than lengthwise becomes the logical technique.” They are also called “the stream-of-consciousness novelists.” They attempt to portray life and reality by setting down everything that goes on in the mind of a character, notably all those unimportant and chaotic thought-sequence which occupy our idle and somnolent moments, and to which, in real life, we pay but little attention. Influenced by the new psychologists-Freud, Jung, and Adler-they came to recognise the human consciousness as a flowing stream which linked the past, present, and to come in an organic unity, and gave them all a never-changing reality. At any given moment in time the consciousness of a man is abode of a million disjointed impressions which it is the job of the novelist to reproduce with the least possible interference. In a way the stream-of-consciousness novel bears a close resemblance to Imagist poetry.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was a daring innovator. He started his career as a novelist with realistic pictures of life, but with a special emphasis on the exploration of the states of human consciousness. In his masterpiece Ulysses (1922), however, realism altogether disappears and the novelist is only left with the task of representing the stream of consciousness of the main character. Leopold Bloom is a seedy, grubby solicitor of newspaper advertisement in Dublin. Joyce’s avowed purpose is to present what passes in the consciousness of Bloom in twenty-four hours-the day and night of June 16, 1904. Action completely disappears, for the only important “events” in the novel are Bloom’s meeting with Stephen Dedalus, ayoung artist, and his reconcilement with his wife Molly. The exhaustive study of Bloom’s mind seems to be without any pattern but critics have come forward to read many parallelisms, myth, symbols, and meanings from and into it. But one thing is certain: Bloom is a hero as well as a commoner. He is the modern Ulysses-the legendary Greek hero and the protagonist of Homer’s epic, Tiie Odyssey. Molly is another Penelope to whom Bloom-Ulysses is ultimately reconciled. Nevertheless, Ulysses is a highly complex novel as complex (or even more) as T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land which appeared the same year. Joyce’s later novel. Finnegans Wake (1939) is still more complex. It, say Moody and Lovett, “is linguistically so intricate that to all but a very few patient and learned readers it is likely to remain an insoluble puzzle.”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) also tried to convey through her novels, like To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, her study of the stream of human consciousness. She, as Moody and Lovett point out, “saw consciousness, as all but the behaviouristic psychologist sees it, as a complex of sensations, feelings, emotions, and ideas, and she attempted, through her rendition of this complex to create the sense of being alive.” Her poetic sensitivity was a great asset to her and gave her works a delicate finesse not to be found in Joyce’s. However, she cannot somehow convince the reader of the reality of her characters who but seldom seem to step out the bounds of her mind.
Dorothy Richardson, though less important today than Virginia Woolf, yet influenced her and the subsequent women novelists with her novel Painted Roofs (1915). It was a new kind of novel in England as in it Dorothy Richardson endeavoured to give both the subjective and objective biography of a character-a young woman named Miriam Henderson. The description comes from Miriam’s own mind. It is the stream of her consciousness that Miss Richardson reproduces without any interference on her own part. Her novel is truly feminine, and she comes closest, among all English novelists, to fidelity in her study of the mind of a woman.
The Romancers:
The impact of psychological study is apparent even in the novel of adventure of the twentieth century. Conrad’s is a good illustration. Gerald Bullet observes: “Indeed, far from writing in any materialistic spirit, Conrad wrote with the vision and spirit of a poet. He wrote of the conflict between man and nature and of the mysteries of the human soul, and in his view of man the world ‘soul’ was an inevitable word to use.” Some romancers, like Kipling, however, went merrily along the beaten track. H. G. Wells wrote a number of interesting “science romances.”
The Satirists:
Huxley, Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh have written novels of ideas rich in satiric elements. Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point, and The Brave New World are Huxley’s best novels. In the last mentioned novel he gives a ludicrous picture of the future world with its test-tube babies, “soma gas,” and cold and effete creatures reminiscent of Swift’s Houyhnhnms. Huxley is a disillusioned cynic whose chief job is to go about disillusioning others. His art is the art of exposure, not of comprehension. He is a gigantic intellect, but his creative energy is limited and his characters mere abstractions. Orwell’s Animal Farm is a lively and interesting satire on communism. Evelyn Waugh has also impressed with his satirical novels.
D.H. Lawrence’s Work And Achievement As A Novelist
Introduction:
Lawrence‘s achievement as a great modern novelist came to be recognized long after his death in 1930. It was no other than the stormy petrel of criticism, F. R. Leavis, who with his epoch-making D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955) rescued Lawrence from faddists and sex -maniacs on the one hand and puritans and respectable “men of letters” on the other and fairly succeeded, virtually single-handed, in establishing him as “one of the greatest creative writers in English of our time.”
Leavis thus tried to end the era of the neglect and censure of Lawrence, or. what he called, “the shameful history of misrepresentation and abuse.” While endorsing E.M. Forster’s view that Lawrence, is “the greatest imaginative writer of the twentieth century,” Leavis included Lawrence in The Great Tradition of the English novel which, according to him, comprised apart from Lawrence, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis recognized Lawrence’s merit as a critic, a poet, and a dramatist as well, but primarily he singled out his achievement as a novelist-as the very title of his epoch-making work on Lawrence shows.
Lawrence’s Independence:
According to Middleton Murry, Lawrence belongs to no school and no tradition, except the “tradition of himself.” A fierce individualist as he was, his slogan was, not surprisingly, “Art for My Sake.” As a poet, a critic, a playwright, and as a novelist, he maintained his fierce individuality and refused to yoke his inspiration to the mechanizing discipline of any school or literary coterie. At best his fierce individualism manifests itself in his piercing insights into the predicament of man in the context of twentienth-century civilization, and, at worst, it appears in his numerous crotchets and brain-waves which have invested his personality with a pronounced aura of eccentricity.
When Lawrence started his writing career in 1911, such novelists as Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells were occupying the scene. These novelists can all be called “conventional” both as regards the theme and the form of their novels. Love, money, and social status are their prime concern and there is not even muted experimentation with the form of the novel. Lawrence revolutionized, both the theme and the form of the novel. Once when Arnold Bennett found fault with Lawrence’s bold departure from the traditional structure of the novel, he wrote indignantly in a letter to his literary executor: “Tell Arnold Bennett thatall rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction, and what he calls faults, he beings an old imitator, I call characteristics.”
Lawrence criticized novelists such as Flaubert and Mann whose novels are too ”well-made” and who apply themselves all-too-assiduously to their craft. Lawrence believed in his own version of the living, organic, or emotional form, which is not external or mentally imposed but grows in response to the necessity of the embodiment of experience. Evidently, Lawrence took a cue from the latter-day romanticists who in turn looked to Coleridge and his German predecessors.
Experiments with Form:
It may be admitted that in spite of his fierce independence and radical romanticism, Lawrence did not make with the form of the novel experiments which may be described as bold. Some modern novelists, such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf, have been particularly interested in the problems of time and human consciousness. Though Lawrence radically changed the very concept of the novel, he did not much bother about these particular problems. David Daiches observes : “In his mature novels Lawrence was at least as revolutionary as Joyce in the conception of prose fiction which he was acting o’ut, but he was not involved in those problems of time and consciousness which Joyce and Virginia Woolf saw as paramount and which had such an immediately visible effect on those writers’ technique.”
Lawrence’s formal excellence rises from the diffident and rather clumsy (from the formal point of view) maiden venture The White Peacock to Women in Love, which is a tour deforce of tight symbolic architectonics in which texture and structure are in almost perfect harmony and even coalescence. In The White PeacockLawrence seems to have tried to adopt the Jamesean point-of-view technique according to which the principle of formal coherence is provided by the consciousness of one of the dramatis personae. But, obviously, he has made a mess of it, so much so that at times it becomes difficult to ascertain as to whose point of view-of a character’s or of the novelist himself-is being brought to the fore. Sons and Lovers, The Trespasser, and The Lost Girl follow more or less the conventional concept of form; the time pattern is strictly chronological, though the ebb and flow of the human consciousness as also the use of symbols impart to these novels a kind of poetry which is so peculiarly Laurentian.
Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo are structurally the weakest of Lawrence’s novels in which he often seems to be mocking at the very notion of structure. In the former, to quote an instance, there is a chapter entitled “Talk” which contains nothing more than inconsequential conversation among some of the characters. At one point in this novel he asks the reader to give up reading his novel if he cannot brook his wayward procedure. In Kangaroo Lawrence for once builds bloodcurdling atmosphere of terror and anticipation in the chapter “Willie Struthers and Kangaroo” where Kangaroo threatens Somers (the Lawrence figure) with dire consequences for refusing his love. In the next chapter “Nightmare,” however, Lawrence is so overwhelmingly taken up by his own outrageous experiences in England during the First World War that he forgets everything about the novel in hand to launch a fierce tirade against his own country where the human body is subjected to desecration.
The form of Lady Chatter ley’s Lover suffers from being mechanical. Though it is largely based on the use of symbols and their interaction, the form is a little too neat and obtrusive because the symbolism is rather schematized. (Lawrence averred it was not so.) The mutually contrasting categories of this scheme of symbols, under which these symbols cohere, are life and death. Connie, Clifford, Mellors, and the wood have obvious enough referends.
The Rainbow and Women in Love, particularly the latter, do not lend themselves to such criticism. The Rainbow is in a sense a “historical” novel. But how different it is from, say, the novels of Scott! It is a long story involving three successive generations, but what it really endeavours to do is to bring out the inner history of the English psyche over about a hundred years. The cohering principle is provided by the most important of human relations-man-woman relationship or, in other words, marriage and self-fulfilment through marriage. The three generations get telescoped into each other and the problems of man-woman adjustment of one serve implicitly as a comment on and a criticism of the others.
According to Daleski, the principle of structure in Women in Love is locative : there are five important mutually connected loci in the novel representing different modes and sections oflife. To Eliseo Vivas it is the use of what he calls the “constitutive symbol” that gives this novel a subtly satisfying structure. There vare other opinions, too. It may be noted that the structure of the novel is symbolic and analogical rather than causal-in the traditional Aristotelean sense. Water and the moon, for example, are important symbols which connect mutually divergent (apparently) episodes many of which do not seem to advance the action at all.
Lawrence’s Themes: His Moral Fervour:
While Lawrence hasn’t much to show in way of formal mastery as a novelist, his achievement in the field of the novel is still tremendous. His uncompromising moral preoccupation which finds expression in all his Oeuvre along with his diagnostic insight and perspicacity/makes his novels the singular achievement that they are. The theme of all his novels is both perennial and curiously modern : the achievement of fulfilment through the right cultivation of human relationships. It may be said that all novels, for whatever they are worth, are about human relationships; but Lawrence’s forte is to trace the ever-fluctuating curve of these relationships at a very profound level where human speech gets silenced and where mind-and will-controlled gestures and actions become sheer irrelevancies. The problem that Lawrence poses in all his novels is: how can a man achieve fulfilment (presuming that there is no God) in the context of the modern, mechanical, industrial civilization which is moving fast towards pure materialism and massinsanity? And because man-woman relationship is the most important of all relationships, much of Lawrence’s exploratory imagination is employed on the depiction of this particular relationship.
It is interesting to note that from The Rainbow onwards Lawrence’s novels constitute a single series which comprehensively deals with the totality of human relationships, though the emphasis continues to fall on the most important of these relationships. The Rainbow and Women in Love (which were originally conceived as one novel) explore chiefly the man-woman relationship. But at places in Women in Love, and particularly at the end, Lawrence hints at the insufficiency of this relationship alone for man’s fulfilment and suggests in addition man-man relationship as contributory to such fulfilment. The next novel, Aaron’s Rod, takes up the thread and deals chiefly with man-man relationship. Kangaroo, while dealing with man-man relationship, also takes up the political question, that is, how best to develop a policy involving a number of people in society. The Plumed Serpent finally considers man’s relationship with “God”-to Lawrence not a “personal” authority administering the universe from above but a pantheistic power in which a man participates while fulfilling his nature. Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s last novel, reverts to and brings into sharp focus Lawrence’s primary concern, namely, man-woman relationship.
Lawrence and Sex:
As Lawrence concentrated on man-woman relationship, it was inevitable for him to deal intimately with the theme of sex. The boldness of his treatment of this forbidden theme involved him in legal battles against what he called the “censor-morons” and the “canaile.” The Rainbow was proscribed and Lady Chatterley, with its frank use of the four-letter words and its open (though often poetic) descriptions of the sex act, raised a storm of indignation which Lawrence had -ather hopefully anticipated. Irt his-essays Pornography and Obscenity and Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence tried earnestly to defend his last novel and his use of the obscene words. His plea was hat he had used these words to give the phallic reality its true phallic language. He reverenced sex as a mystery beyond the interference of the mind and as the prime mode of achieving the fruition of one’s nature. Lawrence was against the pornographer who tended to cheapen and to commercialize sex as also the puritan who shied away from its very mention as from a taboo. Lawrence, however, could not cut much ice with the people, and, ironically Lady Chatterley has become a collector’s piece for everybody fond of “porno.” Lawrence‘s conviction that there is religious mystery in sex relationship is deemed nothing more than an eccentricity today, but Lawrence is also a novelist of tomorrow.
The Stream-Of-Consciousness Novel
Introduction:
The stream-of-consciousness technique is a revolutionary modern technique which has tried to transform the art of narrative almost in every respect. The first user of this technique was the French novelist Edouard Dujardin in a short novel published in 1888. The phrase “stream of consciousness,” however, was coined by the psychologist William James who wrote Principles of Psychology (1890).
By calling consciousness a stream, James meant that human consciousness is something fluid; it is an unbroken current of feelings, impressions, fantasies, half-formed thoughts, and awareness in general. Consciousness is a continuity like time, and it is independent of time. At any given instant of time, an individual’s consciousness may not be entirely concerned with the present. He may be living through an experience of the past or fantasizing about the future. The clock of subjective consciousness is independent of the mechanical clock-time. The stream-of-consciousness novelist tries to render the consciousness of his characters in its fullness (not excluding even its pre-verbal component) without the least authorial intervention and without ordering it into logical, lucid, and even grammatical narrative. Works like Joyce’s Ulysses are indeed revolutionary in the history of English fiction.
Psychological and Philosophical Background:
We have mentioned above the name of William James who coined the phrase “stream of consciousness.” However, the “stream-of-consciousness” novelists are much indebted to Freud, Jung, and Bergson than to James. Freud’s theories of sexuality, unconscious, repression, and dreams, Jung’s of collective unconsciousness and myth and archetypes; and Bergson’s of the subjectivity and relativity of time created around 1914 what Allen calls the right “environment of ideas” which nurtured the stream-of-consciousness novelists like Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Dorothy Richardson who made use of the technique in her series of twelve novels. Pilgrimage, is not an outstanding name for the reason that her psychology is largely pre-Freudian.
New Concept of Reality:
The stream-of-consciousness is a revolutionary technique because of the fact that it is based on a revolutionary concept of reality. It is a common practice to contrast Modernism with Realism, as if the moderns were not concerned with reality. They were in fact as much concerned with reality as any of their predecessors. But their concept of reality was very different, as different as their technique of presenting it. For them reality is not something superficial, mechanical, rational, or purely “‘scientific,” but something deeper, mythic, alogical, or even irrational. In herjustly famous essay ‘The Modem Novel” Virginia Woolf enunciates the new concept of reality as also the new concerns of tjhe modern psychological novelists like Joyce and herself even as she rejects the theory and practice of her Edwardian predecessors like Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett. She denounces these novelists as “materialists” who delight in the “solidity of the fabric” without venturing to come to grips with the inward reality of life. They make a lot of fuss about creating lifelike characters, all dressed and buttoned up. They make’a fetish of coherence, causality, probability, plot-making, and the other paraphernalia of novel-making. As for herself, she will render life as it is1 really experienced by human beings. And what is life? Virginia Woolf says: “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning, of consciousness to the end let us record the atoms as they all upon- the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”
Advantages of Using the Stream-of-Consciousness Technique:
The stream-of-consciousness technique bestows at least three major advantages on the novelist. They are:-
(1) Freedom from the constraints of time.
(2) Complete objectivity.
(3) Greater inwardness and profundity.
Let us elaborate.
Let us elaborate.
(1) The stream of consciousness is, according to Daiches, “a means of escape from the tyranny of the time dimension.” “Traditionalists,” as Ward puts it, “keep their eyes upon the calendar and the clock.” But because human consciousness is not a respecter of time, and the job of the psychological novelist is to render this, time loses its tyrannic rigidity. The stream of consciousness differs from a stream of water insofar as it can course both up and down at various speeds subverting all chronological barriers. Thus one peciality of the stream-of-consciousness novelists is their daring experiments with time. Joyce in Ulysses (the locus classicus of the stream-of-consciousness novel) has confined the outward action to a single day, June 16,1994. Whatever is experienced by the consciousness of the three central
characters on that day is rendered by Joyce in one thousand pages or so. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf too confines the outer plot to one day in 1923. However, her handling of time is so subtle that reminiscence, reverie, and even hallucination form a delicate and very suggestive pattern which offers the reader not only an insight into the deep recesses of Mrs Dalloway’s mind but also into the mystery and meaning of life itself. Virginia Woolf s To The Lighthouse comprises
three parts. The first and third cover the outer action of a day each, while the middle one, which is the shortest of all, covers a period often years. Such free handling of time is an obvious advantage.
characters on that day is rendered by Joyce in one thousand pages or so. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf too confines the outer plot to one day in 1923. However, her handling of time is so subtle that reminiscence, reverie, and even hallucination form a delicate and very suggestive pattern which offers the reader not only an insight into the deep recesses of Mrs Dalloway’s mind but also into the mystery and meaning of life itself. Virginia Woolf s To The Lighthouse comprises
three parts. The first and third cover the outer action of a day each, while the middle one, which is the shortest of all, covers a period often years. Such free handling of time is an obvious advantage.
(2) As Beach puts it, the progress of twentieth-century novel is marked by the disappearance of the author. In other words, narrative has approached the condition of drama. The stream-of-consciousness novelist tries to render the flow of the consciousness of a character as directly and as objectively as possible—without any comment. He tries to remain out of the picture. The true literary artist, in Joyce’s words, “like the God of creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, aring his fingernails.”
(3) Thirdly, by shifting interest from the experiential reality to theexperiencing self, the stream-of-consciousness novelist can achieve aninwardness which is difficult to achieve by conventional means. VirginiaWoolf has characterized Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay by lluminatingthe recesses of their psyche with an amazing authenticity. And Joyce’s Bloom holds the distinction of being the fictional hero most thoroughly characterized in world literature. It is not only the depth and breadth of characterization which distinguish the work of stream-of-consciousness novelists but also their penetrating insights into the dilemmas of existence. What they exactly convey or imply is often debatable no doubt, but it could have been put across by no other means.
Disadvantages:-
There are mainly two disadvantages or objections to the stream-of-consciousness technique:
(1) Disregard of material/outer reality.
(2) Lack of form and pattern and even meaning.
Let us elaborate.
(1) The stream-of-consciousness novelist concentrates only on that miniscule component of reality which impinges on the consciousness of his characters. He shows no interest in events, even earth-shaking ones, which do not do so. Thus he fails to render life in its wholeness.
(2) Liberating themselves from the tyranny of time, the stream- of-consciousness novelists expose themselves to the danger of chaos and formlessness. Adherence to chronology is a restraint but it also ensures clarity of contours. Ulysses is indeed a tour deforce. But for many readers it is still an enormous puzzle. The last fifty or so pages of the novel render the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom without any mark of punctuation: Joyce’s next novel Finnegans Wake is still
more difficult to follow. To the uninitiated it looks like a mass of words, several of which are not to be found in any dictionary.
more difficult to follow. To the uninitiated it looks like a mass of words, several of which are not to be found in any dictionary.
The Principal Users of This Technique:-
The first British user of the technique was Dorothy Richardson whose long novel, Pilgrimage, comprised twelve volumes, the first of which, Pointed Roofs, appeared in 1915. Pilgrimage is a semi-autobiographical work which presents the life of the heroine Miriam Henderson. Dorothy Richardson disliked the term “stream of consciousness.” She was not a bold experimenter like Woolf or Joyce. Her pre-Freudian psychology is another limiting factor.
James Joyce is the greatest of the stream-of-consciousness novelists. His first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is quite autobiographical but at the same time objective. It tells us how the hero, Stephen Dedalus, found his vocation as an artist after experimenting with religion and politics. The next novel, Ulysses (1922), is a most complex and amazing feat. The protagonist, the middle-aged Irish Jew Leopold Bloom, is made analogous to Homer’s Odysseus and each of the eighteen episodes in the novel corresponds to one in the Odyssey. This extended analogy complicates and enriches the significance of Joyce’s novel. Joyce’s last novel, Finnegcms Wake, which took him seventeen years to write (as against seven taken by Ulysses) is indeed a hard nut to crack.
Virginia Woolf s novels are poetry novels. She excels in suggesting delicately the subtle nuances of feeling experienced by her female characters. Her sensibility is too refined to admit anything vulgar. Joyce baulks at nothing—not even at sexual indecency. But Woolf is very different. In fact a critic thinks that her major defect is her “dread of copulation.”
English Novel Since 1950
Introduction:
The years around the termination of World War II (1945) constitute something like a watershed in the history of the English novel. Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who were among the greatest of the Modernists, died in 1941. And it seemed that a great era had come to an end with them. Thereafter is a perceptible decline in the British novel. The post-Ulysses novel lacks, what Karl Calls, “the moral urgency of a Conrad, the verbal gifts and wit of a Joyce, the vitality and all-consuming obsession of a Lawrence.”
On the whole, there has been less of experiment and innovation in the post-1950 English novel and more and. more of parochialization and what is called “Little Englandism,” Lacking the force and originality of their great Modern predecessors, the English novelists of recent years sometimes look like feeble imitators of the giants gone by. “One common characteristic” of most novelists of recent years is, in Karl’s words, “their inability to deepen and develop with time. When Elizabeth Bovven, for example, experiments in The Heat of the Day, she does little more than what Virginia Woolf had tried in Mrs Dalloway fifteen years earlier. When Joyce Gary in The Horse’sMouth and elsewhere tampers with language, he barely scrapes the surface of what Joyce attempted with words. When Durrell talks about love in his Alexandria Quartet, he points towards but hardly reaches Lawrence’s examination of love. When Graham Green uses moral issues without a religious frame of reference, he is dealing with a subject that many nineteenth-century novelists wrote about extensively and with greater range.”
Provincialization:
Karl’s wholesale deprecation of the recent and contemporary English novelists seems to ignore the work of some genuine and bold experimenters and innovators like Beckett, Fowles, B.S. Johnson, and Golding who have made solid contributions to both the range and technique of the novel. We shall consider these novelists later. Here let us point out a feature of recent British novel—its growing provincialism and tendency to sever international links. Interestingly, while the novel in other countries—such as France, America. Germany, and even India to some extent—is becoming more international, the novel in England is becoming parochial and provincial. Earlier English novelist were much more catholic than their descendents. Take Lawrence for example—the most English of English novelists. And yet look at his range and the breadth of his mind. He has written novels set in please about Mexico. Australia, and Italy. The growing narrow English outlook is well represented by Kingsley Amis in his novel with the suggestive title I Like It Here (1958) which in,the words of Bradbury and Palmer “deveoted itself to mocking the experimental and expatriate tradition in the novel, blamed on Henry James, and celebrating the common-sensical realist. English virtues of Henry Fielding, while also indicating how much better England was than anywhere fancy abroad.” Most new English novelists were not much bothered by the dilemmas of Existentialism and Absurdism, nor were they keen to experiment with new fictional forms. Karl trenchantly remarks : “The novel in Joyce’s hands was internationalized; in Gary’s and Waugh’s Anglicized.”
Tradition and Innovation:
We can well understand the implications of such paradoxes as Bergonzi’s that “the novel” is no longer “novel” and Karl’s that “contemporary English novel is not modern.” The lack of “novelty” and “modernity” makes the recent English novel look like a poor cousin of the French or the American novel in which bold experimentation with both theme and technique is more a rule than an exception. However, it will be extremely unjust to say that all English novelistsof recent years are sedate and spunkless traditionalists harking back to their Victorian compatriots. Beckett. Fowles, and Johnson, for instance, are as bold innovators as any in the Continent or in America, and even novelists like Golding. Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark, who accept tradition in some respects, yet open up new horizons in some others. Only time will decide the comparative merit of contemporary novelists— like it has already done that of their predecessors like Lawrence, Forster, Joyce. Woolf. and Conrad. So we have to wait for time to do the sifting and say what is grain and what is chaff.
Let us now consider the work of the experimentalists and the traditionalists one by one. (It must be understood, however, that these two group-names are only relative terms and not absolute like, say, “sheep” and “goats.” A sheep cannot be a goat at the same time, but a novelist who is largely a traditionalist can also be an experimentalist and vice verse. Further, as the number of practitioners of the craft is unmanageably large, we shall have to limit ourselves to just a handful ofthem).
The Experimentalists and Innovators:
Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is indeed among the most daring of recent novelists. According to Andrew Piasecki “Beckett is one of the most singular and original writers to appear in English, or possibly in France, since 1945.” A friend and associate of the Irish expatriate James Joyce, he was greatly influenced by him as also by the French novelist Marcel Proust. His fascination for words and his use of the stream-of-consciousness technique are strongly suggestive of the influence of Joyce. Beckett is better known as a dramatist than as a novelist: his play Waiting for Godot is a modern classic, a locus classicus of Modernist Absurd drama. His vision as a novelist too is strongly laced with Absurdism and even Nihilism. In his 1950s trilogy comprising Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable aged outcasts tell their own stories with grimness and black humour which underline the futility of their pastime. Beckett’s novels, in the words of Andrew Roberts, “represent the ultimate breakdown of the classic realist novel.”
John Fowles (1926- ) carries on Beckett’s exploration of the possibilities and nature of narrative and fictionality. His distinguished work The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is of the nature of a pastiche combining passages in the nineteenth-century novelistic style, quotations from sociological reports, frequent authorial comments, passages from Darwin, Marx, Arnold, and Tennyson, and so on. In the course of the “novel” (if it may be called one), the author himself becomes a character. And last but not least, Fowles offers two alternative endings, inviting the reader to choose the one he likes.
B. S. Johnson (1933-73) went farther than Fowles in making daring experiments with the form of the novel. His overwhelming interest in the nature of narrative and fictionality together with his penchant for Postmodernist techniques makes him an avant-garde author of recent times. He is credited with the attempt to write a “non-fictional novel” in See the Old Lady Decently (1979) by making use of authentic documents and photographs. The Unfortunates (1969) is another path-breaker. It comprises twenty-seven loose-leaf sections, twenty-five of which may be read in any order, almost like the five sections of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Johnson’s intention seems to highlight the arbitrariness of the structure of fictionality as also the radical circularity of the mind.
The two directions in which English experimental novel of recent years has progressed are, according to Andrew Roberts, “documentary objectivity” and “perspectivism.” The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) of Lawrence Durrell (1912-90) represents both these directions. The intricate relationships within a community are intimated by a variety of narratives with different perspectives.
The Traditionalists:
Retaining the socio-moral moves of the novel and its classic form, the traditionalists, too, made substantial contribution to the English novel. Let us consider a few of them.
First, we have the group Of novelists like Angus Wilson (1913-91), and C.P. Snow (1905-80) who carried on the tradition of social analysis, criticism, and satire of their predecessors like Huxley and Waugh. Wilson’s characters have a vast variety and all of them are rooted in the soil. Snow is known for his series of eleven novels Strangers and Brothers (1940-70). He is good at delineating the conflict between personal ambition and social conscience. He was a great champion of science and technology as against literature. This made him the bete noire of writers like F. R. Leavis.
The 1950s also saw the emergence of the so-called “angry young men” who employed both drama and the novel for ventilating their criticism of English middle-class values and institutions. In the 1950s middle-class respectable values were getting eroded by a large number of disaffected youth who were jobless and were becoming angry with almost everything time-honoured—morality, religion, parental authority, social stratification, and so on. The “angry young men” include novelists like Alan Sillitoe (1928- ), John Braine( 1922- ), John Wain (1925-), Stan Barstow( 1928- ), and David Storey (1933- ).
Moral Philosophers:
Finally, there is the important group of novelists like Graham Greene (1904-91), William Golding (1911-93), Iris Murdoch (1919-), and Muriel Spark (1918- ) who are partly experimentalists and partly traditionalists, but whose main contribution is their deep metaphysical exploration of the foundations of morality and the nature of good and evil both in human and non-human contexts. Greene does not merely depict right and wrong but fundamental good and evil. Instead of Original Sin he seems to believe in Original Charity as the chief characteristic of man. Golding has shown impressive technical virtuosity as well as metaphysical profundity in his novels. While novels like Pincher Martin (which attempts to delineate the post-mortem. experiences of the protagonist) manifest the fonner, others like Lord of the Flies amply show the latter. The novels of Iris Murdoch, who is a philosopher as well as a novelist, have considerable variety. She addresses herself to the existential issues of identity and freedom as also ethical problems. Andrew Roberts observes about her: “Although her works are novels of ideas, they combine this with exciting and sometimes macabre plots, elements of the grotesque and supernatural and touches of social comedy.” Muriel Spark appropriately started her career as a novelist with The Comforters (1957) which, in her own words, is “a novel about writing a novel.” Her later fiction combines the comic and the sinister. Her novellas such as The Driver’s Seat (1970) are extremely precise and concise in form and style and still some others show the influence of Golding.
Modern Poetic Drama
Introduction:
Like the rest of the literature of the twentieth century, drama is marked by excessive realism-almost naturalism. In the early years of the century English drama under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy was too realistic and too involved in contemporary social problems to be tolerant of any poetry-least of all, poetic expression. Prose-witty, serious, pathetic, or ironical-was the accepted medium of drama.
But that does not mean that poetic drama was dead beyond hope. At least a few early twentieth-century dramatists like Stephen Philips did write poetic drama. In the later years of the century, thanks to Yeats, Abercrombie, Bottomley, and most of all, T. S. Eliot, poetic drama came to its own once again and could thereafter compete with prose drama without needing any special excuses. In fact, in the twenties of our century there is a clear evidence of a marked reaction against the naturalistic drama of the earlier years; there is, conversely what Allardyce Nicoll in British Drama calls, “a renascence of imagination.” The ascendency of imagination and the challenge to realism took in the field of drama three divergent directions as below:
(i) The establishment of poetic drama.
(ii) The coming into its own of the modernistic Continental School.
(iii) The arrival of the historical dramatists.
Stephen Phillips (1864-1915):
But even before this “renascence of imagination” we find some dramatists writing verse drama in the early years of the twentieth century. Of these dramatist Stephen Phillips deserves the first mention. Paolo and Francesco was his greatest achievement, though he wrote some other verse plays also, like Herod, Ulysses, The Sin of David, and Nero. His work is not original, for unlike T. S. Eliot, he does not try to subject an old traditional style to the needs of the modern age. “He,” says Nicoll, “looks backward always and can think of nothing save the continuance of the wornout nineteenth century styles based on uncritical admiration of the Elizabethans.” Now that is just not sufficient. Phillips is a fossilized Elizabethan. In spite of their flamboyantly melodramatic elements and wooden characters, his plays dazzled nis contemporaries, at least for a time, but could not succeed in creating an appreciable public demand for poetic drama.
His Followers:
Nor did he found a tradition, though some dramatists like Rudolf Besier and J. E. Flecker tended somewhat in his direction. Besier’s The virgin Goddess is written much in the same style as Phillips’. Flecker’s Hassan (published in 1922 and staged in 1923) is different in the sense that it is related to the Middle East. It does capture much of the gorgeous splendour of the East with its hedonistic lustfulness and grotesque sadism, but its characterisation and incidents (mostly of the melodramatic kind) are quite crude and incapable of interesting the more discerning of readers and spectators. There is some really splendid poetry also no doubt, but, to quote Allardyce Nicoll, it is “a mere patchwork of heterogeneous elements without harmony and without form.” Edward Knoblock’s Kismet (1912) is another Eastern phantasmagoria.
John Masefield (1878-1967):
John Masefield was not affected by the Middle East, but he was influenced a great deal-especially in his later dramatic work-by the Japanese drama which was introduced in English for the first time in 1913. In the beginning Masefield tried his hand at domestic and historical themes, in such plays as The Tragedy of Nan, the prose play The Tragedy ofPompey the Great, and Philip the King (written in heroic couplets)-. The Japanese influence is perceptible first in The Faithful (1915). His later plays mostly on religious and historical themes, show an appreciable evidence of the Japanese influence. Good Friday(1915), A King’s Daughter (1923), The Trial of’ Jesus (1925), Tristran and Isolt (1927), and The Coming of Christ (1928) are his important later plays. In them he skilfully combines prose and verse, and, following the precedent of the ancient classical stage, introduces choral interludes. His language is well-wrought but lucid. His Christianity is quite conventional and as such unacceptable to the moderns. But there is a childlike quality in his conception and presentation which cannot go unobserved and uncommended.
John Drinkwater (1882-1937):
John Drinkwater is best known for his prose historical drama Abraham Lincoln (1918) which secured for him international fame. But here we are concerned with his poetic dramas which came only before 1918 and which include The Storm (1915), The God of Quiet (1916), and X=O: A Night of the Trojan War (1917). These plays were not as popular as Abraham Lincoln and even his other historical dramas like Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell, but they helped to promote and preserve the vogue of poetic play. The Storm is indeed very effective and puts one in mind of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. A young woman is waiting fearfully for her husband who has been overtaken by a furious storm. Her mind, torn between hope and fear, comes to a settlement with the bringing in of the dead body of her husband. The play is meditative rather than expressive of action. The storm in the soul of the young woman going to be bereaved is given more importance than the physical storm raging outside her cottage. Her tragedy which she takes with an agonized silence is really pathetic and heart-writing. X-O attempts a smart exposure of the evils of war. Even the most expensive war yields no profit in the end: it comes to zero. Drinkwater has presented in the play an imaginary episode during the course of the Trojan War. The chief characters of the play are four—two Trojan friends and two Greek friends. At night one of the Trojans leaves his friend behind to kill some Greek straggler, and, likewise one of the Greeks goes to ambush some unwary Trojan. The Greek and the Trojan left behind happen to become the victims. It is discovered by the Greek and the Trojan assasins when they come back from their respective errands. Drinkwater, aware as he was of the tragedy of war, was not yet a pacifist-as his Abraham Lincoln shows. Lincoln turned to war when things went out of hand, though he did so with a deep spiritual agony.
Yeats and the Irish Movement:
The Irish Movement contributed a lot to English drama, both prose and verse. The leaders of the Irish Movement were W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Synge. Their followers were many and included some very talented writers. Synge wrote plays in a poetic language all his own. but it was prose not verse. Hence he will not detain us here.
Yeats was a poet of considerable powers. His poetic plays posed a serious challenge to the products of the realistic prose school. They were poetic not only in form but spirit also. They were full of rich symbolism, mystic esotericism. and delicate refinements which characterise much of his poetry. Yeats “deprecated the conversion of the theatre into the lecture-platform and the pulpit by realistic playwrights.” His was, say Moody and Lovett, “the first dramatic verse since Jacobean days that was really related to human impulse and expression and was not a mere decoration; he took the new Anglo-Irish poetry, with its tendency towards rhetoric and its gleams of racial imaginativeness, and he gave it an aesthetic form that was to be the greatest influence on the next generation of Irish writers.” The Countess Cathleen (which came towards the end of the nineteenth century), The Land of Heart’s Desire, The King’s Threshold, On Baile’s Strand, and Deirdre are his chief plays. For sheer poetry and emotional effectiveness The Countess Cathleen occupies the most prominent place. It is the story of a Christ-like countess who offers her own soul for hell in return for the release of many others. She is a benevolent Faustus. On finding her dead even the unsophisticated peasants express themselves poetically:
A Peasant. She was the great white lily of the world. A Peasant. She was more beautiful than pale stars. An Old Peasant Woman. The little plant I love is broken
in two.
The grief of Aleel, the Countess’s lover, finds a Shakesperean expression. He breaks the Countess’s mirror and exclaims:
I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
And left you but a ball of passionate dust.
And you proud earth and plumy sea, fade out!
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left only amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils.
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
And left you but a ball of passionate dust.
And you proud earth and plumy sea, fade out!
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left only amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils.
Yeats was a dramatist of visions and symbols which were to him
Forms more real than living men;
Nurslings of immortality.
Nurslings of immortality.
“I had unshakable conviction”, he once remarked, “arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates would open as they did for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg.” The “gates” might not have opened wide for Yeats, but at least some wickets did.
Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938):
Abercrombie’s verse plays, like Deborah (1913), The Adder (1913), The Endofthe World(1914), Staircase (1920), The Deserter (1922), and Phoenix (1923), struck a note of departure from the fanciful and symbolical plays of Yeats. Abercrombie had nothing to do with the land of fairies or mysticism. He was a poet, no doubt, but he was also a realist. He took upon himself the task of adapting the blank verse of the Elizabethan age to the contingencies of the modern times. Refering to Abercrombie’s work, Moody and Lovett maintain: “fundamentally, Abercrombie endeavoured to bring his poetry into close contact with reality. He was not another singer from fairyland as was Yeats: he deliberately departed from the Elizabethan tradition which kept so many writers of the past in its thraldom. Consciously he sought to find a form of blank verse expression which might adequately convey to modern spectators or readers the immediate emotions of our times in terms of poetry. The powerful resonance of his verse, with its peculiar welding of highly imaginative language and common expressions presents a notable contribution to dramatic form.” Abercrombie’s plays are poor in characterisation and stage effects. Moreover, there is a sizable proportion of narrative which does not fit well into the dramatic framework. Anyway, Abercrombie scored an advance upon the unthinking Elizabethanism of Stephen Philips by showing a much greater awareness of contemporary taste and conditions.
Dr. Gordon Bottomley:
Whereas Abercrombie tried to poetise ordinary speech and thus combine poetry with realism, Dr. Gordon Bottojnley endeavoured to ake an altogether new start. In his search for a new poetic medium he did not turn to the Elizabethans or their Victorian imitators, but the No drama of Japan and the classical drama of Greece. In his youth Bottomley was an enthusiastic admirer of D. G. Rossetti in whom he found, to quote himself,
The lost Italian vision, the passionate
Vitality of art more rich than life,
More real than the day s reality.
Vitality of art more rich than life,
More real than the day s reality.
Later, however, his enthusiasm for aestheticism dwindled considerably. His plays can be roughly divided into two groups as follows:
(i) The earlier group; and
(ii) the lyric, choral plays.
What attracts our attention in the plays of the earlier group is the solidity of Bottomley’s characterisation and his pleasing inventiveness. These plays include some with Shakespearean themes-such as King Lear’s Wife and Gruach-which are extremely interesting. Gruach tries to show the background of Lady Macbeth and succeeds in convincing us psychologically.
In the choral plays Bottomley further removed dramatic dialogue from common speech. His experiments are quite interesting even though hey could not excite much emulation.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):
T. S. Eliot has been the greatest shaping force in the literature of the twentieth century-in poetry, criticism, and drama. Long before he came forward with a poetic play^of his own, he had started defending poetic drama. In The Possibility of Poetic Drama, The Need for Poetic Drama, Aims of Poetic Drama, and Poetry and Drama he strongly advocated the cause of poetic drama. At one point, comparing prose and verse as the media of drama, he conveyed his belief that “poetry is the natural and complete medium of drama, that the prose play is a kind of abstraction capable of giving you only a part of what the theatre can give, and that the verse play is capable of something much more intense and exciting.”
But all this verbal pleading would have been of little avail if Eliot had not, with his own practice, proved the potentialities of poetic drama in the modern age. He wrote some seven poetic plays which are:
Sweeney Agonistes
The Rock
Murder in the Cathedral
The Family Reunion
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk
The Elder Statesman
The Rock
Murder in the Cathedral
The Family Reunion
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk
The Elder Statesman
Of all of them Murder in the Cathedral is the most outstanding. Bamber Gascoigne observes in Twentieth Century Drama: “It is the highest tribute to a poetic drama to say, as one can of Murder in the Cathedral, that it is both intensely dramatic and inconceivable in prose.” Eliot’s plays are quite complex (like his poetry), but they are satisfying in their poetry and the evocation of the desired moods by a wonderful handling of the verse medium.
Others:
W. H. Auden in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood wrote some good poetic plays-TTze Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of, F6, and Frontier. Miss Dorothy Sayers in The Zeal of Thy House and The Devil to Pay followed T. S. Eliot’s lead in handling religious subject-matter. Stephen Spender with The Trial of a Judge came out with a powerful poetic play depicting the fate of Liberals and Socialists in the Nazi Germany of Hitler. This play, as Nicoll points out, “despite its brilliance in execution, exhibits a burning emotion so consuming as to destroy that simple structure from which a stage play must be built.” Christopher Fry in his poetic plays imported some mystical suggestions and philosophical speculations. For this very purpose he preferred verse to prose. His verse is quite suggestive but is sometimes marred by a little immaturity and incomprehensibility. Consider an instance showing both his excellence and weakness:
The world is an arrow
Or larksong, shot from the earth’s bow and falling
In a stillborn sunrise.
Or larksong, shot from the earth’s bow and falling
In a stillborn sunrise.
The Postmodernist English drama after 1956 (Second World War)
Introduction: The Importance of 1956:
The death of G.B. Shaw in 1950 created a big vacuum in the world of the British theatre which none of the practising dramatists could adequately fill. Eliot, Priestley, and Coward had already done their best work and no new promise was in sight. However, the years 1955 and 1956 changed the scenario altogether. In 1955, Beckett’s epoch-making Waiting for Godot was staged in London.
This crucial development was closely followed by two more in 1956. The first was the signal success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger when it was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre. The second was the first visit to London of Brecht’s company, the Berliner Ensemble. Waiting for Godot was Beckett’s pioneering attempt at the Theatre of the absurd in England, a revolutionary movement which had Already gained much momentum in Europe thanks to the work of the French dramatists Camus and lonesco and their Continental followers. Osborne’s famous play gave expression to the disaffected youth of the post-war period called “angry young men.” And Brecht’s troupe laid the foundation of the “epic theatre” which found quite a few adherents among the English playwrights of that period, especially of a Marxian leaning. Both Absurdism and epic theatre were against the idea of dramatic naturalism or illusionism; but drama of the angry young men of the fifties, being primarily a drama of protest against contemporary social set-up, was inclined to be more naturalistic though only up to a certain extent.
How to Group the Playwrights of Recent Years ?:
Engfish playwrights of the post-1950 period are too numerous and too individualistic to lend themselves to neat categorization in a few groups. The two obvious ways to attempt any categorization are first, from the point of view of technique, and, second, from that of theme and intention. But there is a troublesome problem-a playwright with a radical social manifesto may use a docile, conventional technique, while another using revolutionary techniques may turn out to be a mealy-mouthed reformer or even a status quoist. However, for the sake of convenience (and only for this reason) we may arrange the post-1950 English playwrights in the following two categories:
1. Social protestors, generally influenced by Brecht, but not always: They can be further split into the following three subgroups:
(a) “Angries”ofthe!950s
(b) Those who were for social change, but of a non-radical kind.
(c) Radical leftists, revolutionists, and anarchists.
(2) Technical innovators influenced by the theatre of the absurd. Let us consider these groups/subgroups one by one.
Angry Young Men:
This term is loosely applied to both the dramatists and novelists of the 1950 who vociferously protested against the prevalent social mores and institutions. The mood of the “angries” was effectively epitomized by George Osborne in his pioneering effort Look Back in Anger. Osborne was followed by authors like John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe. Osborne’s protagonist Jimmy Porter is a young University graduate living with his wife Alison (who is ironing clothes most of the time) in a one-room flat. Most of the time Jimmy is wittily attacking established institutions and respectable notions of propriety. Jimmy has been hailed as the first non-hero of modern drama. To us, forty years after his appearance, Jimmy, with all his colourful rhetoric and incisive criticism, looks lik&a bilious loudmouth, but in his day he was said “to represent,” in the words of Gareth Lloyd Evans, “a postwar generation in his anger, petulance, dissatisfaction, infirmity of purpose, railing, complaining.” Both Osborne and Jimmy became something like cult figures representing the temper of their time. Of the rest of Osborne’s plays, the best by far is The Entertainer (1957). The “angries” other than Osborne, who have been named above, are of far less importance.
Non-Radical Social Protestors:
This “group” comprises John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, Shelagh Delaney, Robert Bolt, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckboum, and Peter Shaffer. Most of them have a leftist leaning and several of them show the influence of Brecht. As regards technique, they generally abide by the demands of naturalism but at times use devices like symbolism, interior monologue, and even those normally associated with the theatre of the absurd. Their drama is almost overtly purposive and of contemporary relevance. Unlike the iconoclastic rhetoric of the “angry young men,” their zeal and purpose have clearly defined targets.
John Arden shows the influence of Brecht in his vigorous dialogue and his dramatic use of lyrics. Like shaw he wrote the drama of ideas with a social purpose. Comparing Arden and Shaw, Andrew Piasecki observes: “No dramatist in England since Shaw had used the theatre for such thorough exploration of political and social ideas,but whereas Shaw made the ideas central to his dramas and the characters merely instrumental to them, Arden made his characters central ” Arden’s best-known play is Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) wherein he tries to balance pacificism and violent revolution. It is a thought-provoking play which tries to temper revolutionary zeal with a reminder about the unlimited destructive potentiality of having a recourse to the gun. Wesker is a campaigner for mutual understanding and sympathy cutting across class barriers. The other playwrights in this group have also tried their hand at tackling social problems and narrow attitudes but have mostly stopped short of the Marxian concepts of class struggle and economic exploitation.
Radical Leftists, Revolutionists, and Anarchists:
Their scalpee has a definite ideological curve and it goes deeper into the diseased flesh than that of the mild protestors mentioned above. This group comprises Edward Bond, Joe Orton, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, and David Hare. All these playwrights have a violent anti-establishment attitude which in the case of Orton takes the shape of sheer anarchism. As would be expected, they often violate censor laws and even the unwritten laws of decency. For example, Bond’s early play Saved (1965) was heavily censored because of its candid sex scenes and the scene in which a child is stoned to death. His Early Marriage (1968) was banned outright because it depicted Queen Victoria as a lesbian. Orton was a sheer anarchist. This is shown both by his ideological bent and the chaotic nature of his plots which at times look like lurid farces. Sex and institutional corruption are his favourite when only thirty-four. Griffiths is a Socialist but now writes mostly for T. V. As Christopher Innes has so well put it, “The landmarks in contemporary English drama have been more like landmines, shattering conventional expectations, with a whole new configuration of subjects and themes emerging on the stage each time after the dust of public outrage settled/” Innes identifies some of such “landmarks-landmines” as Osborne’s Look Back, Bond’s Saved, and Breton’s The Romans in Britain. What the first did to the fifties and the second to the sixties was done by the third to the eighties. Edgar and Hare use eloquent haracters and emotionally charged and tense situations. They use the theatre for subversion of order and authority at various levels. Both of them are wedded to the idea of a socialist theatre.
Theatre of the Absurd:
Finally we have to consider the technical innovators like Beckett and Harold Pinter who brought foreign influences to bear on English drama-influences which transformed its very being. These influences were chiefly derived from the theatre of the absurd which originated from France.
“Theatre of the Absurd” is the term used by Martin Esslin to describe the “New Theatre” of the 1950s started by the Rumanian-born French playwright lonesco with the staging of his play The Bald Prima Donna in Paris in 1950. The original French version of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was staged three years later while the English version was put up on a London stage in 1955. lonesco and Beckett were hailed in France and England as pioneers of the new revolutionary drama which was later, in 1961, termed by Esslin the “Theatre of the Absurd.” The two other French practitioners of this kind of drama were Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov. In England Harold Pinter and N.F. Simpson adopted some features of absurd drama.
Theatre of the absurd was based on the philosophy of Existentialism of Camus and Sartre according to which the universe and an individual’s life in it are too chaotic and too irrational to be reduced to a comprehensible system. The absurd arises from the tension between man’s keenness to understand the universe and the refusal of the recalcitrant universe to be understood. Despair is a natural concomitant of the absurd. However gloomy absurdism may be, it yet has a bracing effect on man who must face existence, however bleak and meaningless, without any reassuring props of religion or evasive philosophy. Theatre of the absurd tries to mirror the chaos and incomprehensibility of existence. Plot is dismissed because it is based on causality, characters are mostly ordinary people who do not understand themselves or one another, and whatever they do is arbitrary and unpredictable and incomprehensible to themselves and to the audience. Yet like an abstract painting, a good absurdist play has a pattern of images, motifs, and emphases which affects the reader or spectator like poetry.
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot proved a landmark in the history of English drama. He followed it up with a few more plays the best known of which is Endgame. Pinter is the most notable practitioner of absurd drama after Beckett. In his plays he specializes in creating suggestions of an unforeseeable menance which terrifies the protagonists who long for security. This menace is, of course, the fear of death or “nothingness” which is generally represented as the circumambient darkness waiting to enter through a door into the safe haven of a room or a house in order to engulf the protagonist. The vogue of absurd drama lasted for about a decade from 1955 but its influence can be found in the work of several latter-day playwrights as well.
The Drama and Theater of The Absurd
Introduction:
“The theatre of the absurd” was a derived from Camus’ philosophy of the absurd and popularized by Martin Esslin’s book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961). Esslin applied the term to the work of mainly four French playwrights which appeared on the stage in Paris in the early 1950s starting with lonesco’s The Bald Prima Donna (1950). The other three playwrights included by Esslin were Beckett, Adamov,and Genet. This kind of drama remained in ascendence till the early 1960s. The theatre of the absurd came to England with the staging in London of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955, the French version of which had already been staged in Paris a couple of years earlier.
The Philosophic Basis of Absurd Drama:
The theatre of the absurd envisaged a radical departure from all kinds of conventional drama. It stood for total revolution rather than a few cosmetic changes. It was for a new content and a new form. The content was largely derived from the philosophical though of Camus and Sartre, which may be called Absurdism and Existentialism respectively.. As regards dramatic technique, the new kind of drama was to be what lonesco, its first exponent, described as “anti-play” or “anti-theatre” which ould discard all conventional notions of plot, characterization, dialogue, setting, etc. dating from the practice of the ancient Greek playwrights and the dramatic theory of Aristotle. The Theatre of the Absurd, in the words of Claude Schumacher, “overturned twenty-five centuries of tradition by rejecting all rules and by facing the chaos head-on.”
Camus and Sartre:
The chaos of existence as conceptualized by Camus and Sartre-is the basis of absurd drama. According to these philosophers the universe and man’s experience in it are meaningless. All attempts by the human mind to understand the world are futile. All philosophical systems and religions which claim that they can enable man to make sense of the world are delusive and useless. The absurd is defined by Camus as the “tension” which arises from man’s determination to discover order and purpose in a world which firmly refuses to show either. This definition of the absurd is to be found in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a cruel king condemned by the gods forever to roll a huge stone up a hill in Hades, only to have it roll down the hill just before reaching the top. Camus suggests that whatever a man does in this world is as futile and meaningless as Sisyphus’ eternal labour. Camus’ Absurdism looks like a philosophy of defeat and despair; however, there is something bracing and valuable in being freed from illusions to face “the chaos head-on.”
The Technical Aspect of Absurd Drama:
Camus was the first Absurdist and he wrote several plays which propagated this new philosophy. But his own plays do not belong to the theatre of the absurd. It is so because he mostly uses the conventional dramatic form and technique which enable him to convey this Absurdist vision lucidly and effectively. The world may be chaotic and meaningless but a play which tries to convey this truth should not be chaotic and meaningless itself. Chaos cannot be conveyed through chaos but through an ordered form. But the theatre of the absurd thought otherwise. Very correctly lonesco called his first play The BaldPrima Donna as “anti-play” and his kind of theatre “anti-theatre,” suggesting thereby a wholesale subversion of the conventional dramaturgy. Sartre emphasizes what he calls “the three essential refusals” of the new dramatists. These are: “the refusal of psychology, the refusal of plot, and the refusal of all realism.”
The “refusal of psychology” means that characters should not be consistent or fully conceived with a clear past and a fairly predictable future. Claude Schumacher observes in this context: “Characters in contemporary plays are often parodic, grotesque, incomplete, self-contradictory. They do not understand who they are, they do not understand the world around them, they are baffled by all the events that occur while they are on the stage.”
The “refusal of plot” removes what Aristotle considered the most important of the six elements of tragedy. The theatre of the absurd is drama of inaction-a contradiction in terms because “dran,” the Greek root of “drama,” means “action.” Inaction is the action of such drama. Like Sisyphus, characters in this drama do nothing meaningful or well-motivated. Whatever incidents are there do not make up a sensible pattern, not to speak of a coherent plot. Like life, an absurd play is meaningless. lonesco wrote apropos of his play TTze Chairs: “Since I am unable to understand the world, how could I understand my own play ? I hope someone would explain it to me.” The plot of this play is absurd to the last degree. A ninety-five years old lighthouse keeper and his wife invite people so that the old man may deliver his “message” before retiring. The invitees arrive but the chairs remain vacant. The old man asks the “Orator,” whom he has hired for the purpose, to deliver his message on his behalf and then jumps into the sea along with his wife. The “Orator” is dumb and mute and can only make incoherent sounds. Equipped so sorrily, he delivers the message to vacant chairs! Even meaninglessness has a meaning. The meaning of this play, like that of most absurd plays, is the impossibility of communication and yet its necessity. Consider Beckett’s definition of art as: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”
The “refusal of realism” has two implications. First, that naturalism has become obsolete; and, second, that, to quote Schumacher, “an artistic creation must create its own reality… often fantastic, grotesque, oneiric; the action takes place in non-defined locations, within surrealist, distorted, subjective, dream-like settings; characters behave arbitrarily, without motivation—They are prone to parody themselves or one another. The dialogue follows its own logic and has recourse to interior monologues, streams of consciousness, rhythmic repetitions, flat contradictions, sudden ruptures, logorrhoea interpersed with long aphasia-like silences.”
The British Practitioners: Samuel Beckett (1906—89):
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter in England and Edward Albee in America are the chief playwrights associated with the Theatre of the Absurd in English. Let us consider the work of the two British playwrights.
Beckett has been one of the boldest and most effective innovators in the fields of drama and novel in the twentieth century. An Irish expatriate settled in France like James Joyce, he wrote both in French and in English. His play Waiting for Godot is the best example of the theatre of the absurd. The vision of life conveyed by his plays is sombre and bleak and yet grotesquely funny.
Waiting for Godot has already become what Esslin describes as “a contemporary classic.” It is a locus classicus of theatre of the absurd. The two Acts of the play have similarity with a little variation. The play opens with two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for one Mr. Godot (God?) with whom they have an appointment. However, it is doubtful if they really have such an appointment and if any time and place have been fixed for the meeting. It is also uncertain if their names are Vladimer and Estragon and not Mr. Albert and Catullus. The two remain talking as if to while away time in both the Acts. In each Act they meet another pair of characters, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is fat and rich while Lucky is weak and poor and looks like Pozzo’s slave who drives him with a whip. At the end of each Act a boy brings the message that Godot will come tomorrow. In the second Act Pozzo goes blind and Lucky, who has been talking volubly about science and philosophy, goes dumb. The futile wait for God represents the human predicament. The whole play is like an abstract painting very difficult to decipher.
Beckett’s other plays are also thought-provoking and built around the themes of identity and existence in a meaningless world which has both fantastic and disgusting aspects. Endgame represents two elderly characters, who are senile and repulsive, placed in dustbins throughout, and yet musing about the time of their honeymoon when they cycled together. In Krapp ‘s Last Tape, Krapp, now very old, listens to the tape of his own voice prepared in his youthful days. In Not the audience is made to see only a mouth trying to give expression to reminiscences. What is evident is that Beckett’s characters are mostly isolated individuals each living in his own world, enclosed and encapsuled, unable to communicate with others.
Harold Pinter (1930):
Pinter shows the influence of Beckett and theatre of the absurd in his earlier plays like The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1958), and The Caretaker (1960). His later plays are, however, more realistic, straightforward, or politically purposive to be exemplars of absurd drama. His latest plays like One for the Road(\9S5) and Mountain Language (1988) are, in Schumacher’s words, “straightforward political statements, the first dealing with state torture and the second with genocide.”
Pinter is specially good at creating suggestions of an unnamable and unpredictable calamity which terrifies the protagonists who long for security and certainty. The calamity is represented as lurking in the circumambient darkness while security and certainty are represented by a well-lit room or house. Pinter’s first play The Room represents an old woman living in a small, warm room in a big, dark, and mysterious house which terrifies her all the time. Her fears come true when a bl ind black man comes to take her “home.” In The Birthday Party Stanley the hero is similarly led away from his rented lodging, by a Jew and an Irishman, into the darkness outside.
Others:
The only other British playwright who shows traces of the absurd is N.F. Simpson (1919— ). Much of what Simpson has written is in grotesquely farcical mode. His best-known play is One Way Pendulum (1959), a bizarre fantasy having elements of the absurd.
The Problem Play in English Literature
Introduction:
The problem play (also called “thesis play,” “discussion play,” and “the comedy of ideas”) is a comparatively recent form of drama. It originated in nineteenth-century France but was effectively practised and popularized by the Norwegian playwright Ibsen. It was introduced into England by Henry Arthur Jones and A. W. Pinero towards the end of the nineteenth century. G. B. Shaw and Galsworthy took the problem play to its height in the twentieth century. H. Granvi lie-Barker was the last notable practitioner of this dramatic type. Thus the problem play flourished in England in the period between the last years of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth.
What Is a Problem Play?
As its very name indicates, a problem play is a drama built around a specific problem. The problem is generally of a sociological nature: for example, prostitution, inadequate housing, unemployment, labour unrest, and so on. At times, however, a problem play may rise above the immediate context of a problem to grapple with larger ideological or even metaphysical and universal issues. If in Mrs. Warren’s Profession Shaw takes on the “profession” of prostitution and its economics in a laissez faire society, in Man and Superman his chief concern is not with a contemporary sociological problem but with the concept of “Life Force”. Acceptance of this concept and working in accordance with.it are the Shavian panacea for all sociological ills and problems.
The Element of Propaganda:
The problem play is sometimes called “the propaganda play,” for the obvious reason that its intent is overtly didactic and propagandist. The writer of the problem play is not a pure aesthete, a dispassionate creator of beautiful artifacts for their own sake. He is not like Henry James’s “God of creation” who remains out of His creation indifferently “paring his finger nails.”‘ Ibsen, Shaw, and Galsworthy have written such plays to direct public attention to social evils and wrong attitudes. And, what is more, a problem play is not something merely diagnostic but also something therapeutic; in other words, it not only spells out the ills but also prescribes uie-fernedy. Shaw scoffed at the slogan “art for art’s sake.” He said that for the sake of art he would not undertake the labour of writing even one sentence, not to speak of a whole play.
Technique : the Prominence of Discussion:
Abrams observes: “One subtype of the problem play is the discussion play, in which the social issue is not incorporate into a plot, but expounded in the dramatic give and take of a sustained debate among the characters.” For example, in Shaw’s Getting Married‘the story is reduced to the m inimum. Act 111 of Man and Superman shows no action, only a long debate. Debates, however lively and witty, cannot take the place of action in drama (The very word “drama” is from the Greek root “dran” which means “action.”) Shaw was brilliant debater and public speaker and most of the dialogues in his plays—both for and against the issue in hand—are witty and often very absorbing, but they do not constitute real dramatic action. Ifor Evans observes: “The brilliance of his dialogue sometimes leads him beyond the bounds of dramatic propriety so that the stage becomes a hustings.” In the plays of a lesser artist like Galsworthy this defect is all the more serious because his debates and lengthy dialogues are without any sparkle or engaging vitality.
The Beginners—Jones and Pinero:
The problem play was introduced into England towards the end of the nineteenth century by Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and Sir A. W. Pinero (1855-1934). These playwrights were influenced by Ibsen but in dramatic talent were not even a patch on him. Ifor Evans justly remarks : ‘The descent from Ibsen to Henry Arthur Jones and Sir A. \V. Pinero is a steep one.”
Jones’s problem plays like Saints and Sinners and Mrs Dane’s Defence are, in Evans’ words, “the work of a cobbler who has never mastered his tools.” Pinero’s most popular play is The Second Mrs Tanqueray which deals with the marriage of “a woman with a past.” A. C. Ward observes: “Pinero did something towards transporting to the English stage the husk of Ibsen; but the substance of Ibsen’s message provoked in England an outburst of rage that only a Bernard Shaw could face with self-possession.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950):
And indeed Shaw had courage and self-possession almost in the same measure as intellectual incisiveness and wit. With all his amazing originality he was highly indebted to Ibsen. In fact his adulatory book on Ibsen The Quintessence oflbsenism (1891) was published a year before the appearance of his own first play Widowers’ Houses the first of the long series of problem plays written by him over the length of more than forty years.
Ibsen’s influence operated on Shaw in the following two ways :
First, it made him determined to use unhesitatingly his dramatic art in the service of his society in particular and mankind in general. He was fond of comparing himself to Moliere, the seventeenth-century French dramatist with a keen talent for satire. What Swift said about his own technique can as well be said about Shaw’s:
my method of reforming
Is uy laughter, not by storming
Is uy laughter, not by storming
Shaw’s problem plays amply show his consuming moral intensity. He has been well called by Ward “the Knight of the Burning Pencil, a crusader whose appointed lifework was the endeavour to restore colour and light and joy to England’s once green and pleasant land.”
Secondly, Shaw learned to question the customary beliefs of society and the accepted bases .of public institutions. He tries to analyse and subvert such time-honoured concepts as patriotism, the supposed romance of war and chivalry, the self-assumed wisdom and realism of John Bull as against the alleged volatility and sentimentality of the irish, and so on. His campaign is for rebuilding social institutions and creating a new climate of ideas on the basis of rationality and unsentimental realism. Witness his own words: “Progress is not achieved by panicstricken rushes back and forward between one folly and another, but by sifting all movements and adding what survives the sifting to the fabric of our morality.
In his problem plays. Shaw does this kind of sifting to separate the husk from the grain. Almost in every such play his intention seems to be to stand popular beliefs upside down. Truth is generally ugly or inconvenient and therefore Shaw’s wit and raillery have the function of making it acceptable.
Shaw’s first play—a problem play—was, in the words of A. C. Ward, “adramatic essay in ‘social realism’ long before the term had been coined in Russia or elsewhere. Built around the theme of slum-landlordism, Widowers ‘Houses represents the cruel oppression of the poor slum-dwellers by big financier-landlords. Mrs Warren’s Profession is about the evil of prostitution. Because of its theme—which was at that time considered outrageous—it was banned by the censor of the plays and was denounced by the public. The play is about the economics of prostitution as a profession in a free society. Its other aspects are ironically made subsidiary. Mrs Warren is far from being a romantic courtesan. She is an ordinary, successful harlot. The Apple Carl is yet another thought-provoking comedy. Shaw defends the institution of monarchy which is represented in the play by King Magnus whose sagacious tactics upset the “apple cart” of democratic leaders. But the real villian in the play is neither monarcy nor democracy but capitalism (humorously represented by Breakages and Company) which obstructs all social and economic progress. Arms and the Man is a brilliant satire on the popular notions about love and war. Bluntschli, the Shavian spokesman in the play, is an unforgettable, no-nonsense mercenary who is fired not by any notions of chivalry and patriotism, but by a matter-of-fact love of money and good living. He is not a coward, only a down-to-earth realist who carries more chocolate than ammunition to the battle-field. His function in the play is to cure the beautiful Raina of her romantic ideas and make her see Sergius, her dream soldier and fiance, in his true colours as a pompous humbug and worthless philanderer.
There is a group of Shaw’s plays (such as Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, and Back to Methusaleh) which treat his favourite concept of “Life Force'” and being so are not strictly problem plays but plays of ideas. By Life Force he means, in Ward’s words, “a power continually seeking to work in the hearts of men and endeavouring to impel them towards a better and fuller life.” Shaw wavers between the mystic and the Christian in defining Life Force. He describes it alternatively as “the Holy Ghost denuded of personality” and “the will of God.”
Shaw’s best play Saint Joan is not really a problem play though it addresses the problem of definiing the real character and significance of “The Maid”
John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Galsworthy as a writer of problem plays is hugely inferior to Slum. ! fe lacks his wit, humour, and intellectual sharpness. Il is said that Shaw’s plays are deficient in emotion. Galsworthy’s are .not, but emotion in his works is hardly different from cheap and mushy sentiment. His best-known play Strife represents the conflict between striking workers and factory-owners, neither of them ready to surrender to the other. Ultimately it is the death of the wife of the leader of the strikers which brings about a reconciliation. The Skin Game dramatizes the struggle between old aristocrats and the newly rich industrialists. Justice and The Silver Box represent the evils of law, which treats some as more equal than others, as also the irrationality of consigning people to solitary imprisonment.
Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946):
Granville-Barker was the last notable practitioner of the problem play. His plays include The Manying of Ann Leete, Waste (which was censored), The Madras House, and The Voysey Inheritance. The last named, to quote Ward, “was his finest achievements, and one of the best and richest plays of modern times.”
Twentieth- Century English Literary Criticism
Introduction:
The present century has witnessed-and is witnessing a terrific deluge of literary criticism. Scarcely a day passes when quite a sheaf of critical writings does not make its appearance. To impose some sort of pattern on this tremendous mass of writing-even for the sake of discussion-is a desperate attempt.
Our ears are all too familiar with the bewildering cacophony of critical noises which are apt to overset our wits and defy all comprehension. Scarcely does a “school” of literary criticism appear when it finds another ready to measure swords with it. “Literary criticism” says Douglas Bush, “which for over two thousand years seemed to be a light-house radiating a fairly steady beam, has in recent times become a tower of Babel, or, to change the metaphor, a darkling plain where arrogant armies clash by night.” However, on the side of credit, it has to be admitted that some of modern literary criticism is indeed rarely illuminating, and does things undreamt of our ancestors who were unpossessed of the impressive (even though partly dubious) stock-in-trade of the average critic of today.
Some General Observations:
Some general observations about twentieth-century English literary criticism may now be profitably made, without, of course, losing sight of the fact that “it pertinaciously defies all neat lebelling or wholesale generalisation.
(i) First, we have to take cognizance of America which has contributed to the critical output of the present century more than even Britain. Many critical schools-such as those of the New Critics and the Chicago Critics-and influential critics-such as T. S. Eliot-have sprung from the American soil. Many scholars of literature-notably some British professors-are rightly sceptical of the quality of much of American critical output, but credit cannot but be given to a good quantity of it.
(ii) Secondly, we have to take into account, to use Stanley E. Hyman’s words in The Armed Vision “the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insight into literature.” The sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology, semantics, linguists, and even mathematics, and such techniques as that of psychoanalysis have been increasingly pressed into the service of literary criticism by many practitioners of this craft in the twentieth century, with sometimes dazzling, and as often, baffling, results.
(iii) Thirdly, we are all too well aware of the complexity of modern iiterary-criticism-particularly of the American brand. Simplicity has “simply” gone out of fashion. Even in creative literature, complexity has come to be reverenced and even relished. There is substance in Donald Davie’s complaint. “The one thing,” says he, “that really distinguishes the critical pedantry of today is the high price set upon complexity…the more complex the work the better. The many works of wit, distinguished for massive simplicity, directness of approach, and unaffected lucidity of language are undervalued-or complexity is put upon them.”
Chief Trends and Schools:
The literary critics of the twentieth century are, mostly, independent thinkers, yet they can be roughly classified into so many “schools” or groups, some critics, however, stick to, more or less, Victorian modes of criticism, and therefore, may not be called “modern” or “modernistic,” and, consequently, ought not detain us here. This, category of critics includes Saintsbury, Chesterton, and many others like them, who are always entertaining and, now and then, illuminating but they seem unaware of the winds of change blowing across our age, necessitating a radical readjustment of values and attitudes. Let us confine our attention here to the truly “modern” schools and critics of our century.
The Psychological School:
The group of literary critics who study literature in the light of psychology is an influential one. They owe much to Freud, the greatest psychologist of modern times. His psychoanalytic techniques have been adopted by a number of critics for exploring the problems of literature. A psychoanalytic critic attempts to perform the task of piercing the social mask of the writer and studying the unconscious urges, frustrations, and motives behind his literary work. Even the characters in a literary work may be subjected to psychoanalysis. Thus Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones treats the famous prince of Denmark in A Psychoanalytic Study of Hamlet (1922). Miss Maud Bodkin, Herbert Read, Lionel Trilling, and Kenneth Burke-among others-have made use of Freudian psychoanalytic techniques in their discussion of literature and literary problems-often with interesting and edifying results.
However, the most notable of all psychological critics is I. A. Richards-both in stature and influence. “Richards,” says George Watson, “is simply the most influential theorist of the century, as Eliot s the most influential of descriptive critics.” Richards’ works-The Foundations of Aesthetics (1921), The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929)-have considerably contributed to, and influenced, modern literary criticism. Richards rejected the view that poetry has only the aesthetic value. He averred that it has psychologically therapeutic value, though no cognitive importance. Further, he popularised the concept of “anonymity in literature” by directing the attention of the reader from the poet to his poetry. He struck a note of dissent with the strict Freudians who gave primary importance to the comprehension of the psychology of the poet. Thus he was instrumental in lessening the popularity of “biographical” and “historical” criticism which ruled the roost before the twentieth century, and promoting the techniques of close reading and verbal analysis adopted by the so-called New Critics years later. Watson says: “Richards claim to have pioneered Anglo American New Criticism of the thirties and forties is unassailable. He provided the theoretical foundations on which the technique of verbal analysis was built.”
The New Critics:
The New Criticism arose in England in the late twenties and spread to the United States in the years following the Second World War, to dominate academic criticism in the forties, and. partly, the fifties. John Crowe Ranson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and Cleanth Brooks are the most important New Critics. They discredited the historical and biographical background of a poem, to concentrate on the poem itself. “Their ideal programme”, says Irving Howe in Modern Literary Criticism, “posited-and in practice they sometimes achieved—a close and patient description of what the poem is.” Their neglect of the historicity of a work of literature was both a disadvantage as well as an advantage. Lionel Trilling asserts “that the literary work is ineluctably a historical fact, and what is more important, that its historicity is a fact in our aesthetic experience.” The New Critical methods were useful only while dealing with lyrical poetry which, as Trilling puts it, is “a genre in which the historical element, although of course, present, is less obtrusive than in the long poem, the novel and the drama”
A word here may be added about a brilliant but somewhat controversial critic-William Empson, once a student of I. A. Richards. Empson is not, strictly speaking, a New Critic; but in his technique of brilliant verbal analysis, he comes close to some New Critics. His major works are Seven Types of ‘Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), and The Structure of Complex Words (1951). The irst mentioned is the most important of all. With concrete analyses-many of them extremely brilliant and illuminating—he points out in this work the various shades and nuances of meaning the understanding of which is essential for the appreciation of the total poetic statement. Empson is often subtle, but sometimes looks too fussy and quibbling, and even “ambiguous.” We owe him the vogue of “difficult” poetry, for ambiguity is tacitly exalted by him as the test of the greatness of a poem. Objections to such a position have come from many quarters. Here is F. L. Lucas’: “In a recent work with the apocalyptic title, Seven Types of Ambiguity, it has been revealed to an admiring public that the more ways a poem can be misunderstood, the better it is.”
The Impressionistic and Romantic School:
The impressionistic critics are concerned with recording their personal impressions when they are in contact with a given work of art, “without attempting to generalize or draw inferences.” “Criticism,” says an impressionistic critic M. Jules Lemaitre, “whatever be its pretensions, can never go beyond defining the impression which, at a given moment is made on us by a work of art wherein the artist has himself recorded the impression he received from the world at a certain hour.” The impressionistic critics are impatient of all dogmas and processes of labelling and codification. Thus they are, in a sense, “romantic” in their attitude. The most important of impressionistic romantic critics is John Middleton Murry who waged for years in his journal, the Adelphi, a debate on behalf of what he called the “inner voice” and “romanticism” against the “classicism” of T. S. Eliot.
The Sociological Critics:
The twentieth century has also seen the emergence of a group of critics who emphasize the sociological context in the study of a work of literature or even art in general. Most of them are avowed Marxists, and their approach to literature, therefore, is propagandist and prejudiced. “They,” as Rene Wellek says in Theory ofLiteratwe, “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. 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 sociological approach (both Marxist and anti-Marxist) has many more adherents in America than England. Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender are some of the most mportant critics whose critical approach is markedly sociological The Marxian critic of today is Terry Eagleton.
The Moralists:
Now we come to a group of literary critics of the present century whom Watson classifies as “the moralists.” They include D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, even F. R. Leavis, and Murry-with some others of less importance. The moralists are occupied with the problem of discriminating between good and bad in literature. They lack, however, the certitude of Dr. Johnson and the past critics of his ilk. Watson says: “Modem moralism, by contrast, is more often agnostic, exploratory, and self-consciously elitist: its tone is not that of the common preacher anticipating assent: it is more often embittered and embattled.” D. H. Lawrence who in Leavis’ opinion, was the greatest literary critic of the present century, fought in his novels a savage battle against the taboos of society, civilisation, and Christianity. He brought something of the same fighting spirit to his critical works. The moralists are all fighters and disciple-makers, even when they find much difficulty in their way. They despise hoity-toity behaviour. Says Watson: “George Orwell, aggressively pouring his tea into his saucer in the B. B. C. canteen may be taken as the eternal model of the modern English moralist.” The influence of the moralists is, however, now on the wane, though what they (particularly D. H. Lawrence) had to say is of the same significance today as it was when it was said.
Eliot and Leavis:
T. S. Eliot has been the most influential of the American-born literary critics of the present century. In his critical works he has thrown out, to quote G. S. Fraser, “a number of suggestive or disturbing ideas-ideas often compressed into a single phrase-that have fertilized the thinking of other critics. Empson has wittily described him as a penetrating and inescapable influence, rather Hke an eastwind.” His views regarding tradition versus the individual talent, poetic drama, impersonality in poetry, the “dissociation of sensibility,” and a hundred other themes and problems have to be taken cognizance of by every literary commentator worth the name. Much of Eliot’s literary criticism is, indeed, an extension of his poetry work-shop, for it deals with the issues he has to tackle as a poet. However, it has proved to be of much wider significance. Such twentieth-century literary phenomena as the “revival” of Donne and Dryden and the devaluation of Milton, and such vogues as that of the placement of every writer and every writing with reference to a tradition, and that of the appreciation and admiration of “difficult” poetry issue mainly from T. S. Eliot. The New Critics also acknowledge their debt to Eliot.
F. R. Leavis is a controversial disciple of Eliot. He is to be acknowledged, however, as the most influential of the British-born literary critics of the present century. No doubt, he later quarrelled with even Eliot and rather spitefully affirmed that Lawrence was a better critic than he, but Eliot’s influence on him cannot be denied. Leavis is so influential that, to quote Watson, “there are probably few Departments of English in the Commonwealth which do not boast, or conceal, at least one disciple.” His disparagement of Milton and Shelley, and exaltation of Pope and Marvell have wrought a change in the critical thinking of today. Among the English novelists, he points out Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and Lawrence as the ones who make up “The Great Tradition.” Leavis is extremely adept at verbal analysis which, however, is not his usual, not to say the only, method. His approach is, fundamentally, that of a moralist who is carefully looking for reverence to life. G. S. Fraser says: “The ‘quality of life’ is what Leavis is primarily interested in and in literature as serving that, but he is a moralist who refuses to generalize.” Leavis’ energetic responsiveness, his penetrative analysis, and intellectual alacrity are his great assets, but his rigidness and pontifical self-aggrandisement cannot be defended. Among his disciples the most important are David Daiches and L. C. Knights (a really great critic in his own right), not to speak of the numerous band who wrote for Scrutiny.
As regards literary criticism, the scene today 1995) is a very confused one-one incapable of being reduced even to a semblance of order. We face a whole welter of literary theories and critical approaches. All of them make up a formidable body of literary aesthetics, but we have to wait long for their profitable application to actual literary works.
Influence of Karl Marx on Modern Literature
Introduction:
Marx and Freud have influenced life and literature in the twentieth century more deeply and extensively than the earlier great thinkers and scientists like Copernicus and Darwin influenced the life and literature in their own respective eras. Karl Marx (1818—83) and Sigmund Freud (1856—1939) had very different fields and orientations.
While Marx was basically a social philosopher, Freud began his career as a doctor specializing in the physiology of the nervous system and the treatment of such disorders as neurosis and hysteria. He soon became the founder of psychoanalysis and thereby one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. And as regards Marx, he started with the study of Hegelian dialectic at the university in Berlin and Bonn but soon gave a new direction to socio-political thought by publishing, along with Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). This makes him the “father of Communism.” Freud’s psychoanalytical theories and Marx’s Communism both proved revolutionary and highly impactful throughout the world.
Let us now consider the impact of Marx on twentieth-century English literature.
Marxian Thought and English Literature:
Marx’s philosophy is known as “dialectical materialism-.” No place is given by him to the soul or the spirit. According to him, religion is the opium of the masses which keeps them in a world of material reality. He adopted the Hegelian dialectic to give a materialist account of social formations. His concept to class conflict is a basic point. Conflicts arise from the desire to control the means of production. He attacked the laissez faire policy which allows the industrialists and capitalists to exploit the working class without let or hindrance. Marx was for Communism, i.e., the supremacy of the community of workers rather than of a few individuals in control of the entire wealth and its generating sources. The proletariat should rule a country jointly instead of a king or an elected parliament, which normally protects vested masses throughout the world. His teachings inspired the Russian Revolution and then the Chinese, not to speak of another dozen or more on smaller scales throughout the world.
Fourfold Influence:
So far as English literature is concerned, Marx’s impact manifests itself in four different ways:
(i) A greater concern for the poor exploited masses, without any overt projection of the Marxian ideology. Even non-Marxian writers in the twentieth century tend to give a much greater representation to the working class in their works. In the novels of Arnold Bennett, for example, we have mostly working-class heroes. And Lawrence’s proletarian hero sometimes walks away with an aristocratic lady.
(ii) Use of literature as a means of communistic propaganda. See, for example, the English Socialist theatre of today.
(iii) A tendency to subvert the conventional literary forms and techniques by condemning them as constructs of the bourgeoisie. Here the Marxians are on avant-garde ground.
(iv) A reaction against Marxian ideology which seems to encourage statism as against the concept of the sanctity and freedom of the individual and abject materialism as against spiritualism and “the higher values of llife.” Witness George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm.
Influence pa-Poetry:
Let us now consider the influence of Marx on English poetry, dirama, novel, and literary criticism of the twentieth century, in this order.
The impact of Marx is most clearly discernible in the work of Oxford poets of the 1930s, viz., W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. They were committed leftists the aim of whose poetry was the propagation of Communist ideology. Poetry in their hands become political action, a contribution to the proletaian struggle against the bourgeoisie the ruling elite. At least two of the four Oxford poets got actually involved in the Spanish Civil War.
Auden is now given the status of a major poet of the twentieth century. In the 1930s he was the voice of his generation. Linda Williams observes: “His verse is full of topical reference to the social and international crises of the time; it gives direct expression to the anxieties of the contemporary intelligentsia as perhaps no other writing has done.” Spender for some time remained a member of the Communist Party and as such supported the Republicans’ cause in the Spanish Civil War. His poetry is less overtly propagandist than that of Day-Lewis. MacNeice had Socialist leanings but was not a committed leftist.
Influence on Drama:
G.B. Shaw was a Fabian, a mild kind of Socialist, to start with. Several of his “problem plays” are built around the problems created by economic exploitation of one section of society by another. His first play Widowers’ Houses is about slum-landlordism. Mrs. Warren’s Profession is about the economics of prostitution as a profession in a laissez faire, exploitative society. And so on. Shaw had the passion of a debunker rather than of a rigid ideologue. Galsworthy in his plays like Strife, Justice, and The Silver Box tries to highlight class struggle, miscarriage of justice, irrationality of consigning criminals to solipitary imprisonment, and so on. In the 1950s several dramatists came under the influence of Brecht. The most important of them was Arden who used the theatre like Shaw for a thorough exploration of political and social ideas. Contemporary British theatre is dominated by Socialists like David Edgar and David Hare.
Influence on the Novel:
Of all the literary genres it is the novel that allows an author to represent life the most comprehensively-even more than he can in drama, because whereas drama only shows, the novel can both show and tell. That is why the novel all over the world has been the most eligible literary medium of propaganda. But, strangely, in England no Marxian novels worth the name have appeared in modern times; propagandists have used drama instead.
But if there have been practically no English novels based on Marxian theories like the materialistic basis of social formation and class struggle, there have been novels representing the life of the poor, exploited classes with all its unrelieved gloom. The two novelists who wrote such novels with some distinctiveness were George Gissing and George Moore. Gissing was influenced more by Schopenhauer than by Marx. Cazamian observes about him: “Bitterness sank to the core of his nature, and permeated all his fibres; it became the very food of his imagination Gissing describes the diseases of society without any hope of curing them. He believes neither in the philanthropy of the rich, nor in the revolt of the poor.” In his novel Demos, “the career of a plebeian agitator…teaches us the vanity of the socialist dream.”
George Moore, unlike Gissing, was a rare combination of an uncompromising realist and a refined aesthete. He tries to make beautiful artifacts out of the gloomy ugliness of life. Cazamian says: “George Moore reconciles the audacity of crude, brutal observation with the sensuous refinement of a voluptuous aesthete.
George Orwell’s well-known novels Animal Farm and 1984 are satires on Socialism and Stalinism. The former has the form of an allegorical beast fable. The latter came after World War II. According to Andrew Roberts, this novel is “a vision of a world “ruled by dictatorships of the Stalinist style, taken to an extreme in which private life and private thought are all but eradicated by surveillance, propaganda, and the systematic perversion of language.”
Influence on Literary Criticism:
Marxian thought has had a tremendous impact on literary criticism not only in Socialist countries, but the world over. Marx did not have a comprehensive theory of art and literature, but his fierce attack on bourgeois idealism have given new directions to literary criticism. To Marx literature was only part of the “superstructure” of which the “base” was formed by economic conditions and dispensation of a society. In its purity Marxian criticism tends to be simplistic if not severely blinkered. But it has its own insights to offer. The Marxian school has in its ranks such great critics as Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Gramsci, and Macherey, to name just a few. Several latter-day critics have tried to relate Marxism with Structuralism, psychoanalytic theories, and even Reconstruction, leading to new insights if not comprehensive systems. In England Raymond Williams (1921—88) has been the best-known Marxian critic. Among the practising critics in today’s England Terry Eagleton (1948— ) is by far the most eminent.
The Influence of Freud On English Literature
Introduction:
Now when the twentieth century is close to its end, we can say that the two seminal thinkers who have most influenced life and literature in this century are Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud-though the former had his birth and death in the nineteenth. Marx was primarily concerned with society, Freud with self. Marx was the father of communism-an ideology which has changed the face of half the world. Freud was the father of psychoanalysis which has revolutionized the science of psychology.
As human psychology is of vital importance in literary art, the significance of Freudian theorie’s- ;s obvious. Before proceeding further in our discussion of the impact of Freud on twentieth-century English literature let us pause to have a view of some of the basic postulates of Freud.
Freud’s Principles:
John Drakakis identifies three basic principles of Freud.
“The first is psychic determinism, the principle that all mental events, including dreams, fantasies, errors and neurotic symptoms have meaning.
The second is the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life, the unconscious being regarded as a dynamic force drawing on the energy of instinctual drives, and as the location of desires which are repressed because they are socially unacceptable or a threat to the ego.
“The third is a developmental view of human life, which stresses the importance of infantile experience and accounts for personality in terms of the progressive channelling of an undifferentiated energy or libido.”
Several well-known Freudian concepts such as infantile sexuality Oedipus complex, and art as neurosis as also the techniques of free association and dream analysis arise from the above-mentioned principles-.
Freud’s Impact More on Literary Criticism Than On Literature:
Though there is no area of literature which Freudian theories have left untouched, yet it must be admitted that they have influenced literary criticism (both theory and practice) much more than creative literature. In other words, Freud has helped us more to understand and appreciate the existing poems, novels, and plays than to write new ones. We now know Hamlet far better because of the work of Freudian psychoanalytic critics like Ernest Jones but no Freudian has ever written a better play than Hamlet A literary work is not an illustration of a theory, however correct and profound. As Herbert Read so well puts it, “the author who imagines that he can start from psychoanalysis and arrive at art is making a complete mistake. No literature, not even a novel, can arise out of a chematic understanding of the phenomena of life rt is itself a chematic construction; an order imposed on the chaos of life.”
Though perhaps no novels have been written to embody or illustrate Freudian theories yet there are quite a few novelists who have a good grasp of them, and this makes their works so much the better. Consider, for example, such works as The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner, The Outsider (1942) by Albert Camus, Catcher in the Rhye (1951) by Salinger, and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth.
Influence on Poetry and Drama:
The examples of Freudian novels quoted above are all American except one-which is French. It is significant that almost no English literary artist of note has written anything expressly Freudian. (We shall consider D.H. Lawrence’s Sons arid Lovers later.) However, till the sixties Freud was the ruling deity in literary circles in England too. An obviously hostile critic. A C. Ward, complains in his Twentieth-Centwy English Literature (1964): “‘Freudianism in all its imperfectly understood manifestations and speculations has become rooted in the very substance of much contemporary fiction, drama and verse. Whatever light psychiatry may throw upon mental problems…it has led to much disorder in imaginative literature as it has contributed to the disintegration of individual ersonality A new trade has imposed itself on the community and is ub-served by much modern literature that exploits abnormality.”
Abnormality, however, plays the second fiddle to sexuality in Freudian literary works. Under the impact of Freud sexuality, which had been a taboo, came to the force with all its neurotic and deviant components. The Victorians had treated the beast of sex with a hush-hush incommodiousness. Now the beast was very much “in.”
So far as English poetry and drama are concerned, the impact of Freud .is discernible only here and there. D.H. Lawrence’s poem Snake,’ which is avowedly a narration of a personal experience, is a Freudian (or Laurentian) acknowledegment of the potency of the sex instinct which is repressed by the ego into the dark layers of the unconscious from which it emerges now and then into the open (that is, consciousness), only to be forced to scurry back into its dark abode. The sex instinct is the snake in the poem. He is the “lord” of all creation and yet treated shabbily by civilized man. The major poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, also acknowledge the supremacy of the sex instinct but their predilection is to sublimate or overcome it. In The Waste Land- the greatest poem of the twentieth century- Eliot blames sex, or rather its degradation and commercialization, as both the cause and the symptom of the decay of Western civilization. Eliot’s poems like “The Love Song of Alfred J. PrufrocK” and The Waste Land are structured on the basis of free association and make use of the technique of interior monologue. Prufrock is evidently a victim of repression. His song remains unsung. As regards drama, Absurdists like Beckett and Pinter show a penchant for dramatizing the absurdity of existence as well as the interplay of subconscious drives. Explicit sexuality with an uninhibited use of four-letter words and violence characterize the work of the most important of contemporary English dramatists, Edward Bond (1934—). In Saved (1965) a baby is stoned to death, in Early Morning (1968) Queen Victoria is represented as a lesbian, and so on.
Influence on the Novel:
Freudian psychology has influenced English novel much more than poetry and drama. As a genre the novel has a greater scope for the representation of the network of diverse human relationships in their fullness. The novel, closest to being a “slice of life,” cart represent the subtle interplay of psychological forces which motivate the characters consciously or otherwise.
The first Freudian novel in English was D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) based largely on his own life-experience. It is an artistically transubstantiated “case history” of the young Lawrence ridden by Odeipus complex and mother-fixation. Interestingly, Lawrence was not aware of Freud’s theories when writing this novel, which is now treated as a locus classicus of Freudian fiction. In the novel Paul Morel (Lawrence) is the son of a robust and coarse coal-miner and an educated, sensitive, and possessive mother who is brutalized by her husband. Th« children-three sons, including Paul, and two daughters-make a “united front” against their father. After the death of his elder brother, Paul becomes a “mamma’s boy” and her surrogate husband. On growing to adulthood, mother-fixated as he is, he is unable to form satisfactory relationship with Miriam, the girl that he meets. After a long Platonic courtship, he breaks up with her, blaming her with being overly possessive and spiritual. In fact, the blame lies with him. For a brief while he goes steady with Clara who has quarreled with her husband, who reclaims her however. When Paul’s mother dies of a cancer, he contemplates suicide but then decides to live on.
Freud’s influence may also be seen on English psychological novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Stream-of-consciousness technique used by these novelists combines perceptions of everyday reality with reverie, dream, and fantasy. In Finnegans Wake Joyce plunges into the profundities of a dream-state which makes no sense to an ordinary reader. In Pincher Martin Golding captures the consciousness of the protagonist while it is flickering into extinction, and even after his death. And so on.
Influence on Literary Criticism:
There is virtually no practising literary critic today without good knowledge of Freud and post-Freudian thinkers like Lacan and feminist theorists. After Structuralism literary criticism has become more and more interdisciplinary. Disciplines like political science, sociology, psychology, economics, and even the experimental sciences tend to interpenetrate and become one at the apex building up a comprehensive interpretative system applicable to all knowledge. In a sense we are back to the good old pre-Baconian days. It is no wonder then that we have very few purely Freudian critics of literature-the like of Ernest Jones who psychoanalysed Hamlet and discovered his Oedipus complex which explained the enigmatic problem of delay. I.A. Richards and William Empson may be mentioned as other critics of note who have made some use of Freudian theories in their work. Good critics such as Edmund Wilson and the two named above “allow psychoanalysis,” in Prichard’s words, “to supplement but not supplant other bases of judgment.”
Freudian approaches to literary works are various, but chiefly ths following three:
(i) The author-oriented approach
(ii) The text-onented approach
(iii) The reader-oriented approach
The first two are much more popular than the third. The author-oriented approach (a new version of the old bio-critical approach of the English Men of Letters Series and even of Johnson’s Lives) collects the entire data of the author’s life for analysis and then reads the text as the “dream” (Freud) or “Phantasy” (Jung) of the author for further elucidation of his character. Thus from Baudelaire’s works Freudian critics have found traces of his unconscious resentment at the second marriage of his mother. Similarly Oedipal symptoms have been found in Kafka and incest fantasies in Emile Bonte’s Withering Heights. The text-oriented approach is more common, though not completely separable from the first one. Jones’s analysis of Hamlet is indeed remarkable, but his conjecture that Shakespeare ‘nimself was passing through a Hamlet-like phase is questionable.
The reader-oriented approach is notably practised by Richards-but is is not really Freudian. Richards shows no concern for the author at all. He values a poem if it can induce in the reader what he calls “synaesthesia”‘- a balance of related or conflicting impulses-which sives specifically aesthetic pleasure.
English essay and prominent essayists during the twentieth century
Introduction: Journalism and the Essay:
The best prose of the twentieth century has gone into the novel and drama. With the close of the nineteenth century the long great tradition of English prose stylists starting with Hooker and Bacon came to an end. Though the twentieth century can boast a very large number of competent prose writers from Lytton Strachey to Bertrand Russell and J.B. Priestley, yet none of them is comparable in stature with the old masters like Browne, Swift, Lamb, Carlyle, or Ruskin. Modern prose writers have hardly any style for they use language only functionally, not like prose-poets or orators.
Take almost any passage from the essays of Bacon or of Lamb and ask even a dull student to identify it and, a hundred to one, he will do so correctly. But modern’ prose writers write almost alike, with few personal whimsies and little individuality.
One important reason for this loss of style is the merger of the essayist with the journalist In this era of mass media a journalist may retain the individuality and independence of his mind but, when it comes to style, he has to accept the common norms of the written language for the sake of effective communication. Many of the notable essayists of the twentieth century have been editors of newspapers or journals and some of them journalists. This is significant. According to A.C. Ward, the enlistment of essayists by newspapers has had the following two effects:
1. First, it has raised the standard of journalistic prose.
2. And, second, it has compelled the essayists to accept a discipline which was quite irksome but useful insofar as it trained them to write regularly to fill a predetermined space in an organ. The periodical essay of Steele and Addison, which was born with the eighteenth century and died with it, had a new avatar, under widely different circumstances, in the twentieth.
The Prominent Essayists of the Century-G.K. Chesterton (1874— 1936):-
Chesterton was foremost among the English essayists of early years of the twentieth century. He was not an essayist but a phenomenon. Chestertonian wit is not less-known than Shavian wit. Chesterton and Barnard Shaw were very different ideologically and even physically. Shaw was an agnostic and a socialist whereas Chesterton was a Roman Catholic and a “Distributist” (i.e. one who was against state control of property and wanted it to be distributed equitably among deserving individuals). Shaw was very lean whereas Chesterton was very corpulent. It is said that once Chesterton taunted Shaw for his hollow looks, saying: “Mr Shaw, if some foreigner looked at you he would think there is a terrible famine in England.” Shaw retorted at once: “And if he looked at you he would also understand the cause of the famine.” For once Chesterton was crestfallen.
Chesterton was always ready to measure swords with whoever came his way. Basically he was a polemicist-vigorous and incisively witty. He started his career as a journalist writing weekly articles for newspapers. He made his mark with his contributions to the Daily News. As an essayist he has a tremendous range, and he has always something original and startling to say about everything. Witticisms, epigrams, satiric sallies and ingenious paradoxes are recurring features of his prose. As an example of paradox consider his remark about the French Revolution: “The greatest event in English history occurred outside England.” How odd, but how true! Chesterton’s predilection for paradox, however, can at time become as fatal a Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s weakness for puns. As Ward puts it, “verbal acrobatics became a pernicious habit” with him with the passage of time. Ward finds fault, for example, with Chesterton’s description of Thomas Hardy a “the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.” This is an example of what Ward calls Chesterton’s “verbal exhibitionism.” However, Chesterton’s writing happily abound in such sparkling examples of verbal wit as the following, which attacks Tolstoy’s pacificism:-
“In the pacifist mythology of Tolstoy and his followers St. George did not conquer the dragon; he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of milk.”
Hilaire Belloc (1870—1953):
Belloc was a very close friend and collaborator of Chesterton. Their mutual association was so strong that the two were jokingly named together “the Chesterbelloc”-as if they were a single but double-headed creature. The two subscribed to the same religion (Roman Catholicism) and the same political ideology (“Distributism.”) “The Chesterbelloc” fought a long battle with agnostic socialists like H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.
Belloc was an extremely versatile writer-essayist, novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. Now he is chiefly read for his books of light verse-A Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children. As an essayist he has a clear and lucid style laced with humour and charged with polemic energy. He hated to fake an emotion. This makes his essays sincere and, sometimes, moving. He prided himself for one quality-what he called the “sense of rhythm,” which is apparent especially in his longer sentences which seem to have been crafted like a piece of music without any overt effort. However, he lacks Chestertonian brilliance.
E.V. Lucas (1868—1938):
Lucas may be called the Charles Lamb of the twentieth century. His adoration of “the prince of English essayists” goaded him to write the authoritative Life of Charles Lamb (1905) and edit a definitive edition of the works and letters1 of Charles and Mary Lamb (1903-05). In addition he wrote essays, travel-books, books about paintings and several volumes of, what he called, “entertainments”-curious mixtures of the essay and the novel. He also worked with several newspapers before becoming assistant editor of Punch. Lucas’ essays and “entertainments” are full of common sense and humour of a kind often reminiscent of Lamb. But, as Ward observes, “there are profound dissimilarities between the two writers. The robust urbanity and sophistication of Lucas made him unlike Lamb Lucas’s essays and ‘entertainments’ are marked by fancy, literary artifice, common sense, and humour. Yet his humour, though in general kindly, is sometimes savage.”
A.G. Gardiner (1865-1946):
Gardiner, or “Alpha of the Plough,” was also a journalist as well an essayist of note. He was editor of the Daily News from 1902 to 1919, a paper to which Chesterton made regular contributions in his early career as an essayist. Gardiner has probably a better claim than Lucas to the mantle of Elia as he is closer to the peculiar temper of the great Romantic essayist. Gardiner could write on almost everything that came his way-umbrellas, pigs, pockets, beer, or porcelain. His prose is close to everyday language-clear and informal, genial and energetic. He avoids difficult words. In fact, he has written an essay “On Big Words” to justify his choice of simple and common diction. He distinguishes between what he calls “a fine use of words” and “the use of fine words,” and prefers the former to the latter.
Robert Lynd (1879—1949):
Yet another journalist-essayist, Lynd as “Y.Y.” wrote weekly essays for the New Statesman for a number of years. Like Chesterton he brooded over his articles in a Fleet Street cafe letting the grateful fumes of coffee kindle his imagination. His essays are marked by geniality, infectious humour, subjectivity, and an uncanny penchant for the right, telling phrase. Ward says about him: “He was a skilled phrase-maker and could describe a Cup Final [“The Battle of Footerloo”] with his eye on many things besides the game-or on everything except the game; and few funnier things have been written than ‘Eggs: An Easter Homily.”
Lynd was the last great personal essayist in the line of Lamb and Stevenson, for with the onset of World War II (1939-45) and the concomitant paper famine newspapers could not spare any space for light stuff. Thus the vogue of the personal essay came to an end with Lynd.
Max Beerbohm (1872—1956):
Beerbohm was a cartoonist and caricaturist as well as a prose writer. He became the dramatic critic of the Saturday Review when Shaw retired in 1898. He had a rare gift for parody. A Christmas Garland, his best-known work; consists of seventeen essays on the subject of Christmas, each of them parodying the style of a contemporary author—Conrad, Bennett, Shaw, and others. As an essayist he is relaxed and good-humoured. He is a good satirist as well. Ward describes him as “a philosophic jester bursting bubbles of snobbery and pretence with wit and irony and satire.” He holds a prominent place among essayists to the twentieth century because, to quote Ward, he was “completely original.”
Scientific Essayists—Bertrand Russell (1872—1970), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), and J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964):—
These writers either wrote essays on scientific subjects or else wrote scientifically (i.e. dispassionately and rationally) on issues concerning practical life. Russell was a notable philosopher and mathematician and a compaigner for rationalism. Huxley, who was a novelist as well, compaigned against mass culture and unreasonable opinions (like the one that the Taj is a very artistic building). Haldane, a geneticist wrote about difficult scientific subjects in a simple, lucid style. Infact the style of all scientific essayists is clear and purely functional— trough Huxley, unlike others, can be very witty and sarcastic.
Discuss the main features of Literary Post-Modernism
Introduction:
Modernism and Postmodernism:
Before trying to explain what literary postmodernism is or what the salient features of postmodernist literature are it is necessary to understand the basic significance of the following two sets of words:
(i) “Modern” and “Modernism”
(ii) “Postmodern” and “Postmodernism”
Of these four words the least easy to explain is “postmodern.” “Modern” means what is alive, prevalent, or available today. So “postmodern” is something that will come later, that is, in the future. In other words, nothing which has ever existed or is existing now can be “postmodern.” Real “Postmoderns” are, in Shelley’s phrase, in the womb of futurity.
“Postmodernism” is, however, a very different kettle of fish. Being “modern” does not necessarily imply being a “modernist.” “Modern,” as we have said, has a temporal signification, but “modernism” signifies a set of aesthetic tendencies associated chiefly with writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Pound who wrote around the 1920s in defiance of the decadent Victorian and Edwardian tradition replacing it with what is now called “High Modernism.” Like “modernism”, “postmodernism” was also something like a “movement,” but a far more amorphous one. It was not self consciously directed against “modernism” or against any other “ism.” More than a movement it was a newly developed mind-set which cut across national boundaries and cut across academic disciplines and aesthetic arts as also schools of criticism (such as the Freudian, Marxian, etc.). The amorphous nature of “post modernism” can be easily proved by citing the case of Samuel Beckett who twenty or thirty years ago was deemed a great “modernist” but is now hailed as a great “postmodernist.” Likewise, the theatre of the absurd (of which Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a locus dassicus) as a whole is deemed to be “postmodernist” for almost the same reason for which it was considered “modernist” earlier-its violation of categories and dismantling of dramaturgical conventions. Absurdist plays are the perennial delight of “post modern” deconstructionist critics.
The Timing:
When exactly postmodernism came into being is another difficult question. Formation of a mind-set across nations is a gradual process which cannot be dated precisely. There is bravado in awrence’s claim in Kangaroo that “the old world ended” in 1915. Virginia Woolf is equally daring in asserting that “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” The “world” or “human character” does not change so suddenly and so completely.
Roughly speaking, postmodernism may be related to what Drakakis calls “a transformation of European culture at the end of World War II. This war produced the death camps and the atomic bomb, and thus generated a new sense of man’s propensity to evil, of the destructive potential of scientific knowledge, and of the perils of political totalitarianism. The end of Empire and the post- war changes in the world economy and power-structure involved new relationships between Britain and other cultures.”
Non-recognition of Boundaries: Hybridism:
One important feature of postmodernism is its non-recognition of boundaries of all kinds. In life, cultural boundaries and hierarchies ensure order and discipline, and in the field of creative writing generic boundaries ensure decorum. Neither the modernists nor the postmodernists overly observed such boundaries, but there is a difference. Whereas the former willfully transgressed them (to achieve the required effects), the latter just do not recognize them at all. Joyce and Eliot devised new techniques for their fiction and poetry respectively, knowing fully well that they were reflecting or subverting the old ones. The postmodernist’ new technique consists in mixing up the old available ones. And not only techniques, they mix up disparate genres as well, producing works which carry the specific mark of postmodern hybridism. Let us consider a few examples of generic hybridism.
Since Plato, creative literature and literary criticism have been recognized as very different kinds of discourse not to be intermixed in a given work. Of course, there have been a few examples of a little departure from the rule-such as in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Swift’s The Battle of the Books, the former of which is more criticism than creation and the latter more creation than criticism, but either combines both discourses. As exemplars of postmodernist practice consider such works as Roland Barthes’ 577(1974) and Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1985)- “creative criticism” of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine and Flaubert’s life and works respectively. Both these works employ a medley of techniques in an unprecedented manner.
In Balzac’s novella Sarrasine is a sculptor in love with a castrated opera singer with a female name, taking him to be a woman. He discovers his real identity at their first meeting and ends up being killed. Barthes makes a very perceptive, line-by-line analysis of Balzac’s story and discovers that castration (with which Balzac plays around but never mentions) with all its symbolic suggestions of want, imperfection, incompleteness, loss of wholeness, deadness and so on is invariably present as a thematic positive. The real interest of S/Z lies in the numerous digressions, whimsical punctuation and capitalization and, what Barthes himself calls, “a number of fictive elements.”
If S/Z is nominally a critical work, Flaubert’s Parrot is, as nominally, a novel. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator, gives an account of his obsession with the French novelist both as man and fictionist. Much of the interest of Barnes’ book, like that of Barthes, lies in digressions of all sorts, such as a dictionary of the prevalent ideas about Flaubert, chronologies of good and bad incidents in his life and a collection of the animal metaphors used by him. Robert Ray observes: “Officially neither biography nor criticism, Flaubert’s Parrot achieves the effect of both: a knowledge effect enhanced by erudition’s passage through the novelesque.”
Literary Pastiche:
So far as literary works are concerned, postmodernist British literature has several examples to offer of works making deliberate use of a hodgepodge of techniques and/or several kinds of discourse. A fine example is Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1962) which deals with the African problem as also the problem of being a woman in a man’s world. The diaries of the protagonist Anna, who wants to be a “free woman” occupy a substantial part of the book. The novel, in Andrew Roberts’ words, “exemplifies the post-modernist experiment in Lessing’s work, in its use of multiple narratives and its concern with fiction and the reconstruction of the self.” Bolder than The Golden Notebook is John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)-a pastiche combining passages from Darwin, Marx, Arnold, and Tennyson, quotations from sociological reports, frequent authorial comments and narrative passages in the nineteenth-century novelistic style. Further, in the course of the novel Fowles himself becomes a character. And, last but not least, Fowles offers two alternative endings, inviting the reader to choose either.
B.S. Johnson has been an avant-garde postmodernist writer of recent times. His See the Old Lady Kindly (1979) is a “non-fictional novel” which makes a generous use of authentic documents and photographs. Another path-breaking novel, The Unfortunates (1969) comprises twenty-seven loose-leaf sections, twenty-five of which may be read in any order! Johnson’s intention is the familiar postmodernist one of highlighting the arbitrariness of the structure of fictionality and the radical circularity of the mind.
A Return to Representationalism and the Pleasure Principle:
This welter of postmodernist techniques or rather combination of techniques, genres, and discourses must not be allowed to overshadow a distinctive element of postmodernism-a return to representational ism and the pleasure principle which had been rejected by the modernists. Mellarme, Flaubert, Eliot, Pound etc. were against the vulgarization of art. They were for difficult literature inaccessible to the masses. When Mellarme’s publisher came to collect a poem, Mellarme said: “Wait till I add a little obscurity.” Mimetic or representational art, being easy to understand, is the common people’s cup of tea and a source of pleasure. Even Brecht, who had Marxian leaning, spoke like a modernist: “I am at an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance. I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed.” Later on, however, he made some concession to what he called “fun,” i.e., the pleasure principle.
Thus one movement of postmodernism is from elitist intellectuality and obscurity to enjoyable lucidity for mass consumption. Pop art of today is as postmodernist as complicated experiments with pastiche.
Postmodernist Literary Criticism:
The distinctive features of postmodernist criticism are much more easily identifiable than those of postmodernist literature. As the postmodernists are inclined to ignore the conventional boundaries, postmodernist criticism tends to be interdisciplinary. The purity of old critical approaches is now a thing of the past.
The centre field of critical activity today is occupied by structuralists and post structuralists. Structuralists (such as Saussure, the Russian formalists, Barthes, etc.) reject the idea that atext represents the author’s meaning or reflects a society. They treat it as an independent unit but a part of a structure comprising other texts as well. They have a propensity for linguistic analysis to arrive at the idea of the structure of the text which animates its parts. In short their search is not for an inherent meaning of the text but for the literary and cultural structures (which are outside it) which generate meaning. Poststructuralists focus their attention on the ways in which texts themselves undermine structures. The theory of the most eminent post structuralist Jacques Derrida is known as “deconstruction.” Derrida denies the existence of specific structures built around centres. According to him “there are only contexts without-any centre or absolute anchoring.” Thus a text has no meaning, only “play” of linguistic elements which keeps the hypothetical meaning defeated forever. A deconstructionist dismantles the text-and studies the “play” among its bits which subverts all meaning or keeps it perpetually deferred.
You have cited Linda Williams in your blog. I would like to use one of your quotes "His verse is full of topical reference to the social and international crises of the time; it gives direct expression to the anxieties of the contemporary intelligentsia as perhaps no other writing has done." in one my papers. Can you please provide the reference of this quote on sarfaraz.farooq@gmail.com if possible.
ReplyDelete