L. C. Knights, Explorations; Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century

L. C. Knights, Explorations; Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Chatto & Windus, London, 1958

If I were writing How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? to-day I should make far more allowance for the extraordinary variety of Shakespeare’s tragedies (a variety of course within the larger unity of the plays when taken together); and I should not, I hope, write as though there were only one ‘right’ approach to each and all of them. (Preface, xi)

The only part of the present book where radical revision might seem called for is my account of The Beast in the Jungle at the end of the essay on Henry James. Since I cannot omit this without sacrificing the rest of the essay, and since this in turn still seems to me to expose some strands of ‘the figure in the carpet’ of James’s work as a whole, these two or three pages are included with the rest. They may at least serve to commend the story to the attention of those who are interested in the subconscious factors lurking behind some of the work of that great writer. (xi)

…the assumption that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a great ‘creator of characters’. So extensive was his knowledge of the human heart (so runs the popular opinion) that he was able to project himself into the minds of an infinite variety of men and women and present them ‘real as life’ before us. Of course, he was a great poet as well, but the poetry is an added grace which gives to the atmosphere of the plays a touch of ‘magic’ and which provides us with the thrill of single memorable lines and lyric passages. / This assumption that it is the main business of a writer—other than the lyric poet—to create characters is not, of course, confined to criticism of Shakespeare, it long ago invaded criticism of the novel. [1] … It should be obvious that a criterion for the novel by which we should have to condemn Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and the bulk of the works of D. H. Lawrence does not need to be very seriously considered. (How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, 1-2)

The case is even better illustrated by Ellen Terry’s recently published Lectures on Shakespeare. … And how did the Boy in Henry V learn to speak French? ‘Robin’s French is quite fluent. Did he learn to speak the lingo from Prince Hal, or from Falstaff with the army?’ [Four Lectures on Shakespeare, p. 49] Ellen Terry of course does not represent critical Authority; the point is not that she could write as she did, but that the book was popular. Most of the reviewers were enthusiastic. (2)

And if we wish for higher authority we have only to turn to the book by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, On Reading Shakespeare. [2] … Here Shakespeare is praised because he provides ‘the illusion of reality’, … because he creates… ‘Those inhabitant of the world of poetry who, in our imagination, lead their immortal lives apart.’ [Mr. Smith reminds us that, “There are other elements too in this draught of Shakespeare’s brewing—in the potent wine that came to fill at last the great jeweled cup of words he fashioned, to drink from which is one of the most wonderful experiences life affords.”] (2-3)

The most illustrious example is, of course, Dr. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. (3)

In the Lectures on Macbeth we learn that Macbeth was ‘exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his marriage.’ (3)

These minor points are symptomatic. It is assumed throughout the book that the most profitable discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedies is in terms of the characters of which they are composed. (3)

The influence of the assumption is pervasive. Not only are all the books of Shakespeare criticism (with a very few exceptions) based upon it, it invades scholarship (the notes to the indespens[3]able) Arden edition may be called in evidence), and in school children are taught to think they have ‘appreciated’ the poet if they are able to talk about the characters… (3-4)

In the mass of Shakespeare criticism there is not a hint that ‘character’—like ‘plot’, ‘rhythm’, ‘construction’ and all our other critical counters—is merely an abstraction from the total response in the mind of the reader or spectator, … (4)

‘A Note on Fiction’ by Mr. C. H. Rickword in The Calendar of Modern Letters expresses the point admirably with regard to the novel: ‘The form of a novel only exists as a balance of response on the part of the reader. Hence schematic plot is a construction of the reader’s that corresponds to an aspect of the response and stands in merely diagrammatic relation to the source. Only as precipitates from the memory are plot or character tangible; yet only in solution have either any emotive valency.’ [The Calendar, October 1926. In an earlier review, Mr. Rickword wrote: ‘Mere degree of illusion provides no adequate test: novelists who can do nothing else are able to perform the trick with east, since “nothing is easier than to create for oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and a character, from glimpses and anecdotes”.’ (The Calendar, July 1926; both pieces are reprinted in Towards Standards of Criticism, Wishart.)] (4)

To stress in the conventional way character or plot or any of the other abstractions that can be made, is to impoverish the total response. (4)

‘We should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life,’ says Mr. Wilson Knight, ‘but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor, by means of which the original vision has been projected into forms [4] roughly correspondent with actuality, conforming thereto with greater or less exactitude according to the demands of its nature. …The persons, ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols of a poetic vision.’ [G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, p. 16] (4-5)

It would be easy to demonstrate that this approach is essential even when dealing with plays like Hamlet or Macbeth which can be made to yield something very impressive in the way of ‘character.’ And it is the only approach which will enable us to say anything at all relevant about plays like Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida which have consistently baffled the critics. And apart from Shakespeare, what are we to say of Tamburlaine, Edward II, The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling if we do not treat them primarily as poems? (5)

Read with attention, the plays themselves will tell us how they should be read. But those who prefer another kind of evidence have only to consider the contemporary factors that conditioned the making of an Elizabethan play, namely the native tradition of English drama descending from the morality plays, the construction of the playhouse and the conventions depending, in part, upon that construction, and the tastes and expectations of the audience. … We can make a hasty summary by saying that each of these factors determined that Elizabethan drama should be non-realistic, … Contrary to the accepted view that the majority of these were crude and unlettered, caring only for fighting and foolery, bombast and bawdry, but able to stand a great [5] deal of poetry, I think there is evidence (other than the plays themselves) that very many of them had an educated interest in words, a passionate concern for the possibilities of language and the subtleties of poetry. (5-6)

We are faced with this conclusion: the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex emotional response. Yet the bulk of Shakespeare criticism is concerned with his characters, his heroines, his love of Nature or his ‘philosophy’—with everything, in short, except with the words on the page, which it is the main business of the critic to examine. (6)

In the Preface to his version of Troilus of Cressida (1679) Dryden says: ‘Yet it must be allowed to the present age, that the tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespeare’s time that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.’ (8)

Johnson… ‘The style of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure’, and many passages remained ‘obscured by obsolete phraseology, or by the writer’s unskilfulness and affectation.’ We remember also how he could ‘scarcely check his risibility’ at the ‘blanket of the dark’ passage in Macbeth. (9)

Since the total response to a Shakespeare play can only be obtained by an exact and sensitive study of the quality of the verse, of the rhythm and imagery, of the controlled force, in short by an exact and sensitive study of Shakespeare’s handling of language, it is hardly reasonable to expect very much relevant criticism of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. What can be expected is criticism at one remove from the plays, that is, of every aspect that can be extracted from a play and studied in comparative isolation; of this kind of criticism an examination of ‘characters’ is the most obvious example. (10)

A significant passage occurs in Shaftesbury’s Advice to an Author, published in 1710: / Our old dramatick Poet, Shakespeare,…Notwithstanding his natural Rudeness, his unpolish’d style, his antiquated Phrase and Wit,…yet by the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters, he pleases his Audience,… / We see here the beginning of that process of splitting up the indivisible unity of a Shakespeare play into various elements abstracted from the whole. If a play of Shakespeare’s could not be appreciated as a whole, it was still possible to admire and to discuss his moral sentiments, his humour, his poetic descriptions and the life-likeness of his characters. (10)

Of the essays of this kind, the most famous is Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). The pivot of Morgann’s method is to be found in one of his footnotes: / ‘The reader must be sensible of something in the composition of Shakespeare’s characters, which renders them essentially different from those drawn by other writers. …we often meet with passages which, tho’ perfectly felt, cannot be sufficiently explained in words, without unfolding the whole character of the speaker… The reader will not now be surprised if I affirm that those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part, are yet capable of being unfolded and understood in the whole; every part being in fact relative, and inferring the rest. [11] …If the characters of Shakespeare are thus whole, and as it were original, whilst those of almost all other writers are mere imitation, it may be fit to consider them rather as Historic than Dramatic beings; and, when occasion requires, to account for their conduct from the WHOLE of character, from general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed. [last italics are Knights’s] (11-12)

It is strange how narrowly Morgann misses the mark. He recognized what can be called the full-bodied quality of Shakespeare’s work—it came to him as a feeling of ‘roundness and integrity’. But instead of realizing that this quality sprang from Shakespeare’s use of words, words which have ‘a network of tentacular roots, reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires’, he referred it to the characters’ ‘independence’ of the work in which they appeared, and directed his exploration to ‘latent motives and policies now avowed’. Falstaff’s birth, his early life, his association with John of Gaunt, his possible position as head of his family, his military service and his pension are all examined in ordered to determine the grand question, ‘Is Falstaff a constitutional coward?’ (12)

But more than any other man, it seems to me, Morgann has deflected Shakespeare criticism from the proper objects of attention by his preposterous references to those aspects of a ‘character’ that Shakespeare did not wish to show. (12)

I have already suggested the main reason for the eighteenth-century approach to Shakespeare via the characters, namely an inability to appreciate the Elizabethan idiom and a consequent inability to discuss Shakespeare’s plays as poetry. And of course the Elizabethan dramatic tradition was lost, and the eighteenth-century critics in general were ignorant of the stage fro which Shakespeare wrote. (13)

If we consider any of the Character writers of the seventeenth century, Earle, Overbury or Hall, we find that they preserve a distance from their subjects which the eighteenth-century creators of characters do not. (13)

One form of the charge against eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism is that it made the approach too easy. In Pope’s edition, ‘Some of the most shining passages are distinguish’d by commas in the margin’, and Warburton also marked what he considered particularly beautiful passages. From this it was but a step to [13] collect such passages into anthologies. The numerous editions of the collections of Beauties show how popular this method of reading Shakespeare had become by the end of the century. This is an obvious method of simplification, but it is only part of the process whereby various partial (and therefore distorted) responses were substituted for the full complex response demanded by a Shakespeare play—a process that was fatal to criticism. [For the collections of Shakespeare’s Beauties see. R. W. Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespearean Idolatry, pp. 115-118. The most famous of these anthologies, William Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespeare, first published in 1752, not only went through many editions in the eighteenth century, but was frequently reprinted in the nineteenth.] (13-14)

One of the main results of the Romantic Revival was the stressing of ‘personality’ in fiction. At the same time, the growth of the popular novel, from Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Bronte to our own Best Sellers, encouraged an emotional identification of the reader with hero or heroine (we all ‘have a smack of Hamlet’ nowadays). (14)

In Shakespeare criticism from Hazlitt to Dowden we find the same kind of irrelevance. Hazlitt says of Lady Macbeth: / She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we hear more than we hate. [14] And of the Witches: … What has this to do with Shakespeare? And what the lyric outburst that Dowden quotes approvingly in his chapter on Romeo and Juliet? / Who does not recall those lovely summer nights, in which the forces of nature seem eager for development, and constrained to remain in drowsy languor? … The nightingale sings in the depth of the woods. The flower-cups are half-closed. (14-15)

Wherever we look we find the same reluctance to master the words of the play, the same readiness to abstract a character and treat him (because he is more manageable that way) as a human being. [use: belles letters] (15)

The habit of regarding Shakespeare’s persons as ‘friends for life’ or, maybe, ‘deceased acquaintances’, … is responsible for all the irrelevant moral and realistic canons that have been applied to Shakespeare’s plays… (16)

And the loss is incalculable. Losing sight of the whole dramatic pattern of each play, we inhibit the development of that full complex response that makes our experience of a Shakespeare play so very much more than an appreciation of ‘character’ … That more complete, more intimate possession can only be obtained by treating Shakespeare primarily as a poet. (16)

We start with so many lines of verse on a printed page which we read as we should read any other poem. We have to elucidate the meaning (using Dr. Richards’s fourfold definition) and to unravel ambiguities; we have to estimate the kind and quality of the imagery and determine the precise degree of evocation of particular figures; we have to allow full weight to each word, exploring its ‘tentacular roots’, and to determine how it controls and is controlled by the rhythmic movement of the passage in which it occurs. In short, we have to decide exactly why the lines ‘are so and not otherwise.’ (16)

‘Plot’, aspects of ‘character’ and recurrent ‘themes’—all ‘precipitates from the memory’—help [16] to determine our reaction at a given point. … A play of Shakespeare’s is a precise particular experience, a poem—and precision and particularity are exactly what is lacking in the greater part of Shakespeare criticism, criticism that deals with Hamlet or Othello in terms of abstractions that have nothing to do with the unique arrangement of words that constitute these plays. (16-17)

The following remarks on one play, Macbeth, …merely point to factors that criticism must take into account if it is to have any degree of relevance,... (17)

Even here there is a further reservation to be made. In all elucidation there is an element of crudity and distortion. … Mr. Eliot… ‘perceptions do not, in really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement in language of this structure; it is a development of sensibility.’ [The Sacred Wood (Second Edition, 1928), p. 15.] Of course, the only full statement in language of this structure is in the exact words of the poem concerned; but what the critic can do is to aid ‘the return to work of art… (17)

The main difference between good and bad critics is that the good critic points to something that is actually contained in the work of art [17] whereas the bad critic points away from the work in question; he introduces extraneous elements into his appreciation… (18)

Macbeth happens to be poetry, which means that the apprehension of the whole can only be obtained from a lively attention to the parts, whether they have an immediate bearing on the main action or ‘illustrate character’, or not. (18)

Two main themes, which can only be separated for the purpose of analysis, are blended in the play—the themes of the reversal of values and of unnatural disorder. And closely related to each is a third theme, that of the deceitful appearance, and consequent doubt, uncertainty and confusion. All this is obscured by false [classical] assumptions about the category ‘drama’; Macbeth has greater affinity with The Waste Land than with The Doll’s House. (18)

If we really accept the suggestion, which then becomes revolutionary, that Macbeth is a poem, it is clear that the impulse aroused in Act I, scenes i and ii, are part of the whole response, even if they are not all immediately relevant to the fortunes of the protagonist. (20)

What is not so frequently observed is that the key words of the scene are ‘loved’, ‘wooingly’, ‘bed’, ‘procreant Cradle’, ‘breed, and haunt’, … (22)

A key is found in Macbeth’s words spoken to the men hired to murder Banquo (Act III, scene i, 91-100). When Dr. Bradley is discussing the possibility that Macbeth has been abdridged he remarks (‘very aptly’ according to the Arden editor), ‘surely, any one who wanted to cut the play down would have operated, say, on Macbeth’s talk with Banquo’s murderers, or on Act III, scene vi, or on the very long dialogue of Malcolm and Macduff, instead of reducing the most exciting part of the drama.’. No, the speech to the murderers is not very ‘exciting’—but its function should be obvious to anyone who is not blinded by Dr. Bradley’s preconceptions about ‘drama’. By accepted canons it is an irrelevance; actually it stands as a symbol of the order that Macbeth wishes to restore. (24)

But this new ‘health’ is ‘sickly’ whilst Banquo lives, and can only be made ‘perfect’ by his death. In an attempt to re-create an order based on murder, disorder makes fresh inroads. (24)

The truth is only gradually disentangled from this illusion. (25)

The situation is magnificently presented in the banquet scene. Here speech, action and symbolism combine. … In Shakespeare, as Mr. Wilson Knight has remarked, banquets are almost invariably symbols of rejoicing, friendship and concord. (25)

Before we attempt to disentangle the varied threads of the last Act, … (26)

…the scene in Macduff’s castle. Almost without exception the critics have stressed the pathos of young Macduff, his ‘innocent prattle’, his likeness to Arthur, and so on—reactions appropriate to the work of Sir James Barrie which obscure the complex dramatic function of the scene. [Dr. Bradley says of this and the following scene: ‘They have a technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears.’ –Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 391, see also p. 394.] In the first place, it echoes in different keys the theme of the false appearance, of doubt and confusion. [26]…Secondly, the scene shows the spreading evil. As Fletcher has pointed out, Macduff and his wife are ‘representatives of the interests of loyalty and domestic affection.’ There is much more in the death of young Macduff than ‘pathos’; the violation of the natural order is completed by the murder. But there is even more than this. That the tide is about to turn against Macbeth is suggested both by the rhythm and imagery of Ross’s speech: … (26-27)

Although the play moves swiftly, it does not move wit a simple directness. Its complex subtleties include cross-currents, the ebb and flow of opposed thoughts and emotions. (27)

The conversation between Macduff and Malcolm has never been adequately explained. We have already seen Dr. Bradley’s opinion of it. The Clarendon editors say, ‘The poet no doubt [27] felt this scene was needed to supplement the meagre parts assigned to Malcom and Macduff’. If this were all, it might be omitted. Actually the Malcolm –Macduff dialogue has at least three functions. Obviously Macduff’s audience with Malcolm and the final determination to invade Scotland help on the story, but this is of subordinate importance. It is clear also that Malcolm’s suspicion and the long testing of Macduff emphasize the mistrust that has spread from the central evil of the play. But the main purpose of the scene is obscured unless we realize its function as choric commentary. In alternating speeches the evil that Macbeth has caused is explicitly stated, without extenuation. And it is stated impersonally. … With this approach we see the relevance of Malcolm’s self-accusation. He has ceased to be a person. His lines repeat and magnify the evils that have already been attributed to Macbeth, acting as a mirror wherein the ills of Scotland are reflected. And the statement of evil is strengthened by contrast with the opposite virtues, ‘As Justice, Verity, Temp’rance, Stablenesse’. / There is no other way in which the scene can be read. And if [28] dramatic fitness is not sufficient warrant for this approach, we can refer to the pointers that Shakespeare has provided. Macbeth is ‘luxurious’ and ‘avaricious’, and the first sins mentioned by Malcolm in an expanded statement are lust and avarice. When he declares, … we remember that this is what Macbeth has done. Indeed Macduff is made to answer, … Up to the point at least the impersonal function of the speaker is predominant. And even when Malcolm, once more a person in a play, announces his innocence, it is impossible not to hear the impersonal overtone: … He speaks for Scotland, and for the forces of order. The ‘scotch’d Snake’ will ‘close, and be herselfe’. / There are only two alternatives; either Shakespeare was a bad dramatist, or his critics have been badly misled by mistaking the dramatis personae for real persons in this scene. (28-29)

It is no use taking one step nearer the play and saying we are purged, etc., because we see the downfall of a wicked man or because we realize the justice of Macbeth’s doom whilst retaining enough sympathy for him or admiration of his potential qualities to be filled with a sense of ‘waste’. It is no use discussing the effect in abstract terms at all; we can only discuss it in terms of the poet’s concrete realization of certain emotions and attitudes. (30)

For the last hundred years or so the critics have not only sentimentalized Macbeth—ignoring the completeness with which Shakespeare shows his final identification with evil—but they have slurred the passages in which the positive good is presented by means of religious symbols. (30)

[note 1] The original audience would be helped to make the connexion if, as is likely, the Doctor of Act IV, scene iii, and the Doctor of Act V were played by the same actor, probably without any change of dress. We are not meant to think of two Doctors in the play (Dr. A of Harley Street and Dr. B of Edinburgh) but simply, in each case, of ‘a Doctor’. (32)

Hithero the agent of the unnatural has been Macbeth. Now it is Malcolm who commands Birnam Wood to move, it is ‘the good Macduff’ who reveals his unnatural birth, and the opponents of Macbeth whose [33] ‘deere causes’ would ‘excite the mortified man’. Hitherto Macbeth has been the deceiver, ‘mocking the time with fairest show’; now Malcolm orders, … Our first reaction is to make some such remark as ‘Nature becomes unnatural in order to rid itself of Macbeth’. But this is clearly inadequate; we have to translate it and define our impressions in terms of our response to the play at this point. By associating with the opponents of evil the ideas of deceit and of the unnatural, previously associated solely with Macbeth and the embodiments of evil, Shakespeare emphasizes the disorder and at the same time frees our minds from the burden of the horror. After all, the movement of Birnam Wood and Macduff’s unnatural birth have a simple enough explanation. (33-34)

If we merely read the play we are liable to overlook the importance of the sights and sounds which are obvious on the stage. The frequent stage directions should be observed—Drum and Colours, Enter Malcolm…and Soldiers Marching, A Cry within of Women—and there are continuous directions for Alarums, Flourishes, and fighting. (34)

By now there should be no danger of our misinterpreting the greatest of Macbeth’s final speeches. (35)

Dr. Bradley claims, on the strength of this and the ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow’ speech, that Macbeth’s ‘ruin is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our sympathy… In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a tinge of tragic grandeur, rests upon him.’ But to concentrate attention thus on the personal implications of these lines is to obscure the fact that they have an even more important function as the keystone of the system of values that gives emotional coherence to the play. Certainly those values are likely to remain obscured if we concentrate our attention upon ‘the two great terrible figures, who dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama’, if we ignore the ‘unexciting’ or ‘undramatic’ scenes, or if conventional ‘sympathy for the hero’ is allowed to distort the pattern of the whole. (36)

A second assumption was made amusingly explicit in the words that John Benson, the publisher of the 1640 edition—who had an eye on changing taste—addressed to the Reader: ‘In your perusall you shall finde them SEREN, cleere and eligantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplex your braine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplex your braine, no intricate or cloudy stuffe to puzzell intellect, but perfect eloquence.’ Many of the Sonnets were written about the time of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet; the verse is therefore essentially unlike the verse of King Lear—it is incapable of subtleties; the meaning is on the surface. No doubt this is an exaggeration, but the effects of an assumption not very dissimilar to this can be seen in such essays as… [40] If we can rid ourselves of these two presuppositions we shall have gone some way towards a revaluation of the Sonnets. ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ is a miscellaneous collection of poems, written at different times, for different purposes, and with very different degrees of poetic intensity. … The first necessity of criticism is to assess each poem independently, on its merits as poetry, and not to assume too easily that we are dealing with an ordered sequence. The second necessity is to know what kind of development to look for—which is a different matter. (40-41)

‘No capable poet’, says Dr. Bradley, ‘much less Shakespeare, intending to produce a merely “dramatic” series of poems, would dream of inventing a story like that of the Sonnets, or, even if he did, of treating it as they treat it.’ (42)

Sonnet 42 runs: / That thou hast her it is not all my griefe, / And yet it may be said I lov’d her deerely, / That she hath thee is of my wayling cheefe, / A losse in love that touches me more neerely. / … if Shakespeare had suffered the experience idicated by a prose paraphrase (for some of the biographical school the Sonnets might as well have been in prose) it would have affected him very different from this. The banal movement, the loose texture of the verse, the vague gestures that stand for emotion, are sufficient index that his interests are not very deeply involved. (Contrast the run and ring of the verse, even in minor sonnets, when Shakespeare is absorbed by his subject—‘Devouring time blunt thou the Lyons pawes…’) His interest is in the display of wit, the working out of the syllogism: (41)

Those who picture Shakespeare as completely enthralled by his love for a particular friend or patron, and therefore deeply wounded by neglect, can hardly have noticed the tone of critical, and sometimes amused, detachment adopted towards himself (‘Cleane pride’), and recipient of his verse (‘You to your beauteous belessings adde a curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse’). (44)

Some of the most interesting and successful sonnets may well have had their context in a personal relationship; but whenever we analyse their interest (further illustration at this point would involve a good deal of repetition later) we find that it lies, not in the general theme or situation, which is all that is relevant to a biographical interpretation, but in various accretions of thought and feeling, in ‘those frequently witty or profound reflexions, which the poet’s [44] ever active mind had deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents’, in the exploration of a mood or discrimination of emotion. (44-45)

The most profitable approach to the Sonnets is, it seems to me, to consider them in relation to the development of Shakespeare’s blank verse. There are certain obvious difficulties: the Sonnets take their start form something that can, for convenience, be called the Spenserian mode, whereas the influence of Spenser on the early plays is both slighter and more indirect; (45)

Richard II’s lament at Pomfret is a fairly typical example of the early set speeches: … It is not merely that the imagery is elaborated out of all proportion to any complexity of thought or feeling, the emotion is suspended whilst the conceit is developed, as it were, in its own right. Similarly the sound and movement of the verse, the alliteration, repetition and assonance, seem to exist as objects of attention in themselves rather than as the medium of a compulsive force working from within. (46)

[later] The verse of course is much more fee, and the underlying speech movement gives a far greater range of rhythmic subtlety. The sound is more closely linked with—is, in fact, an intimate part of—the meaning. The imagery changes more swiftly. But these factors are only important as contributing to a major development: the main difference lies in the greater immediacy and concreteness of the verse. (47)

… ‘the quick flow and the rapid change of the images’, as Coleridge noted, require a ‘perpetual activity of attention on the part of the reader’, generate, we may say, a form of activity in which thought and feeling are fused in a new mode of apprehension. That is, the technical development implies—is dependent on—the development and unification of sensibility. It is this kind of development (in advance of the dramatic verse of the same period in some respects and obviously behind it in others) that we find in the Sonnets, … (48)

After 1579 the most pervasive influence on Elizabethan lyric poetry was that of Spenser. Asrophel and Stella may have been the immediate cause of the numerous sonnet cycles, but it was from Spenser that the sonneteers derived many of their common characteristics—the slow movement and melody, the use of imagery predominantly visual and decorative, the romantic glamour, the tendency towards a gently elegiac note. [48] In the Spenserian mode no object is sharply forced upon the consciousness. (48-49)

With Spenser or Tennyson in mind we should say that both alliteration and assonance were primarily musical devices, as indeed they are in many of the Sonnets: … [where] sound, if not independent of the meaning, usurps a kind of attention that is incompatible with a full and sharp awareness. But that which links the Sonnets, in this respect, with the later plays is the use of assonance and alliteration to secure a heightened awareness, … (50)

The sonnet form is a convention in which it is only too easy to adopt a special ‘poetic’ attitude, … he broke away from the formal and incantatory mode (convention and precedent and transparent medium. (52)

…in the Sonnets, as in later plays, the imagery gives immediacy and precision, and it demands and fosters an alert attention. But the range of emotions liberated by any one image is narrower, though not always less intense. We have not yet reached the stage in which ‘the maximum amount of apparent incongruity is resolved simultaneously’. That is, the creating mind has not yet achieved that co-ordination of widely diverse (and, in the ordinary mind, often conflicting) experiences,… (56)

Shakespeare’s imagery in the Sonnets, as I have pointed out, rarely involves a high degree of tension; and when, in the later plays, we find images that not only possess richness of association but embrace conflicting elements, those elements are [62] invariably drawn from experience and sensation, never from speculative thought: they make finer experience available for others, but they offer no resolution of metaphysical problems. (62-63)

…most accounts of the Sonnets point to certain of them as showing ‘Love’s Triumph over Time’, without bothering to explain what this may mean. … There is an obvious advance in maturity, an increasing delicacy in exposition, but unless we are prepared to accept assertion as poetry (that is, bare statement deliberately willed, instead of the communication in all its depth, fullness and complexity, of an experience that has been lived) we shall not find that solution in the Sonnets. … Sonnet 123 [63] … The purpose of the Sonnet is clear: to affirm the continuous identity of the self in spite of the passage of time. But, though a remarkable achievement, its failure is indicated by the unresolved ambiguity. … Moreover—and perhaps it is more important to notice this than the conflicting meanings which somehow refuse to resolve themselves into unity—the poem asserts rather than expresses a resolved state of mind: ‘Thou shalt not boast’, ‘I defy’, ‘This I do vow’, ‘I will be true’. … in all the Sonnets of this last [64] type, it is the contemplation of change, not the boasting and defiance, that produces the finest poetry; they draw their value entirely form the evocation of that which is said to be defied or triumphed over. In the plays—from Henry IV to The Tempest—in which the theme of Time occurs, there is no defiance; the conflict is resolved by the more or less explicit acceptance of mutability. (63-65)

It is often necessary for the reader of Shakespeare to remind himself that ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ is not all of one kind. In Macbeth, for example, the speeches of the protagonists refer not merely inwards to a hypothetical ‘character’ behind them, but outward to the pattern of the play as a whole in which ‘character’ is subordinate and often irrelevant. In Othello, on the other hand, the hero’s character—in so far as we are intended to be aware of it, and we are aware of it only through the poetry—emerges form the pattern, and interest is centered there. In this respect, as in so many others, Hamlet is a difficult play to feel sure of; but it seems to me that here we are required, more explicitly and more continuously than in Macbeth, or Lear or Antony and Cleopatra, to be aware of, and therefore to assess, a particular state of mind and feeling embodied in the dramatic figure of the hero. The purpose of these notes is to suggest that most critical judgments concerning Prince Hamlet have ignored or misinterpreted some important parts of the evidence. (Prince Hamlet, 66)

…the accumulated knowledge of the context of the play, through it has corrected some obvious errors, has made remarkably little difference in the current estimate of the hero, which remains substantially the Romantic estimate. (66)

There is, it is true, considerable evidence of a superior mental agility, expressing itself in wit and satire. But Hamlet’s wit—and this seem the critical observation to start from—is of a peculiar and limited kind. With very few exceptions it is entirely destructive, malicious and sterile. When Hamlet bids the Player, ‘Follow that lord and look you mock him not’, when he says, ‘We shall obey, were she ten times our mother’, and when he demonstrates to Claudius how a king may go a progress through the guts of a began, the reader’s reaction is not, I think, a sense of liberation but rather the felling, ‘How I—in certain moods and in certain contexts—should have enjoyed saying that!’ Santayana seems to be pointing to this quality of Hamlet’s wit when he remarks of such ‘idealism’ as Hamlet displays that it ‘is lame because it cannot conceive a better alternative to the things it criticizes. It stops at bickerings and lamentations which, although we cannot deny and in an unstable equilibrium, ready to revert, when imagination falters, to all our old platitudes and conventional judgements.’ The function of Hamlet’s satirical girdings—think, for example, of the celebrated ‘fishmonger’ scene with Polonius (II, ii)—is plainly to satisfy an emotional animus which exhausts itself in its own immediate gratification. (67)

What Hamlet’s wit, his cruelty and his self-righteousness have in common is a quality of moral relaxation which more or less subtly distorts the values for which he professes to stand. His scourging of corruption is hardly ever impersonal. In his pretended concern for Ophelia’s chastity (III, i), in the obscenities which he directs [68] towards her in the play scene (III, ii), and in the fascinated insistence on lust in his long interview with his mother (III, iv), Hamlet seems intent not so much on exposing lust as on indulging an uncontrollable spite against the flesh. (68-69)

Forgetting his own injunction against sentimentalizing the personality of the Prince, Mr. Knight thus contrives a partial rehabilitation of the Romantic Hamlet. ‘We properly know Hamlet himself’, he writes, ‘only when he is alone with Death: then he is lovable and gentle, then he is beautiful and noble, … (69)

…and his exaggerated play-acting soon takes on the obvious forms of melodrama: / Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? … / Who does me this? Ha! [Compare III, iii, 407-411 (‘Now could I drink hot blood’), and V, I, 276-306 (the ranting in Ophelia’s grave).] / The distinguishing feature of melodrama is, of course, that it over simplifies what are in reality complicated problems and relationships, and the tendency notes here is in line with Hamlet’s most marked characteristics. His attitudes of hatred, revulsion, self-complacence and self-approach, I have suggested, are, in their one-sided insistence, forms of escape from the difficult process of complex adjustment which normal living demands and which Hamlet finds beyond his power. / Reflexions such as these lead inevitably to a further question. If, by any standards of maturity at all adequate to the later plays, Hamlet appears as fundamentally immature, may we suppose that Shakespeare, at the time of writing the play, deliberately intended he should appear so? (71)

…in Hamlet’s most characteristic speeches there is nothing positive, no technical device, to which one can point—at one can point to the sonorous, simplifying rhetoric of Othello or to the devices by which Jonson makes his figures express their own condemnation [See F. R. Leavis’s essay on Othello in Scrutiny (VI, 3), December 1937, and my Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, Chapter VI.] (72)

It is, however, impossible to believe that Hamlet is merely a mouthpieces, or to accept without qualification Ernest Jones’s contention that, ‘The play is simply the form in which his [Shakespeare’s] deepest unconscious feelings find their spontaneous expressions, without any inquiry being possible on his part as to the essential nature or source of those feelings’. [Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis (‘The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery’), pp. 59-60. I do not feel qualified to discuss the psychological issues involved in Dr. Jones’s interesting essay, which is sometimes brushed aside too easily by literary critics. Although some modifications of the Freudian account of the play’s genesis may suggest themselves to the non-specialist reader, there is no doubt that the essay helps to explain the persistence of the Hamlet legend from early times and the popularity of Shakespeare’s play.] (74)

Between the view that Hamlet is an objective study of a particular kind of immaturity and the view that it is a spontaneous and uncritical expression of Shakespeare’s own unconscious feelings it seems necessary to make a compromise. To suppose—as one must—that Shakespeare was ignorant of the deeper sources of the malaise expressed by Hamlet does not commit us to believe him incapable of assessing the symptoms of that malaise in relation to a developed—or, it seems more accurate to say, developing—scale of values. But the implicit evaluation is not so subtle or so sure as in the later plays, and one is forced to the conclusion that this play contains within itself widely different levels of experience and insight which, since they cannot be assimilated into a whole, create [75] a total effect of ambiguity. (75-76)

A clearsighted view of the fundamental weaknesses of Hamlet’s personality is by no means incompatible with a lively dramatic sympathy, for the simple reason that for everyone Hamlet represents a possible kind of experience. Indeed for most of us it is more than merely [76] possible; in a different sense from that intended by Coleridge, we have ‘a smack of Hamlet’ ourselves, to say the least of it. It is in fact the strength of our own regressive impulses and unconscious confusions that tempts us to see the play in a false perspective. I would say that, read as it commonly is, with a large measure of identification between reader and hero, Hamlet can provide an indulgence for some of our most cherished weaknesses—so deeply cherished that we can persuade ourselves that they are virtues—but it is incapable of leading us far towards maturity and self-knowledge. It is only when Shakespeare’s attitude is seen to be more critical than is commonly supposed, and when we ourselves make a determined effort to assess that attitude, that we are in a position to see Hamlet in relation to the supreme achievement—the achieved maturity—of the later plays. (76-77)

Metaphysical poetry has become a living force, felt directly as one feels contemporary poetry; of the Elizabethan-Jacobean dramatists one or two, such as Jonson and Tourneur, have obtained something very different from the inert and qualified approval of the text-books, whilst others, such as Beaumont [92] and Fletcher, have slid quietly from their eminence; … (Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility, 92-93)

The seventeenth century has long been recognized as marking in some ways the beginning of ‘the modern world’. But the process is no longer felt as simple development, as unqualified progress. The literary splendours of the Shakespearean period are no longer explained solely in terms of the impingement of all that was new, free and ‘progressive’ in the Renaissance; they are seen as the result of Renaissance turbulence and intellectual eagerness working on traditional ways of thinking and feeling and evaluating,… The modern reassessment of the seventeenth century is largely a recognition of what was lost as well as gained by the transition to the modern world…It is as a contribution to our understanding of the seventeenth-century ‘dissociation of sensibility’—from which, as Mr. Eliot remarked in his brilliantly suggestive essay, ‘we have never recovered’—that I wish to consider some of the work of Francis Bacon. (93)

We must, it is true, beware of exaggerating Bacon’s direct influence on the development of the modern science or of confounding him with a nineteenth-century Rationalist. Not only was he not himself an experimental scientist, he was either ignorant or contemptuous of the major scientific discoveries of his own time; and he was without a glimmer of perception of what was to be the supreme scientific achievement of the seventeenth century—the development of mathematical physics. But his ignorance of science did not prevent him from clarifying the ideals that seventeenth-century scientists were to find congenial. (94)

Dr. Rudolph Metz, … [In a valuable essay, ‘Bacon’s Part in the Intellectual Movement of his Time’, in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson.] … ‘Like almost all representative Renaissance thinkers, he was inspired with the Faustian urge. [94] … places his knowledge at the service of practical ends and assigns to it as its greatest task the subjection of nature to the will of man…in this, Bacon’s thought and feeling are entirely modern, and there is no vestige of medievalism left… The science which is placed at the service of humanity has as its final aim technical mastery, which now supplants artistic culture. This shifting from art to technics represents, it seems to me, an important difference between early and late Renaissance thinking. (95)

Some important aspects of Bacon’s style were describe by two of his contemporaries, by Dr. Rawley, his chaplain and literary executor, and by Ben Jonson. In his short Life of Bacon Rawley wrote: / In the composing of his books he did rather drive at masculine and clear expression than at any fineness or affection of phrases, and would often ask if the meaning were expressed plainly enough, as being one that accounted words to be but subservient or ministerial to matter, and not the principal. And if his style were polite, it was because he would do no otherwise. … Jonson’s comment in Discoveries refers to Bacon’s speeches, but it can be applied to his writings. / ‘Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from his, without loss. [96] …the account given by Rawley and Jonson. But the account is not complete. Bacon was not only a learned and weighty writer, he was also an Elizabethan with an eye for the literary possibilities of the spoken idiom. His History of the Reign of King Henry VII is full of phrases that one would not be surprised to find in Nashe, [Some especially lively passages will be found in the description of the Cornish rebellion, and in the account of the capture of Perkin Warbeck.] and The Ad-[97]vancement of Learning owes a good deal of its pungency to those pithy comparison and muscular idioms that Elizabethan English threw up so readily: … ‘As for the possibility, they are ill discoverers that think there is no land where they can see nothing but sea.’… There is, however, a significant difference between Bacon’s use of Elizabethan idiom and that of the majority of his contemporaries. In the first place, the great majority of his figures of speech are simple illustrations of the ideas that he wishes to convey. [98] … the function of the images is not to intensify the meaning, to make it deeper or richer, but simply to make more effective a meaning that was already fully formed before the application of the illustrative device. Shelley declared that Bacon was a poet. In reading his work what we are most frequently forced to remember is that he was a brilliant lawyer. Some analysis of a further example or two… (96-99)

Closer inspection reveals that although the analogy appears to [99] clinch the argument, it does not in fact prove anything. The comparison is imposed , and instead of possessing the validity that comes from the perception of similarity it is simply a rhetorical trick. … The figures of the cell and the spider, on the other hand, although they apparently perform a similar function—namely, to define a particular example of the general kind—serve rather to weight the argument with feelings of contempt and to produce an air of finality that is not justified by any proof actually adduced. By combining a general truth with rhetoric Bacon has contrived to make all scholastic learning look silly and to recommend his own positivistic attitude as the only one possible for a reasonable man. [99-100]

Bacon’s figures of speech are forensic, intended to convince or confound. Some are used simply as apt illustrations of particular points; some serve to impose on the reader the required feeling or attitude. In neither kind is there any vivid feeling for both sides of the analogy such as we find in more representative Elizabethans. Elizabethan prose writers—from Hooker to Nashe, and from Nashe to Deloney and Dekker—also use figures to illustrate an argument or to support a case; but most of their similes and metaphor have a life of their own—sometimes too abundant and vigorous a life for the purpose of logical or ‘scientific’ argument—whereas in Bacon the analogues only have value for the support they offer to his demonstration. I think it is true to say that Shakespeare’s metaphorical complexity, by means of which a new meaning emerges from many tensions, is the development of directly derived from the normal process of living. But the characteristically Shakespearean manner, depending as it does on the maximum range of sensitive awareness, is diametrically opposed to the Baconian manner, which represents a development of assertive will and practical reason at the expense of the more delicately perceptive elements of the sensibility. (101)

To Shakespeare and the majority of his contemporaries ‘Nature’ indicated a world of non-human life to which man was bound by intimate and essentially religious ties. By the beginning of the eighteenth century ‘Nature’ had come to mean simply the daylight world of common sense and practical that is not human, and assumed without question that his part was simply to observe, to understand and to dominate the world of ‘matter’. Almost as much as his explicit philosophy, Bacon’s prose style is an index of the emergence of the modern world. (102)

This excellent caution obviously looks forward to the prescriptions of the Royal Society (‘reducing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can’), and it marks a necessary step forward if the English language was to be made, what it was not in Elizabethan times, a tool for scientific analysis and the construction of methodical systems. Debility set in when this one kind of usage came to be regarded as supreme, and the tyranny of grammar and dictionary meanings succeeded in ironing out the rich complexities of Elizabethan English—a process reflected in the handling of Shakespeare’s text by his eighteenth-century editors, and their successors. / The negative qualities of Bacon’s attitude to words can be seen in his discussion of rhetoric and poetry, of language, that is, [103] adapted to any other than a purely referential use. Rhetoric, in Bacon’s eyes, was something of a deceitful art, for he speaks of ‘eloquence and other impressions of like nature, which do paint and disguise the true appearance of things’ (382). Nevertheless, it is an ‘ornament’ (326), it is useful ‘in civil occasions’, and ‘sensible and plausible elocution’ may be allowed ‘to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself’ (284) . In this temporary rhetoricians, … (103-104)

…although the Advancement, like the Essays, is studded with literary quotations and allusions, their purpose is invariably to point a moral or illustrate an argument: there is never any indication that Bacon has been moved by poetry or that he attaches any value to its power of deepening and refining the emotions. … There is certainly so suggestions that poetry itself can be an exploration of emotion or a discipline of ‘desire’. Bacon [105] in fact sanctions that divorce between imagination and reason,… (105-106)

A principal purpose of The Advancement of Learning was to break down the distrust of theoretical knowledge felt by ‘pragmatical men’ and to win for learning a place in the modern state… (106)

It is plain that for the famous image of the mind as ‘a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence’. As things are, of course, the mind ‘is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced’ (394-395), but what is desirable is that it should approximate more and more to the condition of a perfect reflector of ‘things’. … What Bacon ignores completely is the creative and vital forces in the mind itself; and it is relevant to notice the inadequacy and barrenness of his reflexions on subjects involving intimate and personal emotions in the Essays (they are naturally not much considered in the Advancement). (107)

…not only does Bacon in this essay refuse to admit the validity of subjective estimates of worth—‘It is a strange things to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature and value of things, by this, that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely and nothing but in love’—he seems to think it possible to compartmentalize one’s feelings and actions: ‘They do best, who, if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter,… (107)

…divorce between ‘reason’ on the one hand and creative perception and the feelings generally on the other—‘reason’ of course having the pre-eminence. The history of this dissociation of sensibility, … It can be studied however—although it was far more than a literary phenomenon—in the literature of the eighteenth century. And in this respect the so-called Romantic Revival made no essential difference, for in spite of the great achievements of a few of the ‘Romantic’ poets the general effect of their work was to perpetuate the divisions between ‘poetry’ and ‘life’, between those less lofty but (it was felt) more ‘real’ equipment that served in practical affairs; and whilst poetry became more poetical material life reached a peak of dehumanizing ugliness. (108)

And if we ask what, in Bacon, is of high and permanent value the answer is, the disinterested and disciplined inquiring spirit—what Bacon called ‘the laborious and sober inquiry of truth’. (110)

‘His craftsmanship is conspicuous. Almost any poem of his has its object well defined’, [The Works of George Herbert, edited with a Commentary by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford University Press).] (George Herbert, 112)

The ‘pure, manly and unaffected’ diction that Coleridge noted, the rhythm that, though musical, is close to the rhythm of living speech, the construction that almost always follows the evolution of thought and feeling, even in the most intricate of the stanza forms that he used in such variety—these elements of Herbert’s style show his determination to make his verse sincere and direct, to avoid even the slightest degree of the distortion that occurs when a preconceived idea of ‘the poetical’ takes charge of the matter. (113)

…Herbert, as man and artist, is not the product of one social class alone. An aristocrat by birth, the protégé of James I, the friend of Donne and Bacon, … The Metaphysical subtlety and intellectual analysis that he learnt from Donne, the skill in music—so pleasantly attested by Walton—that one senses even in his handling of the spoken word, the easy and unostentatious references to science and learning, all imply a cultivated milieu. And although the rightness of tone that keeps even his most intimate poetry free from sentimentality or over-insistence springs from deeply personal characteristics, it is also related to the well-bred ease of manner of ‘the gentlemen’. (114)

Again and again Herbert reminds us of the popular preacher addressing his audience—without a shade of condescension in doing so—in the homely manner that they themselves use. There is humour, mimicry and sarcasm, seen most clearly when the verses are read aloud with the inflexions they demand. (115)

Now it would certainly be unwise to underestimate Herbert’s worldly ambitions, or the severity of the struggle that took place in one ‘not exempt from [121] passion and choler’, who liked fin clothes and good company, before he could renounce his hopes of courtly preference and, finally, become a country parson. But it seems to me that if we focus all our attention there, … we ignore… Behind the more obvious temptation of ‘success’ was one more deeply rooted—a dejection of spirit that tended to make him regard his own life, the life he was actually leading, as worthless and unprofitable. Part of the cause was undoubtedly persistent ill-health. ‘For my self’, he said, ‘I alwais fear’d sickness more then death, because sickness hath made me unable to perform those Offices for which I came into the world, and must yet be kept in it’ (p. 373); and this sense of the frustration of his best purposes through illness is expressed in The Crosse and other poems: … (121-122)

…a sense that life, real life, is going on elsewhere, where he happens not to be himself. It was his weakness, as well as his more positive qualities of ‘birth and spirit’, that made a career at court seem so intensely desirable: ‘the town’ was where other people lived active and successful lives. Certainly, then, it was not a small achievement to ‘behold the court with an impartial eye, and see plainly that it is made up of fraud, and titles, and flattery, and many other such empty, imaginary, painted pleasures; pleasures that are so empty, as not to satisfy when they are enjoyed.’ [Herbert to Woodnot, on the night of his induction to Bemerton: recorded by Walton.] But it was an even greater achievement to rid himself of the torturing sense of frustration and impotence and to accept the validity of his own experience. (123)

Henry James—whose ‘social comedy’ may be allowed to provide a standard of maturity—once remarked that he found Congreve ‘insufferable’, [Letters, Vol. I, p. 140] and perhaps the first thing to say of Restoration drama—tragedy as well as comedy—is that the bulk of it is insufferably dull. … And who returns to Dryden’s heroic plays with renewed zest? (131)

It is this that explains why, if one comes to Restoration literature after some familiarity with the Elizabethans, the first impression made by the language is likely to be a sense of what has been lost; the disintegration of the old cultural unity has plainly resulted in impoverished. The speech of the educated is now remote from the speech of the people (Bunyan’s huge sales were, until the eighteenth century, outside ‘the circumference of wit’), and idiomatic vigour and evocative power seem to have gone out of the literary medium. But there was gain as well as loss. … When, in 1667, Sprat attacked ‘this vicious abundance of phrase…this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world’, he had in mind the needs of scientific inquiry and rational discussion. ‘They have therefore’, he said of the Royal Society, ‘been most rigorous in putting in execution the only remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; [132] … [The History of the Royal Society of London: Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II, pp. 112 ff.] For the first time the English language was made—and to some extent made consciously—an instrument for rational discussion. … This is from Halifax’s Characters of Charles II, and the even tone, the sinuous ease of movement and the clarity of the analysis mark the passage an unmistakably post-Restoration. (132-133)

If we look for an early illustration of the bad mid-eighteenth century conception of poetry as something applied from the outside we find it in Dryden’s verse plays, where he adopts canons of style that he would not have dreamed of applying—apart from his Odes—in his non-dramatic verse. Tragedy, he said, ‘is naturally pompous and magnificent’. Nothing in English literature is more surprising—if we stop to consider—than the complete discrepancy between the sinewy ease of Dryden’s satires and the stiff opaqueness of his dramatic verse; … It is only in the easy strength of occasional lines (‘A good, luxurious, palatable faith’) that we hear his natural voice. In the plays as a whole—each made up of a succession of ‘great’ moments and heroic postures… (134)

…the prose in which Restoration comedy is written—select which dramatist you like—is poor and inexpressive in comparison with the staple non-dramatic prose. / Congreve is usually accepted as the most brilliant stylist of the five or six comic dramatists who count. But place beside the extract quoted from Halifax a passage or two from Love for Love or The Way of the World [135] … Congreve’s style… It isn’t, really, very subtle. As for the ‘wit’, when it isn’t merely verbal and obvious (‘Fruitful, the head fruitful;--that bodes horns; the fruit of the head is horns’, etc.) it is hopeless dependent on convention. [136] … Halifax is a witty writer, but his wit springs naturally from the situation he is concerned with and illuminates it… Congreve’s wit is entirely self-regarding. (135-137)

…great books are treated as though they existed in some timeless sphere and had no roots in a life as real, as bewildering and exciting as our own. In English, at all events, there is rarely any attempt made to see the literature of a given period in relation to the economic, social, and cultural forms of that period—its whole complex pattern of living—and to relate the findings of such study to the needs of the present; though one would think it obvious that the condition of health for an ‘interest in literature’ is that it should be an interest in very much more. / What I am contending is that an education adequate to modern needs involves a mastery of more than one kind of knowledge. I am not for one moment urging that the universities should abandon their attempts to turn our expert historians, or economists, or sociologists, or psychologists, or qualified critics and teachers of literature: the more expert knowledge there is available the better. …it is not enough for anyone to be simply a historian, an economist, a sociologist, etc. (The University Teaching of English and History; A Plea for Correlation, 192)

…as soon as cultural subjects are discussed—subjects, that is, bearing on the [192] quality of living at any period—value judgments are involved, and the discipline of History needs to be complemented by the discipline of literary criticism. (192-193)

…the function of literary training in education as a whole. This is, to start with, a training in the use of words for any and every purpose, of words as ‘the tools of thought’—the means by which one mind can influence another; and training in the ways that words are used not only equips the individual for dealing with the modern environment (newspapers, propaganda, etc.), it is the necessary to add, the starting-point for the study of literature. [Judging by the practice of the schools (encouraged, of course, by the School Certificate examination), this is not the hoary platitude it ought to be; elementary and secondary school English continues to hover uneasily between mechanical memory-work and vague ‘appreciation’. Lest anyone should think I am exaggerating, I may say that in a recent university scholarship examination more than half the candidates in English fell for a blatant piece of pseudo-poetic jargon (a perfume advertisement), and very few indeed were capable of diagnosing a verbose and meaningless passage (by a Sunday newspaper pontiff) on the Jubilee celebration of 1935. Until the schools can be relied on to provide the rudiments, the universities should make some attempt to provide first-year courses in elementary analysis and discrimination, not merely for English—and not merely for Arts—students.] (193)

Literature, moreover, is simply the exact expression of realized values—and these values are never purely personal: even when they conflict with accepted modes they are conditioned by them, and it is part of the artist’s function (whenever he is a ‘representative man’ or not) to give precise meaning to ideas and sentiments that are only obscurely perceived by his contemporaries. The discipline of strict literary criticism is the only means we have of apprehending those embodied values with sureness and subtlety. (193)

And just as the study of literature and the literary tradition is only fruitful when it is approached from the standpoint of the present, so the selected period would need to be studied with the questions of most importance for the present held steadily in view. (The mere attempt to decide what those questions are would be not the least valuable part of a university course!) (194)

[note 1] Historians frequently resort to literature for descriptions of the social scene, but in so doing they reduce literature to the level of documentation and ignore and qualities which, as literature, it embodies. (194)

In the cultural investigation of our selected period it would be part of the English teacher’s task to show how it is possible to work back through literature—rooted, as it is bound to be, in a social milieu—to the life of the time. The connexions are rarely simple and straightforward, and dogmatic assertion must be avoided, but I suggest that there are three main paths along which exploration might be directed. There is, to start with, the evidence of style and language: … conditioned by social factors which they can be made, in part, to reveal. In the second place, literature provides an opportunity for examining the tastes and intellectual ability of the audience for which it was intended; … In the third place there is the question of the standard which every writer is bound, explicitly or implicitly, to assert. What is the relation, our investigators would have to ask, between these standards and current social codes? (196)