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Birkholz, Daniel
2009.
The Post-Historical Middle Ages.
p.
161.
Article contents
Literature and Life Again
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
I am prompted to enter again upon this subject by two considerations, which hang together. One is that opinions I had previously expressed upon it have, in a respectable quarter, been treated with greater condescension than a man not wholly in error can well be expected to ignore; the other is that similar opinions, as I have lately noticed, have (independently) appeared in recent reputable criticism, particularly the foreign. I had said that it is not justifiable to treat literary or other art as a document, a record of the time, on the one hand, or of the author's life, on the other; that, rather, art reflects the taste of the time, and the taste of the author; and that while much of the life of the period may be reflected, and of the author, too, it is only with the greatest difficulty and uncertainty that this can be isolated and recognized. Imaginative literature is not only not history or unconscious autobiography but not even raw material for it; big allowances must be made both for the limitations and conventions of the art and also for the character of the artists. Some of these, to be sure, are realists, intent on the external object; some also are egoists, concerned, directly or indirectly, with their own nature and experience: but good art, and the greatest, is not limited or determined either by the artist's person or his day. And rather similar are the opinions of the critics Mm. Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, and Henri Bremond; and of recent notable novelists such as Proust and Gide. Like writers of their nation and of England whom I have cited in discussing the subject before, they are all of one accord against the biographical or historical attitude as unfruitful and irrelevant; and nearly all of them have much to say of Racine as one who did not recognizably reflect his time or his own life within it, and is, because of that, all the more significant as a poet.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932
References
1 Shakespeare Studies (1927), chap. ii.—The present article was to have been read before the Association, at Washington, December, 1930. As one eager not to be beyond the pale of scholarly credence, I might, even at this meeting, have found something of dogmatic sanction for this heretical doctrine of mine in the Presidential Address. [PMLA (1930) Supplement, pp. xiv–xv.] Cf. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Year's Work in English (1924), pp. 13–19, on the heresy's first appearance.
2 Gourmont, as cited (above) in my Shakespeare Studies, and Promenades (1912), iv, 189; Valéry, Variété, i, Au Sujet d'Adonis; ii, pp. 84, 112; Bremond, Nouvelles littéraires, “Racine et la Poésie Pure,” Sept. 14, 1929, et seq.; Proust, À l'Ombre, i, pp. 176 f; ii, pp. 137, 175; Gide Faux-monnayeurs (1930), pp. 236–238.
3 This is, of course, a rough statement only—“literature is no transcript.” M. Valéry is speaking of self-revelation; and of the necessity of selection,—of lighting, coloring, and making-up to suit the needs of the théâtre mental.
4 Farquhar (Belles-Lettres Series), p. xvi.
5 Since sending this article to press, I have read Mr. I. A. Richards' sane and illuminating Principles of Criticism (1928). The author knows both the arts and psychology as my opponents and I—pitiful philological Ph.D's—do not. And to profit by the prestige of his name I have added here and below some excerpts from his book as footnotes. “Whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. … Even if we knew far more than we do about how the mind works, the attempt to display the inner working of the artist's mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers. And to judge by the published work of Freud upon Leonardo or of Jung upon Goethe, psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics” (pp. 29–30). Poetic dreams are here in question; and Mr. Tinker quotes Mr. Lowes (Xanadu, p. 400) to the effect that in the case of Kubla Khan, after the lapse of one hundred and twenty-seven years, the intimate, deep-lying, personal facts on which alone such an analysis must rest are no longer discoverable. What, then, of psycho-analysis applied to Milton?
6 Ariel, p. 308.
7 Poets and Playwrights (1930), pp. 95–96.
8 Cf. Mr. Bailey in note 11, below. There are more incredible ones than he mentions: cf. the fifty volumes of the Jahrbuch!—and, with no right to speak, I am skeptical concerning such discoveries also in Corneille and Racine.
9 Biographia Literaria (N. Y., 1884, p. 376).
10 Shakespeare Studies, pp. 78–88.
11 Pp. 204–205. Here Mr. Bailey also declares “no critical road more treacherous than that which attempts to cross the gulf between imaginative work and biography or history. To find France or Spain, Mary Queen of Scots or Henry of Navarre, in the dramas is to find what no one seems to have found at the time, and what is not at all likely to be there.” —To the same effect cf. J. W. Mackail, in his Approach to Shakespeare (1930), as (pp. 5, 85) he touches on “the raging curiosity of the critics”; but this volume, by a man of letters, again, yet also of vast though discriminating erudition, reaches me too late to be used.
12 C. H. Herford, A Sketch of Recent Shakespearean Investigation, pp. 37–38.
13 C. B. Tinker, op. cit., pp. 76–77.
14 Problem Comedies of Shakespeare (1931), p. 228.
15 Lanson, Histoire (1912), p. 1080.
16 I am still defending myself—see Shakespeare Studies, pp. 79–80, 307–308, 312, etc. This strange notion that Molière was thus consciously or unconsciously exposing his domestic life hangs together with another (which I there touch upon) almost as strange, that what apparently is comic is really tragic or pathetic.—Palmer's Molière (1930).
17 I am in this paragraph indebted to Mr. Tinker, op. cit., pp. 32–33, 49–50.
18 Quarante ans (1900), i, p. 151.
19 See my Poets and Playwrights, pp. 156–157.
20 Prefaces, Second Series, p. 70.
21 Poets and Playwrights, pp. 97–98.
22 See Richards, op. cit., passim, for similar opinions, especially chapters xxxiv and xxxv.
Mr. Richards no more thinks than I do that art is aloof from life, or is for its own sake alone; but he does not take it for a document, a transcript. “It is evident that the bulk of poetry consists of statements which only the very foolish would think of attempting to verify. They are not the kind of things which can be verified. [Of us Ph.D's and our achievements Mr. Richards must not know.] Even when they are on examination, frankly false, this is no defect. Unless indeed the obviousness of the falsity forces the reader to reactions which are incongruent or disturbing to the poem. … There is a suppressed conditional clause implicit in all poetry (pp. 272–276). In the reading of King Lear what facts verifiable by science, or accepted and believed in as we believe in ascertained facts, are relevant?” (p. 282).
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