using the qualification sole, and brutally frank in attributing this
'humorousness' to 'the unreclaimed Teutonic element in us'. But
it strikes me that Mr. Murry, and this other voice, are either too
obstinate or too tolerant. The question is, the first question, not
what comes natural or what comes easy to us, but what is right ?
Either one attitude is better than the other, or else it is indifferent.
But how can such a choice be indifferent ? Surely the reference to
racial origins, or the mere statement that the French are thus, and
the English otherwise, is not expected to settle the question :
which, of two antithetical views, is right ? And I cannot understand why the opposition between Classicism and Romanticism should be profound enough in Latin countries (Mr. Murry says
it is) and yet of no significance among ourselves. For if the French
are naturally classical, why should there be any 'opposition' - in
France, any more than there is here ? And if Classicism is not
natural to them, but something acquired, why not acquire it here ?
Were the French in the year 16oo classical, and the English in the
same year romantic ? A more important difference, to my mind,
is that the French in the year 16oo had already a more mature
prose.
I I I
This discussion may seem to have led us a long way from the
subject of this paper. But it was worth my while to follow Mr.
Murry's comparison of Outside Authority with the Inner Voice.
For to those who obey the inner voice (perhaps 'obey' is not the
word) nothing that I can say about criticism will have the slightest
value. For they will not be interested in the attempt to find any
common principles for the pursuit of criticism. Why have
principles, when one has the inner voice ? If I like a thing, that is
all I want ; and if enough of us, shouting all together, like it, that
should be all that you (who don't like it} ought to want. The law
of art, said Mr. Clutton Brock, is all case law. And we can not only
like whatever we like to like but we can like it for any reason we
choose. We are not, in fact, concerned with literary perfection at
all - the search for perfection is a sign of pettiness, for it shows that
the writer has admitted the existence of an unquestioned spiritual
authority outside himself, to which he has attempted to conform.
We are not in fact interested in art. We will not worship Baal.
'The principle of classical leadership is that obeisance is made to
72
THE FUNCT I O N O F CR I T I C I S M
the office or to the tradition, never to the man.' And w e want, not
principles, but men.
Thus speaks the Inner Voice. It is a voice to which, for convenience, we may give a name : and the name I suggest is Whiggery.
I V
Leaving, then, those whose calling and election are sure and
returning to those who shamefully depend upon tradition and the
accumulated wisdom of time, and restricting the discussion to
those who sympathize with each other in this frailty, we may
comment for a moment upon the use of the terms 'critical' and
'creative' by one whose place, on the whole, is with the weaker
brethren. Matthew Arnold distinguishes far too bluntly, it seems
to me, between the two activities : he overlooks the capital
importance of criticism in the work of creation itself. Probably,
indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his
work is critical labour ; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing : this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism ; and (as I think I have said
before) that some creative writers are superior to others solely
because their critical faculty is superior. There is a tendency, and
I think it is a whiggery tendency, to decry this critical toil of the
artist ; to propound the thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist, unconsciously inscribing on his banner the words Muddle Through. Those of us who are Inner Deaf Mutes are,
however, sometimes compensated by a humble conscience, which,
we can, reminds us that our compositions ought to be as free from
defects as possible (to atone for their lack of inspiration), and, in
short, makes us waste a good deal of time. We are aware, too, that
the critical discrimination which comes so hardly to us has in more
fortunate men flashed in the very heat of creation ; and we do not
assume that because works have been composed without apparent
critical labour, no critical labour has been done. We do not know
what previous labours have prepared, or what goes on, in the way
of criticism, all the time in the minds of the creators.
But this affirmation recoils upon us. If so large a part of creation
is really criticism, is not a large part of what is called 'critical
writing' really creative ? If so, is there not creative criticism in the
ordinary sense ? The answer seems to be, that there is no equation.
I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is
73
ESSAYS O F GENER ALr'ZATION
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
•
autotelic ; and that criticism, by definition, i s about something
other than itself. Hence you cannorfuse creation with criticism as
you can fuse criticism with creation. The critical activity finds its
highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the
labour of the artist.
But no writer is completely self-sufficient, and many creative
writers have a critical activity which is not all discharged into
their work. Some seem to require to keep their critical powers in
condition for the real work by exercising them miscellaneously ;
others, on completing a work, need to continue the critical activity
by commenting on it. There is no general rule. And as men can
learn from each other, so some of these treatises have been useful
to other writers. And some of them have been useful to those who
were not writers.
At one time I was inclined to take the extreme position that the
011/y critics worth reading were the critics who practised, and
practised well, the art of which they wrote. But I had to stretch
this frame to make some important inclusions ; and I have since
been in search of a formula which should cover everything I
wished to include, even if it included more than I wanted. And
the most important qualification which I have been able to find,
which accounts for the peculiar importance of the criticism of
practitioners, is that a critic must have a very highly developed
sense of fact. This is by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And
it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense
of fact is something very slow to develop, and its complete
development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization. For
there are so many spheres of fact to be mastered, and our outermost sphere of fact, of knowledge, of control, will be ringed with narcotic fan
cies in the sphere beyond. To the member of the
Browning Study Circle, the discussion of poets about poetry may
seem arid, technical, and limited. It is merely that the practitioners have clarified and reduced to a state of fact all the feelings that the member can only enjoy in the most nebulous form ; the
dry technique implies, for those who have mastered it, all that the
member thrills to ; only that has been made into something
precise, tractable, under control. That, at all events, is one reason
for the value of the practitioner's criticism - he is dealing with his
facts, and he can help us to do the same.
And at every level of criticism I find the same necessity regnant.
There is a large part of critical writing which consists in 'interpreting' an author, a work. This is not on the level of the Study Circle either ; it occasionally happens that one person obtains an
understanding of another, or a creative writer, which he can
partially communicate, and which we feel to be true and illumi-
74
THE FUNCT I O N O F CR I T I C I S M
nating. I t i s difficult to confirm the 'interpretation' by external
evidence. To anyone who is skilled in fact on this level there will
be evidence enough. But who is to prove his own skill ? And for
every success in this type of writing there arc thousands of impostures. Instead of insight, you get a fiction. Your test is to apply it again and again to the original, with your view of the original
to guide you. But there is no one to guarantee your competence,
and once again we find ourselves in a dilemma.
We must ourselves decide what is useful to us and what is not ;
and it is quite likely that we are not competent to decide. But it is
fairly certain that 'interpretation' (I am not touching upon the
acrostic element in literature) is only legitimate when it is not
interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of
facts which he would otherwise have missed. I have had some
experience of Extension lecturing, and I have found only two
ways of leading any pupils to like anything with the right liking :
to present them with a selection of the simpler kind of facts about
a work - its conditions, its setting, its genesis - or else to spring
the work on them in such a way that they were not prepared to be
prejudiced against it. There were many facts to help them with
Elizabethan drama : the poems of T. E. Hulme only needed to be
read aloud to have immediate effect.
Comparison and analysis, I have said before, and Remy de
Gourmont has said before me (a real master of fact - sometimes, I
am afraid, when he moved outside of literature, a master illusionist of fact), are the chief tools of the critic. It is obvious indeed that they are tools, to be handled with care, and not
employed in an inquiry into the number of times giraffes are
mentioned in the English novel. They are not used with conspicuous success by many contemporary writers. You must know what to compare and what to analyse. The late Professor Ker had
skill in the use of these tools. Comparison and analysis need only
the cadavers on the table ; but interpretation is always producing
parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place. And
any book, any essay, any note in Notes a11d Qperies, which produces a fact even of the lowest order about a work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious critical
journalism, in journals or in books. We assume, of course, that
we are masters and not servants of facts, and that we know that
the discovery of Shakespeare's laundry bills would not be of much
use to us ; but we must always reserve final judgment as to the
futility of the research which has discovered them, in the possibility that some genius will appear who will know of a use to which to put them. Scholarship, even in its humblest forms, has
its rights ; we assume that we know how to use it, and how to
75
ESSAYS O F G F.NF.RA LI ZA T I O N · 1 9 I I:l - I 9 J O
neglect it. Of course the multiplication o f critical books and essays
may create, and I have seen it create, a vicious taste for reading
about works of art instead of reading the works themselves, it may
supply opinion instead of educating taste. But fact cannot corrupt
taste ; it can at worst gratify one taste - a taste for history, let us
say, or antiquities, or biography - under the illusion that it is
assisting another. The real corrupters are those who supply
opinion or fancy ; and Goethe and Coleridge are not guiltless - for
what is Coleridge's Hamlet : is it an honest inquiry as far as the
data permit, or is it an attempt to present Coleridge in an attractive costume ?
We have not succeeded in finding such a test as anyone can
apply ; we have been forced to allow ingress to innumerable dull
and tedious books ; but we have, I think, found a test which, for
those who are able to apply it, will dispose of the really vicious
ones. And with this test we may return to the preliminary statement of the polity of literature and of criticism. For the kinds of critical work which we have admitted, there is the possibility of
cooperative activity, with the further possibility of arriving at
something outside of ourselves, which may provisionally be called
truth. But if anyone complains that I have not defined truth, or
fact, or reality, I can only say apologetically that it was no part of
my purpose to do so, but only to find a scheme into which, whatever they are, they will fit, if they exist.
E S S A Y S O F G E N E R A LI Z A T I O N
from PREFACE TO ANABA S I S
I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabase requires a
prf'face at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder . . . .
For myself, once having had my attention drawn to the poem
by a friend whose taste I trusted, there was no need for a preface.
I did not need to be told, after one reading, that the word anabasis
has no particular reference to Xenophon or the journey of the
Ten Thousand, no particular reference to Asia Minor; and that no
map of its migrations could be drawn up. Mr. Perse is using the
word anabasis in the same literal sense in which Xenophon himself used it. The poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and
foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the
ancient East.
I may, I trust, borrow from Mr. Fabre two notions which may
be of use to the English reader. The first is that any obscurity of
the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of 'links in
the chain', of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to
incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of
such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images
coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric
civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his
memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of
each at the moment ; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.
Such selection of a
sequence of images and ideas has nothing
chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a
logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always
find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the
77
ESSAYS O F GENERALoiZAT I ON
1 9 3 0- 1 9 65
•
arrangement of images ; and even those who are capable of
appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was
not convinced of Mr. Perse's imaginative order until I had read
the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much 'fundamental brainwork'
as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the
reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister
reading an important decision on a complicated case . . . .
from THE USE OF POETRY AND
THE USE OF CRITI C I S M
[i THE N E CESS I TY OF C R I T I C I S l1
. . . The important moment for the appearance of criticism seems
to be the time when poetry ceases to be the expression of the mind
of a whole people. The drama of Dryden, which furnishes the
chief occasion for his critical writing, is formed by Dryden's perception that the possibilities of writing in the mode of Shakespeare were exhausted ; the form persists in the tragedies of such a
writer as Shirley (who is much more up to date in his comedies),
after the mind and sensibility of England has altered. But Dryden
was not writing plays for the whole people ; he was writing in a
form which had not grown out of popular tradition or popular
requirements, a form the acceptance of which had therefore to
come by diffusion through a small society. Something similar had
been attempted by the Senecan dramatists. But the part of
society to which Dryden's work, and that of the Restoration
comedians, could immediately appeal constituted something like
an intellectual aristocracy ; when the poet finds himself in an age
in which there is no intellectual aristocracy, when power is in the
hands of a class so democratized that whilst still a class it represents itself to be the whole nation ; when the only alternatives seem to be to talk to a coterie or to soliloquize, the difficulties of