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Philip Hobsbaum

Essentials of
Literary Criticism

T&H

THAMES AND HUDSON

For my dear step-daughters, Jane and Mary,
who stand for all the students I have taught
and from whom I have sought to learn

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a

paperback is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without
the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of
binding or cover other than in which it is published,
and without a similar condition including
these words being imposed on a subsequent
purchaser.

© 1983 Thames and Hudson Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher

Printed in Hungary
Contents

Preface

I The use of criticism

II What to say about a poem 18

III Four modes of fiction 35

IV English prose style oe

V Writing notes 67

VI Structuring an essay 80

VII Background and biography 98

VIII Comparison and analysis 17%

IX The model essay / Breaking the model 131

Bibliography 143

Index 147
‘The critic’s perceptions and judgments are his, or they
are nothing; but, whether or not he has consciously
addressed himself to co-operative labour, they are
inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the
form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the
critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with’
F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit

‘The Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least

to lessen) the distance between writing and
reading, not by intensifying the reader’s projection
into the work, but by linking the two together
in a single signifying process’

Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’

Preface

The purpose of this book is to provide a guide to the detailed

discussion of literary texts. Primarily it is designed for the
first-year university student, though it should also be found useful
in the later stages of secondary or high school. It could also be
used by school and university teachers with their classes.
The basic procedure is to examine specific passages in the first
four chapters, arranged according to genre, and in chapters
5 —8 to put them in a larger context, at the same time suggesting
approaches that the student could take in writing about them.
The last chapter consolidates previous remarks on the writing
of the critical essay: the form in which, for better or worse,
students of English Literature are required to express themselves.
My reason for undertaking the book is that, as far as I am
aware, it is the first to place as much emphasis on writing
about literature as on reading it.
I wish to thank my wife for her inexhaustible patience during
the writing of this book; my university, and especially its great
library, for help without which nothing could have been done;
my teachers and students, for all I have learned from them;
and my departmental secretary, Mrs Valerie Eden, whose skill
in her craft helped to consolidate my work.
ogee :
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I The use of criticism

One’s first reaction to a work of literature is instinctive and emo-

tional. Yet this reaction implies within it the judgement that
would be evident in any reasoned account we should later give of
the text. Strictly speaking, what we do in giving such an account
is not so much analyse the text as our reaction to it. This is a use-
ful thing to do because, unless we rationalize our feelings, we
cannot be certain whether our reaction is a just one or not. Fur-
ther, it gives us a chance to check our judgement against that of
colleagues or other critics. Such a check may act as a safeguard
against misreading or prejudice. Ultimately the reasons given
for holding an opinion are as important as the opinion itself.
Alone in the field of the arts it is possible to speak of literary
criticism in terms of progress. Roughly speaking, criticism has
been tied up with the development of science and of analytical
philosophy. It had its first flowering in Ancient Greece when
Aristotle described the key dramas of his time, and it suffered
grave setbacks in the Dark Ages of the medieval period.
This does not mean that criticism is a branch of science. It
does not present factual proof so much as demonstrate a point of
view. But the language in which it couches that demonstration
resembles that of the more analytical forms of philosophy. There-
fore criticism in English has been dependent upon the develop-
ment of scientific prose. Thus the critical views of Sir Philip Sid-
ney are obscured by the rhetoric in the only form of prose open
to him in the sixteenth century. John Dryden, however, wrote
10 THE USE OF CRITICISM

concurrently with the foundation of the Royal Society. His prose

bears traces of the conceptual logic necessary for the descrip-
tion of scientific experiment and is, accordingly, all the more lu-
cid a medium for critical discussion.
Nevertheless, like most critics, Dryden was essentially a deba-
ter. Criticism seems always most to have flourished when an old
order was to be defended or a new one evinced. At its best it al-
ways has the smack of urgency. We find in the eighteenth cen-
tury Dr Johnson gravely reproving Romantic incursions upon
the neo-classical decorum of his time. Half a century later,
Wordsworth and Coleridge produced the manifesto for what
their contemporaries felt was a poetic revolution. More than
sixty years after, Matthew Arnold combined the high-minded
academicism of Johnson with the distrust of convention shown
by Wordsworth and Coleridge. His concern for the education of
personal sensibility set the central line of criticism in the twenti-
eth century. The highly analytical prose of I.A. Richards and
T.S. Eliot was developed out of Coleridge and Arnold to defend
the modern poetry which was, in the 1920s, heavily under fire.
F.R. Leavis and William Empson showed how the approach
could work retrospectively, adapting itself to the discussion of
works of the past. Their mode of criticism is itself part of a new
development in the twentieth century, the academic teaching of
English literature. This in its turn produced a cautious attempt
at consolidation, if not retrenchment, in the 1950s and 1960s.
A primary form was Historical Intentionalism, whereby the cri-
tic attempted to reconstruct the work of literature to give some
idea of how its readers saw it at the time of publication. This di-
minished the need for personal judgement. But such caution was
no doubt a result of the way in which the practice of criticism
had outrun in the present century any possible theory upon
which it could be based. An overhaul of literary theory, initiated
mostly from France, occurred in the 1970s. As a result of this,
criticism took another step forward and now emerged as a key
area of thought. The new movement was called Structuralism
and derives from the practice of such figures as the anthropolo-
THE USE OF CRITICISM 11
gist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the historian, Michel Foucault.
These writers laid great emphasis on cultural patterns as a deter-
minant of human behaviour. In terms of criticism, this means
that we should take into account our own historical standpoint
at the time of reading a work of literature, as well as the histori-
cal character of the period when it was first produced.
With all this development there is no excuse for failing to
write a lucid and persuasive prose. Earlier critics had the disad-
vantage of coping with concepts that were still nascent, and the
prose of Leavis or Blackmur, for instance, sometimes bears signs
of that struggle. The best models are often found not in criticism
but in the less exacting field of moral and analytical philosophy.
Russell, and his disciples Ryle and Ayer, are good examples of.
how an argument can be set out plainly. All three, for instance,
characteristically allow only one idea per sentence: a rule that
makes for brevity and precision.
Related to this is the nature of critical argument itself. Of ne-
cessity it must be a selection from the manifold points of view
open to the educated sensibility. The critic should select the line
of argument that seems to him most germane to his reaction to
the text, and he should follow it through rigorously without be-
ing diverted into parenthetic by-ways, no matter how beguiling
they may seem. Diversions and parentheses obscure argument.
It is much better to get one idea across than to hint at and fail to
grasp a dozen others.
Every statement should be backed up by an example and
every example should be further defined by a relevant comment.
Otherwise the reader has no way of accurately gauging the crit-
ic’s point of view.
Each point should arise logically out of the point made before
it. This can be most easily checked by classifying individual
points under various heads; alphabetical letters would do. If all
the A’s and B’s aggregate together and are followed by C’s and
D’s, well and good. The system may seem absurdly simple, but
few critical essays would stand up against an analysis couched on
these lines.
12 THE USE OF CRITICISM

The object of criticism is to describe the work and to persuade

the reader that the description is valid. Therefore precision of
fact, vocabulary and argument is of the very essence. You can-
not have any sort of a discussion if your adversary is not fully
conversant with his opponent’s point of view.
The most common mistake I find among my students is their
frequent belief that a work of literature cannot be discussed.
There is a built-in paradox here. Even when they claim a work is
not discussible they are, in a sense, discussing it. But to claim the
standpoint of total subjectivity is to discount all possibility of
criticism, of teaching, of education altogether.
Some students indeed even claim that a work ought not to be
discussed. But surely it is clear that discussion and analysis are
likely to give rise to a deeper appreciation of its quality. Only a
bad work is likely to suffer from close attention.
Another aberration I have had occasion to correct is a too lit-
eral rendering of the work. This usually takes the form of plot-
summary. Retailing the events of a play or novel is not enough:
one requires some act of interpretation, of appreciation. Other-
wise criticism becomes indistinguishable from mechanical exer-
cise such as précis.
At the other extreme is the error of the wandering argument.
It is surprising how few students sketch out their line of argu-
ment beforehand. First-year students, in particular, tend to
work by an associative method whereby one idea gives rise to
another and the essay meanders further and further away from
its original point.
Allied to this is the tendency to respond to a specific question
with an answer that was not called for; to give answers, in fact,
that are irrelevant. Even in a general essay one should take
up a definite stand to which all points made in the essay should
relate.
These are only a few of the errors that abound, but they all have
a family resemblance. Subjectivism, incoherence, irrelevance
and inconclusiveness are still the chief weaknesses of modern
critical writing.
THE USE OF CRITICISM 13

In spite of this, it is in the area of terminology that criticism

may be seen most clearly to have advanced in the twentieth cen-
tury. Nobody would wish acritical essay to be heavily technical
in the way a scientific paper must necessarily be; at the same
time it is obvious that any extension of our critical vocabulary
gives us access to a greater delicacy of description than would
otherwise be the case.
Characteristically terminology is extended by the activities of
a major critic or theorist. Thus to Richards we owe the terms, in
their current usage, ‘tone’, ‘intention’, ‘effect’, ‘sense’, ‘feeling’.
To Eliot we owe ‘dissociation of sensibility’, “objective correla-
tive’; to Leavis ‘concreteness’, ‘realization’, ‘enactment’ ; to Emp-
son ‘ambiguity’, ‘double plot’; to Winters ‘qualitative progres-
sion’, ‘imitative form’; to Lévi-Strauss ‘bricolage’; to Foucault
‘episteme’; to Shklovsky ‘defamiliarization’ or ostranenie; to
Mukaryovsky ‘foregrounding’.
Many of these were terms current in one form or another be-
fore they were taken up by the critics with whom they are now
associated. But it was these critics who gave them their present
application. Clearly it would be foolish to stuff an essay full of
such terms, whether to show modernity or knowledge: critical
terms should be the instruments of a critic’s individual sensibil-
ity. But equally clearly it would be the height of ignorance to
write as though the great critics had never improved on existing
terminology. Criticism is a progressive form of description: it
has deepened and broadened considerably in the twentieth cen-
tury. No other form of enquiry would expect its new entrants to
jettison all that had been with great pains studied out by their
predecessors.
Literature is basically not feeling, thought or judgement; liter-
ature is words. At least the words are what, initially, we must
point to. We certainly recognize that the discussion of a book on
a purely verbal level will not take us very far; at the same time
we must concede that any larger account of a given text repre-
sents something of an extrapolation.
I am far from saying that all literature must be discussed sole-
14 THE USE OF CRITICISM

ly in terms of the language it uses. But some such analysis must

take place, on or off the critic’s printed page, if he is to proceed
to larger terms. Otherwise those terms need not be valid: if the
language is not effective, and seen to be so, there is no safeguard
against reading into a badly written text our own private fanta-
sles.
The process of analysis is necessarily highly selective: other-
wise we would be faced with a discussion of a text many times
longer than the original text itself. But the points selected for
discussion should be the salient ones necessary for sustaining a
critical argument, and behind each one should be the pressure
of implication that indicates each example to be not only particu-
lar but representative.
At its best, as in the work of Empson, Leavis, James Smith
and Douglas Brown, analysis can take us further into the work
than could have been predicated of the act itself.
More than verbal analysis, the survey of form and structure is
still in process of development. This is because the discussion of
literature has so far dealt mainly with poetry and this lends itself
readily to the analysis of language. Larger forms such as tragedy
and the novel respond at least equally well to the description of
structure. For example, Wilson Knight has shown how given
images or themes hunt each other through the plays of Shake-
speare. It could also be demonstrated that Jane Austen grounds
her novels very much on patterns of human behaviour: children
picking up bad habits from their parents, or siblings reacting
against each other.
The survey of even larger issues is possible: Joseph Conrad’s
use of pause and parenthesis in plot, for example, or Henry
James’s technique of the withheld piece of information. It seems
to me that this is the area in practical criticism that most is in
process of amplification.
The great critics — Wilson Knight and Winters among them
— have shown that it is possible to assess a story in such a way as
to imply a very definite judgement upon it. This is what I should
call interpretation, as distinct from plot-summary. It has atri-
THE USE OF CRITICISM 15

partite faculty: it conveys necessary information regarding the

subject of a book, it indicates what the pattern of events actually
signifies, and it conveys the feel and atmosphere of the text un-
der survey. This last is especially important if one is to persuade
an unconversant reader that one’s chosen author is worthy of at-
tention. Roughly it may be said that the better a work is, the
more we are impelled from analysis into interpretation.
There is no way of writing criticism without in some manner
implying judgement of value. Therefore it is best to be sure what
one’s judgement is and to make it as clear to the reader as pos-
sible. This will not seem arrogant on the part of a young critic if
we remember that what he probes is his personal experience of
the work in question. It is true that he is unlikely to write so well
as Shakespeare or Pope, but this need not inhibit him from hav-
ing a reaction to their work.
A word of warning is due here. Since we are all biologically
similar, it may seem that those of us brought up in Western so-
ciety are likely to have a fairly similar reaction to work that is
good. It is true that, by very definition, work that is bad fails
to communicate. But failure in communication can also be the
fault of an inattentive reader. Very often when we attack a given
work we are simply describing that which we have failed to un-
derstand. In other words, it is very hard to have a critical discus-
sion about a work which offers no purchase to the reader. A cau-
tious analysis rather than wholesale denunciation should be the
order of the day. But such analysis is worth attempting because
it may expose valid aspects of the work that a first reading would
hastily pass over, and it does help critics who may not agree with
one’s view to see exactly why it is that one holds it. The reasons
for holding a judgement often act as a way of defining that
judgement more closely. ‘
It is worthwhile putting in order one’s view of a work because
nothing in the long run is so bad for critical judgement as whole-
sale acceptance of inferior work. Clumsily written or obscure
literature requires the reader to do a great deal of reading-in
or mental rewriting. This is all very well in dealing with inferior
16 THE USE OF CRITICISM

literature but deflects one badly when approaching a masterpiece

which requires no such over-active reading. The critic’s duty is
to see and to describe what he sees. Description of what he can
dredge up out of his sub-consciousness forms no part of his
duty. Judgement is formed by comparisons; and, once judge-
ment is reasonably formed, the critic is able to indicate some
kind of a hierarchy of existing works of literature, from those
which are ever-present classics through those of a secondary or
conventional order down to those which are so badly written as
to be scarcely present to the consciousness at all.
The critic’s duty is to keep communications open between
reader and writer, the present and the past, and also to indicate
what of that past needs most attention in our own time; to keep,
in fact, the classics before our eyes. A related duty is to discrimi-
nate among the masses of books being produced at this present
moment in order to ensure that the best work gets a fair hearing.
To do all this requires a highly developed sense of value.
It could be argued that all of: the seminal minds were literary
critics. Obviously this is so of the great writers, otherwise they
could not have done their work, but it was equally true of Marx,
Freud, Weber, Frazer and Trotsky. In our own time, it is true of
Lévi-Strauss and Foucault. Sensitivity to literary texts is a prime
requirement for those who would be at the creative front of what
is still a highly verbal society.
The term literary texts in the present argument may be held to
include political propaganda, newspapers, advertisements,
films, conceptual prose of all kinds, as well as literature proper.
If we are to avoid undue indoctrination, it will be necessary for
us to instruct as many readers as possible in the art of reading;
to inculcate, in fact, the critical spirit. Otherwise a great deal of
evasive rhetoric, operating for reasons of self-interest on the part
of the ‘writer’, will be accepted as fact and reason — with potenti-
ally disastrous consequences.
Moreover, it is essential that we all know something of how
language is used. In the absence of a once highly literate élite,
the need to preserve and develop the best in linguistic tradition
THE USE OF CRITICISM 17
to some extent devolves upon each one of us. But our capacity to
recognize excellence will be considerably impaired if we yield
uncritically to the blandishments of inferior ‘literature’ — ora-
tory, propaganda, advertising and the like.
Thus the training of a critic is also the training of a citizen: to
judge political propaganda and commercial rhetoric no less than
to choose material for personal enlightenment and entertain-
ment. The study of criticism is the study of language in action.
In a verbal society, this entails the study of civilization itself.
II What to say about a poem

A person may like and understand a poem and yet still have lit-
tle idea of what can be said about it. Nevertheless, he may find
himself required to write a critical essay with some such title as
‘Wyatt’s work is essentially a poetry of anger’ or “Herbert is one
of the truly devotional poets of English literature’. Such an es-
say, whatever its incidentals, must rest on a substratum of criti-
cal analysis.
One’s reaction to a poem is necessarily personal, but it can to
some extent be rationalized. This rationalization can be yery
useful in showing another person where you stand. Essentially,
critical discussion demonstrates a point of view. Your reader
may not, in the end, choose to agree with you, but at least he
knows your position. It is possible for me to indicate something
of what I see in the poem I am about to quote; and this is the
process we call critical analysis or critical discussion.
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 19

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart how like you this?’
It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Str THOMAS Wyatt

Analysis is a term we adopt in criticism, but it is an analogy

rather than a description. What we do is to analyse not the poem
itself but its effect upon us. Since this effect tends to be a fairly
complex one, it can be broken down into various parts; hence
the term analysis. But we must remember that the analogy does
not go very far. The poem on the page can be appreciated only
in so far as it reacts with our ideas and feelings, and affects them.
In ‘They flee from me’ by Wyatt I would ask you to look out
for what may be called the centre of the poem. This need not be
a matter of geography: the ‘centre’ is as likely to be near the
beginning or at the end as half-way through. The ‘centre’ is that
which essentially gives the poem its identity. In any work, some
parts are more crucial than others, and there usually is a climac-
tic point when one has to say ‘If anywhere, it is on this that the
poem depends’. In the Wyatt poem, such a point may be found
in stanza 2.
...In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart how like you this?’
In contrast to the rest of the poem, this is sharply seen. There is a
20 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

high degree of actuality in such phrases as ‘thin array’, ‘loose

gown’, ‘arms long and small’. Not any gown is in question; not
any arms. The adjectives limit and so define the characteristics
of this mysterious lady. This concreteness, as we may call it,
serves as a guarantee that the event happened; it enables us to
suspend our disbelief.
The poem goes on to assert ‘It was no dream’. Yet in the con-
text of the poem the vividness of this incident has a dreamlike
quality. This is not because the event is illusory but because it
stands out in marked contrast to the less focused poetry of the
whole. After all, the poem does not begin with sharp actuality —
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek.

Who are ‘they’? The term is uncomfortably inclusive, and well it

may be, for the word ‘they’ is qualified by a dependent clause,
‘that sometime did me seek’. This suggests that all who once
sought the speaker now flee from him. The details that flesh out
this inclusive concept, ‘they’, suggest nothing central to the
experience. Rather they have a tentative, hesitating quality, like
movements seen out of the corner of one’s eye. “They’ have
naked feet; ‘they’ used to stalk in the speaker’s chamber; ‘they’
were once gentle, tame and meek — these details hint at birds,
pets, children, dependents, lovers even. But at no point do they
commit the poem or the reader to an explicit statement of fact.
This effect, frequent in English poetry, is called ‘ambiguity’. In
the words of Sir William Empson, “The fundamental situation is
that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several
ways at once’. It is the combination of different areas of meaning
in such a way as to imply some part of each of them. In this case,
the total effect is that of desertion and that, essentially, is what
the poem is about. Everything that the speaker loved and trusted
has gone away.
Now we can see the second stanza in perspective. The tense
changes, from the uncertain present of the beginning to a narra-
tive concerned with an historical past. The speaker recapitulates
one event he is able to grasp, if only in recollection. It is an event
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 21
whose vividness is a guarantee that it happened. Once, things
were better; once he, the speaker, now deserted, was sought out,
caught, held, caressed. This recollection gives him a kind of for-
titude with which to contemplate a desolate present time. In the
last stanza he is able to understand his position with more dis-
tinctness. From the dispersed anxieties of the first stanza, when
all we have is a general sense of withdrawal and consequent
desolation, we move to the concentrated anger of the third
stanza, focused upon one particular betrayal. The speaker thus
lays down a basis for self-justification. The poem does not con-
clude on a hopeful note, but at least it is able to come to some
conclusion —

But since that I so kindly am served,

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

He has been treated in this kind; treated ‘kindly’ only in a

blackly ironic sense. But if he has been served in this way, justice
would demand that ‘she’ — this she who has deserted him
— should be served badly as well. Such is (a further ambiguity
here) her desert!
My discussion has not yet encompassed all that takes place in
the poem: for example, I have not considered the allegorical
possibility that the Lady is a representation of Fortune. But
then, no single analysis can contain a poem, and it should not
even make the attempt. You can raise in class discussion such
other possibilities as occur to you. What I was concerned to do
here was to show a way into the poem; an approach by way of
locating the poem’s centre.
This approach would do, too, for the next poem we are to dis-
cuss; but, in this case, we can add a further consideration to our
analysis.

THE PULLEY
When God at first made Man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by —
a2 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

Let us (said He) pour on him all we can;

Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made astay,
Perceiving that, alone of all His treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay. ~
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on My creature
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not thé God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest.
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.
GEORGE HERBERT
If we start off looking for the centre, I think we shall find it
here —
Perceiving that, alone of all His treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
Unlike Wyatt, Herbert’s point of climax coincides with his high-
est degree of ambiguity. There is a real pun here: rest remains
at the bottom of God’s tumbler. This is appropriate: rest is in-
ert, when one rests one lies reposefully, when one is resting one
does not put out an appreciable degree of energy or movement.
So the concept of rest is made actual by showing it as the last
blessing to fall from the glass. But in this inheres the allegorical
meaning of the poem. The last blessing to be conferred upon
man will be not only the latest but the rarest. ‘
The word ‘rest’ is not allowed to remain in that position, at
the bottom of a tumbler. It plays what amounts to a dramatic
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 23
role through the poem, showing this apparently inert concept in
different guises.
[man would] rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.
Further to the residual idea of rest as repose on earth, we have
the additional identification of rest as trust in God. The two
ideas, indeed, are contrasted. So the line can be glossed as fol-
lows: left to himself, man would take his ease in worldly repose
rather than seeking beyond material objects to the peace that
resides in God, and is alone to be trusted.
Or again —
Yet let him keep the rest
But keep them with repining restlessness. ..
The use of the word ‘rest’ here is ironic; a new dimension has
been added; an extra range of ambiguity. If man keeps the rest
of the blessings, he still will find himself without the rest — the
only rest worth having, rest not measurable in terms of worldly
blessings, that rest which is the peace of God. Moreover in so far
as ‘rest’ occurs in the word ‘restlessness’, it makes the absence of
rest an entity, turning a negative attribute into a very real sense
of unease. This unease melts into that disease that assails the
proprietors of worldly blessings — weariness. It is the same weari-
ness that, God says,
May toss him to My breast.
The word ‘toss’ suggests a metaphor drawn from shipwreck.
Nevertheless, the poem ends on a qualified note of hope. The
greatest misfortune — total shipwreck, even — may lead to the
greatest fortune of all, a fortune not to be estimated in worldly
terms; union with God.
Our consideration of the poem’s centre has, in this way, led us
into a discussion of language. As we have seen, the language of
this poem is both appropriate to its subject-matter and vivid in
itself. This can be located especially in the verbs. Rest, appro-
priately enough, lay in the bottom of the glass. With equal
appropriateness —
24 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

strength first made a way...

The blessing first out is the strongest; being strong, strength is
able to force a way through, to make a way.
Then beauty flowed...
‘Flowed’ is a word used to describe the movement of rivers, the
glitter of robes, the line of an accomplished dancer. Appropriate-
ness such as this runs through the stanza; indeed, throughout
the entire poem.
The language needs to be appropriate because, if it were less
effective, the poem would be little more than a sermon. As such,
it would appeal probably only to those already converted; it
would be about God, not man. ‘The Pulley’ is, after all, based on
an abstract concept; the idea of man being gifted and also self-
destructive. If one is to act this idea out, rather than to ser-
monize around it, some kind of narrative technique in language
is necessary. The poem is couched in a form which has its basis
in the Bible: the parable. Like the story of the Prodigal Son, and
that of the Good Samaritan, “The Pulley’ is a short story that, in
its acting out, conveys a moral lesson.
After the storms of the seventeenth century we have, in the
eighteenth century, what has been called the Peace of the Augus-
tans. This did not mean that emotions were wiped away. Rather
it suggested restraint, poise, the sober arrangement of one’s feel-
ings. If you read this next poem carefully, you will see that it
exhibits the sort of control that a man has to assert if he is very
angry indeed.
ATTICUS
Were there One whose fires
True Genius kindles, and fair Fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease:
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 5
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 25

And hate for arts that caus’d himself to rise;

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; 10
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserv’d to blame, or to commend,
A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading ev’n fools, by Flatterers besieged, 15
And so obliging, that he ne’er oblig’d;
Like Cato, give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While Wits and Templars ev’ry sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise:- 20
Who but must-laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if ATTICUS were he?
ALEXANDER PopE
Strictly speaking, this is not a separate poem but an extract
from a larger work. But it was originally written as an indepen-
dent piece and was only later incorporated in ‘The Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot’. Therefore we shall for the moment look at it as an
entity on its own. We shall have a chance of putting it into a
larger context later on, in Chapter S.
The centre of Atticus occurs right at the end —
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if ATTICUS were he?
This raises the question of tone — that ideal speaking voice which
we assume when we read the poem aloud or hear it in our heads,
as we should, when reading it silently. The tone is that of conver-
sation — formal and ordered, but still conversation. It is the voice
of a cultivated man of the world. He tells us about an acquaint-
ance of his — a former friend, it would seem — and his earliest
words assure us that this personage is a man to be reckoned
with. Here we must also consider the appropriateness of the lan-
guage. In the earliest lines, as I indicated, we have a vocabulary
of praise: the man has genius, he has talent, he has art, he was
26 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

born to live with ease. But even though this is praise, it is praise
in a descending scale of enthusiasm. We move from ‘genius’ to
‘ease’, in fact. This Atticus, it would seem, takes life too easily.
And, as the praise diminishes, the blame comes in (lines 5—8) in
words like ‘scornful’, ‘jealous’, ‘hate’. Out of context, this might
suggest an access of rage on the part of the speaker. But in con-
text control is never lost; the suave tone prevails; we are sure of
five stresses to a line and we always find a rhyme at the end of
the couplet. More important still, in the next section (9-16) a
third area of language asserts itself. This Atticus does not damn
outright; there would be boldness in that, and he is circumspect;
he damns ‘with faint praise’. Atticus does not wound; that
would show antagonism of an open kind; the will is there, but
not the performance —
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike...

This letting ‘I would not’ wait upon ‘I would’ produces an effect

which is best seen as ridicule. In this third section, beginning
‘Damn with faint praise’, the vocabulary of blame is combined
with words that check and modify the anger. So we move, not
into greater and greater anger, but into ridicule and contempt.
The figure of Atticus is belittled. There are words like ‘foe’
which blame; there are words like ‘tim’rous’ which take from
the blame without increasing the praise. A timorous foe is a
nasty thing to have around the place, but not especially dread-
ful. Looked at like this, the case against Atticus seems to be that
he is a coward. This is no slight criticism of him. In the book of
an eighteenth-century gentleman, only a few sword-thrusts away
from the Civil War, a coward would rank lower even than a vil-
lain or a fool. Atticus is worse than a fool; he sits attendant
upon the praise of fools. The ‘blame’ language, modified into
ridicule, gives rise to the picture of a mock senator. It is blame-
worthy in a Roman senator to court applause, but it is ridiculous
for a man of letters to give himself the airs of a senator. We are
asked (17-21) to contemplate the pretentiousness of an eight-
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM Di

eenth-century coffee house deliberating solemnly in the manner

of a Roman forum. So the comedy rises —
While Wits and Templars ev’ry sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise; —
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?...
Left here, the poem would be a comic portrait, one of many
character-sketches that delighted the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries alike. But Pope does not leave the matter here. All
along, the metre with its regular stress and regular rhyme has
maintained continuity, so that even at the end we are not for-
mally very far from the regulated praise of the beginning. At this
point (line 22) Pope forces us to remember that initial praise —
were there one whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair Fame inspires;
oie) Sed ‘el(a a ee wfie: ehleyta, Sr sien] (e-lel'e! ohiel fevuliele es s,s cule <egs\ ets is)» <0

Who would not weep if Atticus were he?

If this coffee-house Cato were a mere buffoon, like the scribblers
and law-students who surround him, one might laugh. A ridicu-
lous man would then be shown in a posture which invited ridi-
cule. But this is neither wit nor templar; this is a man with the
potential of human greatness. It has all been cast away by reason
of his pusillanimity. His fall from grace therefore invites, even
from the Augustan man-about-town, not comedy but pathos.
The balance of the poem is effected by keeping praise, blame
and ridicule in equipoise. If the praise recedes into the back-
ground, the judged and certain movement of the verse makes
sure it is not lost sight of. Indeed, the justness of the praise is re-
established with a fresh poignancy when we realize at length, in
that last line, how far the subject of the poem has ceased to
deserve it.
In discussing the centre, the language and the tone of the
poem, notice that we have also had to discuss its structure. We
have shown the way in which one area of meaning gives place to
another or contrasts with it. This may well be typified as Praise
28 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM
(lines 1-4); Blame (lines 5—8); Increasing Ridicule (lines 9-21);
Praise (line 22). Consideration of structure will be to the fore in
our discussion of the next poem, a twentieth-century work by a
nineteenth-century master.

DURING WIND AND RAIN

They sing their dearest songs —
He, she, all of them — yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face. ...
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss —
Elders and juniors — aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat. ...
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all —
Men and maidens — yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee. ...
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them — aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. ...
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

THomas Harpy
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 29

Like many of Hardy’s better poems, this piece is more compli-

cated than it looks. It has not one centre but several. Each one
is, however, more emphatically brought out than the last.
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs...
See, the white storm-birds wing across...
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall...
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs...
Notice the concreteness of the language. As I said regarding
other poems, this guarantees the authenticity of the experience
conveyed. The leaves do not just fall; they reel, like sick men
striving to hold themselves on end. The movement mimes the
sense; it is heavy, it lurches.
These climactic lines contrast violently with the light and trip-
ping stanzas of which they are ostensibly part. This contrast is
brought out by the wrenching of the rhythm; I doubt whether
any of the climactic lines, in context, can be scanned. Great
weight is laid on the stresses, and there is a high proportion of
stressed to unstressed syllables.
But, even in this contrast, there is contiguity. This is found not
only in the proximity of each climactic line to its parent stanza,
nor in the fact that each carries a rhyme word, but also in a kind
of calculated mockery of the hopes of man as stated in the main
body of the poem. In the first stanza the family sing their favour-
ite songs, but the last line parodies the basic dance movement; in
more senses than one, it reels. The climactic lines of the next two
stanzas intercross, so that the forlorn storm-birds of stanza two
relate to the pet fowl of stanza three. Similarly, the garden acti-
vities of stanza two are transmuted into the decay instinct in the
last line of stanza three —
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
Structurally, then, the poem is an amalgam of two contrasted
works, one about a hopeful family, the other, four lines long,
about the inevitability of death and decay. Each of these works
 30 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

is broken into four parts, and each single part of the ‘hope’
poem is contrasted with a part of the four line poem about des-
pair. The effect may be represented in part as Aw/By/Cx/Dz.
Most poignant of all is the contrast in the last stanza. By that
time we have become conditioned to expect the worst to happen.
The hopes of the family changing to their high new house are
mocked even while they are in the process of removal. What the
refrain does here is to symbolize their destruction. It makes a
connection with the rest of the stanza: the people move to a new
house; a house is a thing of walls; walls are stone; stone decays.
It equally makes a connection with the other refrain-lines: the
rotten rose is ripped from the wall in stanza three, leaving the
stone; but in stanza four, even the stone decays. My paraphrase
does not do justice to the vigour of Hardy’s language; in fact,
the raindrop ploughs the stone, not to fertilize, but to efface. The
lively family whom we have seen singing, gardening, picnicking
and moving house are not allowed to remain even as a memory,
for
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

As well as looking at the centre — centres, in this case — we

* have broadened our analysis to take in considerations of lan-
guage, tone and, in looking at these tonal contrasts, structure.
Equally, as with the other poems discussed, this is not the only
possible approach. The components of a good poem are many
and various, and no one account is going to do justice to them
all. Criticism, in other words, is not the end of reading a poem;
it is the beginning.
Contrast of language, then, indicates contrast of tone; con-
trast of tone implies a consideration of structure; and, as our
discussion of the next poem will show, this can lead to an ana-
lysis of dramatic form.
JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 31
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
32 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
T. S. Exror

The centre here is at the beginning! We are confronted with

the fact of a hard journey. It is acted out in touches of sharp
detail — ‘the camels ... lying down in the melting snow ... a
temperate valley, wet, below the snow line ... three trees on the
low sky .. .’ But the detail exists on at least two levels. This is not
just the description of one particular journey but a symbolic pat-
tern referring to others. The three trees irresistibly remind us of
the three crosses on which Jesus and the robbers hung. Even
though the Kings are called to the Nativity, it is the Crucifixion
that is suggested —
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver.
This conflates the silver paid to Judas with the soldiers dicing for
Christ’s garments. It is detail like this, at once descriptive and
symbolic, that reinforces the puzzlement behind the speaker’s
question —
were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
We are brought to the recognition that the hard journey of the
poem is itself symbolic. It represents, among other things, the
difficult path the Christian takes after conversion. After they have
been present at the Nativity, the Kings are
no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation:
The whole poem is a feat of encapsulation. We have the tone of
a Magus speaking, the weary tone of a man who has suffered to
the extreme of his endurance. There is a shudder in the speeding
up of the rhythm towards the end of the first line; distaste in the
heavy emphasis upon the words ‘worst’ and ‘journey’; a sense of
muscular effort, of kinaesthesia, in the consonantally end-
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM 33
stopped words ‘deep’, ‘sharp’, ‘dead’. This would seem to put
the poem sharply in the present. Yet it records a journey that
must have taken many months; it retells the Nativity story; it
forecasts the Crucifixion; it intimates the agonies of the life to
come. Moreover, the poem cannot really be in the present, for it
is spoken by a Magus, and such afigure, if he had said anything,
would have said it two thousand years ago. The form is that of
the dramatic monologue, and it is ironic that it should be Eliot,
usually considered a difficult ‘modern’, whose work should be
the only poem here capable of being so readily placed in a cate-
gory. The dramatic monologue can be taken as a poem spoken
by someone other than the author; that embodies some revela-
tion of character; that conveys the feel and presence of a drama-
tic situation. As this will suggest, a dramatic monologue is a
concise substitute for a play. It is as though this speech occurred
in Act V of an otherwise unwritten drama. One should make a
distinction, however: the speech conveys the essence of that part
of the drama not played out before. It is couched in a form that
is an excellent way of handling experience economically. Eliot
gets through a great deal in comparatively few lines. That, in
itself, would not make the poem a success. But we should con-
sider. the immediate scenic effect of the journey, the way in which
the larger issues of crucifixion and conversion are implied, and,
not least, the way in which the tone of the poem conveys the
voice and character of the Magus. When this is brought under
review, we see that Eliot is a direct and living poet, in many res-
pects not unlike Herbert (whom he greatly admired) and Hardy.
There are, of course, obvious differences between the poems
under discussion. For one thing, each of the authors grew up in
a different century. ‘They flee from me’ was written in the 1520s
and ‘The Journey of the Magi’ in the 1920s. One would certainly
expect some difference of technique in a period covering four
hundred years. But we have seen that these poems, different as
they are, do not require wildly different approaches. Moreover,
each particular approach implies something of another. It is im-
possible to discuss what I have called the centre without bring-
34 WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

ing in the question of appropriateness in language. When we dis-

cuss language, we necessarily bring in our reactions to the tone
of a poem — how it would condition, in delivery, an ideal speak-
ing voice. Tone relates to form the moment we begin to compare
disparate areas of language with each other within the total
structure of the poem. In the end, it does not matter where we
start with a poem, so long as what we bring into consideration is
relevant to the text under discussion. That is to say, if we look at
the poem and do not substitute for it fantasy, biography, point-
scoring or the like, we shall find ourselves bringing some part of
our reaction into rationality and conveying it to other readers.
The rational discourse cannot replace the poem. But you may
help others, as well as yourself, if you make clear what you un-
derstand of your reading. At the best, critical analysis allows us
to make sure that a text has been looked at as carefully as is
practicable. In any case, such analysis is a way of developing
one’s powers of reasoned discussion.
III Four modes of fiction

There are almost as many ways of reading fiction as there are

readers. However, some modes of writing assert themselves
more strongly than others. This is especially true if we read the
classics: those texts which have lasted beyond their immediate
period and survive into our own.
Some novels signal to us in such a way as to create the antici-
pation of comedy. They have a kind of realism that is restrained
or angled so as to preclude our identifying with the central char-
acter; the protagonist. This entails the notation of character and
events in a manner explicit enough to render them recognizable.
However, it does not entail photographic naturalism. We can
adopt a term patented by Northrop Frye and call this mode
Low-Mimetic. Professor Frye used this term as a way of describ-
ing protagonists who fail to rise above their environment. Here
I adapt it to suggest a kind of writing which is narrative without
being intensely dramatic.
If there is a low-mimetic mode, it would be logical to infer
that there must be a high-mimetic mode as well. This may be
identified with tragedy, where the language acts out the meaning
in a highly dramatic way. In prose, it is what F. R. Leavis called
‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem’. One need not altogether
empathize with the protagonist; but one tends to, in the High-
Mimetic mode.
Sometimes, however, we may be conscious of a distance deli-
berately imposed between us and the characters. They are held
36 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

up for our amused contemplation, often to the accompaniment

of a good deal of authorial comment. Sometimes, indeed, the
author himself is a palpable presence, a stage-manager or pup-
pet-master, quite explicitly telling us what to think. This mode is
sometimes ironic, sometimes moralistic. Quite often we are
aware of a split level of narration: the author may separate the
foolish character’s point of view from his own informed one in
order to satirize what he considers to be ridiculous behaviour or
to point a moral. This is what may be termed the Didactic mode.
A mode which has been particularly wide-spread among ser-
ious authors in the twentieth century attempts realism through
imitating the consciousness of particular characters. This mode
has predecessors in the eighteenth century: when a character in
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne becomes unconscious, the
page goes black! Nowadays, writing that follows the prota-
gonists’ consciousness tends to be associated with two spectacu-
lar exponents of this mode, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
One cannot, without many qualifications, term them realistic,
for the flicker of attention is necessarily stylized when given a
degree of permanence in fictional form. When bits of detail are
seen to be dispersed in such a way as to simulate an intermittent
consciousness, the mode may be termed /mpressionist.
One of the best exponents of the first of these modes, the Low-
Mimetic, is Jane Austen.

From: Pride and Prejudice (1813) Volume I, Chapter iii

Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to
sit down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr Darcy had
been standing near enough for her to overhear a conversation between
him and Mr Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes to
press his friend to join it.
‘Come, Darcy,’ said he, ‘I must have you dance. I hate to see you
standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better
dance.’
‘I certainly shall not. You know howIdetest it, unless I am particu-
larly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 37

be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another

woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand
up with.’
‘I would not be so fastidious as you are,’ cried Bingley, ‘for a king-
dom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my
life as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see, un-
commonly pretty.’
‘You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,’ said Mr
Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.
‘Oh, she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one
of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and
I daresay very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.’
‘Which do you mean?’ and turning round, he looked for a moment
at Elizabeth, till, catching her eye, he withdrew his own, and coldly
said, ‘She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; and
I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who
are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and
enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.’
Mr Bingley followed his advice. Mr Darcy walked off; and Eliza-
beth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the
story, however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a
lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.
JANE AUSTEN
We are given an insight into Elizabeth’s feelings but we are
not encouraged to identify with her. In close proximity to this
insight there is a comment on Elizabeth — ‘lively, playful’
— which could come only from the author. The centre of con-
sciousness in Pride and Prejudice relates to the way in which its
protagonist sees things, but it includes more detachment and
perception than she as yet possesses. We never lose the sense
that the book is an account of a young woman growing out of
prejudice and into judgement. Necessarily, there is an element of
distance in the comedy. Darcy’s behaviour causes Elizabeth
some indignation, but it is not relayed to us directly in her voice.
The novel is written in a third person: there is an intermediary
that sees what Elizabeth sees, and more besides. In other words,
38 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

the narrative is refracted in such a way as to inhibit dramatic

confrontation. Nothing is taken to extremes.
Jane Austen did not invent this mode. She learned a good deal
from her predecessors, including some who may be seen as less
talented than herself. To say that a piece of writing is in a given
mode is not necessarily to imply an evaluation. It is plain that
the ball scene in Pride and Prejudice derives from a similar scene
in an earlier novel; but it is obvious that this novel is a cruder
performance altogether.
From: Evelina (1778), Letter XII
It must have passed while I was sitting with Mrs Mirvan in the card-
room. Maria was taking some refreshment, and saw Lord Orville
advancing for the same purpose himself; but he did not know her,
though she immediately recollected him. Presently after, a very gay-
looking man, stepping hastily up to him, cried, ‘Why, my Lord, what
have you done with your lovely partner?’
‘Nothing! answered Lord Orville with a smile and a shrug.
‘By Jove,’ cried the man, ‘she is the most beautiful creature I ever
saw in my life!’
Lord Orville, as he well might, laughed; but answered, ‘Yes, a pretty
modest-looking girl.’
‘O my Lord!’ cried the madman, ‘she is an angel!’
‘A silent one,’ returned he.
“Why ay, my Lord, how stands she as to that? She looks all intelli-
gence and expression.’
‘A poor weak girl!’ answered Lord Orville, shaking his head.
‘By Jove,’ cried the other, ‘I am glad to hear it!’
At that moment, the same odious creature who had been my former
tormentor, joined them. Addressing Lord Orville with great respect, he
said, ‘I beg pardon, my Lord, - if I was — as I fear might be the case
— rather too severe in my censure of the lady who is honoured with
your protection — but, my Lord, ill-breeding is apt to provoke a man.’
‘Ill-breeding!’ cried my unknown champion, ‘impossible! that ele-
gant face can never be so vile a mask!’
‘O Sir, as to that,’ answered he, ‘you must allow me to judge; for
though I pay all deference to your opinion — in other things, — yet
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 39
I hope you will grant — and I appeal to your Lordship also — that I am
not totally despicable as a judge of good or ill-manners.’
‘I was so wholly ignorant,’ said Lord Orville, gravely, ‘of the provo-
cation you might have had, that I could not but be surprised at your
singular resentment.’
‘It was far from my intention’, answered he, ‘to offend your lord-
ship; but, really, for a person who is nobody, to give herself such airs,
— I own I could not command my passion. For, my Lord, though
I have made diligent inquiry — I cannot learn who she is.’
“By what I can make out,’ cried my defender, ‘she must be a country
parson’s daughter.’
‘He! he! he! very good, ’pon honour!’ cried the fop; — ‘well, so
I could have sworn by her manners.’
And then, delighted at his own wit, he laughed, and went away, as
I suppose, to repeat it.
FANNY BURNEY
As in Pride and Prejudice, the scene is described partly
through the eyes of the young woman who is the protagonist of
the novel. ‘It [the ensuing dialogue] must have passed while
I was sitting with Mrs Mirvan in the card-room.’ Unlike Pride
and Prejudice, however, this novel is written largely in the first
person, mostly in the form of letters from Evelina to her guar-
dian and friends. But this circumstance does not prevent our
having a sense of the author’s implied presence. Nothing in this
passage, or indeed in the book itself, would lead us to believe the
passive Evelina capable of the sarcasm of the last line quoted:
‘And then, delighted at his own wit, he laughed, and went away,
as I suppose, to repeat it.’ This is not the ‘silent angel’ talking
but a lively and informed narrator. Since the book is very much
about Evelina, the third-person narrative in this case brings
about an instability of mode. The problem of reconciling third-
person perceptions with first-person narrative is more satisfac-
torily solved in the following.
From: Clarissa (1747-48) Letter XVII
Before the usual breakfast-time was over my father withdrew with
40 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

my mother, telling her he wanted to speak to her. Then my sister and

next my aunt (who was with us) dropped away.
My brother gave himself some airs of insult, which I understood
well enough; but which Mr Solmes could make nothing of: and at last
he arose from his seat. Sister, said he, I have a curiosity to show you.
I will fetch it. And away he went; shutting the door close after him.
I saw what all this was for. I arose; the man hemming up for a
speech, rising and beginning to set his splay feet [indeed, my dear, the
man in all his ways is hateful to me!] in an approaching posture. I will
save my brother the trouble of bringing to me his curiosity, said I.
I curtsied — your servant, sir. The man cried, madam, madam, twice,
and looked like a fool. But away I went — to find my brother to save my
word. But my brother, indifferent as the weather was, was gone to walk
in the garden with my sister. A plain case that he had left his curiosity
with me, and designed to show me no other.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON

More evidently than the writing of Jane Austen or Fanny

Burney, this is dramatic. The passage is seen through the eyes of
the young woman concerned, but the distance varies. The first
sentence shows us the figure at a remove, but, by the second para-
graph, we are much nearer. At this point the prose breaks
down, quite appropriately considering the subject, into dia-
logue. The family is making itself scarce in order to give the suitor
free play. When the brother leaves, Mr Solmes is uncomfortably
near — through Clarissa’s eyes, we notice his splay feet. The nar-
rative varies in distance all the time. Sometimes the prose resem-
bles in its curtness and precision the mode adopted by stage dir-
ections, and the dialogue incorporates an effect of interruption
normally associated with the theatre. Indeed, there were certain
playwrights whom we know Richardson to have liked. They will
be found, however, to lack his subtlety.
From: The London Merchant (1731)
To her BARNWELL, bowing very low. LUCY at a distance.
Millwood. Sir! the surprise and joy —
Barnwell. Madam —
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 4]
Millwood. This is such a favour. Advancing
Barnwell. Pardon me, madam.
Millwood. So unhoped for. Still advances
GEORGE LILLO
Richardson has the advantage over the old dramatists of being
able to get inside his characters. We never lose sight in his narra-
tive mode of the consciousness of the central figures. Like other
novels of the period, Clarissa is told in letters. But, in the hands
of Richardson, this means that we have a number of possible
viewpoints clearly diversified. Despite this, we are never in
doubt of the narrative framework. Description does not swamp
the reader; neither does it evaporate and leave the dialogue
devoid of authorial judgement.
Richardson has been called, by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, the
Shakespeare of Prose! Only Shakespearé can be called that, un-
less some readers feel the title should go to Dickens in order to
acknowledge that, like Richardson, Dickens got some of his best
effects from the theatre. He adapted them, however, into a very
different mode.
From: Bleak House (1852—3) Chapter XXXII
. Mr Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and
balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to
tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws
his hand away.
‘What, in the Devil’s name,’ he says, ‘is this! Look at my fingers!’
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch
and sight, and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil,
with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
‘What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out
of window?’
‘I pouring out of window! Nothing,I swear! Never, since I have
been here!’ cries the lodger.
And yet look here— and look here! When he ie the candle, here,
from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away
down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool.
4? FOUR MODES OF FICTION

‘This is a horrible house’, says Mr Guppy, shutting down the win-

dow. ‘Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off.’
He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that
he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy, and stood
silently before the fire, when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve, and all
those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in
the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the
lodger says:
‘It’s the appointed time at last. Shall I go?’
Mr Guppy nods, and gives him a ‘lucky touch’ on the back; but not
with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.
He goes downstairs; and Mr Guppy tries to compose himself,
before the fire, for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute
or two the stairs creak, and Tony comes swiftly back.
‘Have you got them?’
‘Got them! No. The old man’s not there.’
He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval, that his ter-
ror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him, and asks loudly, ‘What’s
the matter?’
‘I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked
in. And the burning smell is there — and the soot is there, and the oil is
there — and he is not there!’ — Tony ends this with a groan.
Mr Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and
holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has
retreated close to it, and stands snarling — not at them; at something on
the ground, before the fire. There is very little fire left in the grate, but
there is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark
greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the
bottle so rarely absent from the table all stand as usual. On one chair-
back, hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat...
... What’s the matter with the cat?’ says Mr Guppy. ‘Look at her!’
‘Mad, I think. And no wonder, in this evil place.’
They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains
where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground,
before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the
light.
Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from alit-
tle bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 43
steeped in something; and here is — is it the cinder of a small charred
and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal?
O Horror, he is here! and this, from which we run away, striking out
the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that repre-
sents him.
CHARLES DICKENS

This is the High-Mimetic mode par excellence. The prose

seems impersonal in one sense of the word, yet it brings its signi-
ficant details almost under our noses. We are, for the moment,
quite close to the character, Guppy. The closeness lies in the im-
mediacy of the writing: it accumulates sensations. There is
touch: ‘he hastily draws his hand away’, ‘“look at my fingers!”’,
‘a thick, yellow liquor defiles them’. There is hearing: ‘Saint
Paul’s bell strikes twelve’, in sonorous monosyllables. There is
smell: ‘a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room’. In how-
ever uncertain a light, we can see; but what we see is horrific: ‘a
small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white
ashes’. This, we understand almost immediately, is all that is left
of Old Krook, the rag-and-bone merchant. He has blown himself
up by ingesting spirituous liquors. The fact that this could not
happen in real life does not diminish its effect here. Neverthe-
less, one could not imagine any of this in Jane Austen!
The dialogue, like the sensory effect, is thrust upon us —

‘What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of
window?’
‘I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been
here!”

The rhythm in both description and dialogue is strongly

marked. One could almost scan Dickens as verse. He writes here
in a mode stemming not from the bourgeois theatre of George
Lillo so much as from poetic drama; perhaps, especially, Shake-
spearian tragedy at its most emotionally fraught.
44 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

From: Macbeth (1606) Act II

Macbeth. I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?
Lady Macbeth. I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
Macbeth. When?
Lady Macbeth. Now.
Macbeth. As I descended?
Lady Macbeth. Ay.
Macbeth. Hark!
Who lies i’ the second chamber?
Lady Macbeth. Donalbain.
Macbeth. This is a sorry sight. /Looking on his hands]
Lady Macbeth. A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.
Macbeth. There’s one did laugh in’s sleep, and one cried
‘Murder!’
That they did wake each other: I stood and heard
them:
But they did say their prayers, and address’d them
Again to sleep.
Lady Macbeth. There are two lodg’d together.
Macbeth. One cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen’ the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands:
Listening their fear, I could not say ‘Amen,’
When they did say ‘God bless us!’
Lady Macbeth. Consider it not so deeply.
Macbeth. But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?
I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
Stuck in my throat.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Both Shakespeare and Dickens rely on thrusting sharp details

FOUR MODES OF FICTION 45

upon our attention. In Dickens, some of these details occur as

description and others occur in the dialogue. In Shakespeare, all
is dialogue. In this example, it is terse, miming the emotion of
the speakers. However, the dialogue may very well contain de-
scription —
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand...?
The High-Mimetic mode, moreover, can go higher than this.
Sometimes, for effect, Shakespeare practically lifts the language
on to stilts. Occasionally this is to show dissimulation —
Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood...
Sometimes the language is raised to show mania, as with the
grandiloquent Antony, in Antony and Cleopatra —
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze...
The High-Mimetic mode can get even higher, but it seldom
works at such an altitude, and especially not in prose. Consider
this —
Ah! wretched men, what woe is this ye suffer? Shrouded in night are
your heads and faces and knees, and kindled is the voice of wailing,
and all cheeks are wet with tears, and the walls and the fair spaces
between the pillars are sprinkled with blood...
or this —
Far and gray, on the heath, the dreadful strides of ghosts are seen: the
ghosts of those who fell bend forward to their song. Bid, O Cathmor!
the harps to rise, to brighten the dead, on their wandering blasts...
These are, respectively, the Butcher and Lang (1879) translation
of Homer’s Odyssey and James Macpherson’s entirely spurious
‘translation’ (1763) of the Gaelic bard, Ossian. In verse such
writing might be termed the Grand Style; but, even in verse, it
often fails. In prose, the reader is liable to be embarrassed by the
46 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

over-statement — ‘wretched men, what woe’ — and bludgeoning

emphasis — ‘dreadful strides of ghosts’. This is the High-Mimetic
mode gone wrong. Fortunately, it is a kind of writing we hardly
ever come across now. One can see from all this that value
resides not in the mode itself but in the way in which the author
handles it. Shakespeare can use as a special effect what for
Butcher and Lang and for Macpherson is mere posturing, empty
of emotional content.
Almost at the other extreme is the mode which may be termed
Didactic. It is one where the author is very definitely present and
where, therefore, everything else is liable to seem somewhat
diminished. Certainly the descriptive details in the following
passage seem at a considerable distance from the reader.
From: Pendennis (1848-53) Chapter I
At sunset, from the lawn of Fairoaks, there was a pretty sight; it and
the opposite park of Clavering were in the habit of putting on a rich
golden tinge, which became them both wonderfully. The upper win-
dows of the great house flamed so as to make your eyes wink; the little
river ran off noisily westward, and was lost in a sombre wood, behind
which the towers of the old abbey church of Clavering (whereby that
town is called Clavering St Mary’s to the present day) rose up in purple
splendour. Little Arthur’s figure and his mother’s cast long blue shad-
ows over the grass: and he would repeat in a low voice (for a scene of
great natural beauty always moved the boy, who inherited this sensibi-
lity from his mother) certain lines beginning, ‘These are Thy glorious
works, Parent of God; Almighty! Thine this universal frame,’ greatly
to Mrs Pendennis’s delight. Such walks and conversations generally
ended in a profusion of filial and maternal embraces: for to love and to
pray were the main occupations of this dear woman’s life: and I have
often heard Pendennis say in his wild way, that he felt that he was sure
of going to heaven, for his mother never could be happy there without
him.

W. M. THACKERAY
The nineteenth-century reader was more attuned to this mode
than is his counterpart in the twentieth century. In those days
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 47

the literate minority had a good deal of leisure and often

required not only to be amused but also instructed. Thackeray
here assumes what has been called the role of the omniscient
narrator. That is to say, he observes, on our behalf, the sunset,
the lawn, the house; he overhears the boy reciting to his mother,
claims his acquaintance after he has grown up, and makes explic-
it comments on the action as it proceeds. We are not allowed to
identify with the characters. The author is plainly distinguish-
able in his plot; directing, stage-managing, even prompting.
Thackeray himself, at the end of his most famous novel, Vanity
Fair, compared his activity with that of a puppet-master. It is at
an extreme from the High-Mimetic mode of narration favoured
by his great rival, Dickens. Though it shares some attributes
with the Low-Mimetic mode, it differs in placing much more
weight upon the explicit presence of the narrator.
Like the Low-Mimetic mode — that of Jane Austen, for exam-
ple — the Didactic mode has its roots in the eighteenth century.
In this particular case, the opening of Pendennis, it most
obviously derives from Henry Fielding.
From: Tom Jones (1749) Book I Chapter 2
In that part of the western division of this kingdom which is com-
monly called Somersetshire, there lately lived and perhaps lives still, a
gentleman whose name was Allworthy, and who might well be called
the favourite of both Nature and Fortune; for both of these seem to
have contended which should bless and enrich him most. In this con-
tention Nature may seem to some to have come off victorious, as she
bestowed on him many gifts, while Fortune had only one gift in her
power; but in pouring forth this, she was so very profuse, that others
perhaps may think this single endowment to have been more than
equivalent to all the various blessings which he enjoyed from Nature.
From the former of these he derived an agreeable person, a sound con-
stitution, a sane understanding, and a benevolent heart; by the latter,
he was decreed to the inheritance of one of the largest estates in the
county.
This gentleman had in his youth married a very worthy and beauti-
ful woman, of whom he had been extremely fond: by her he had three
48 _ FOUR MODES OF FICTION

children, all of whom died in their infancy. He had likewise had the
misfortune of burying his beloved wife herself, about five years before
the time in which this history chooses to set out. This loss, however
great, he bore like a man of sense and constancy, though it must be
confessed he would often talk a little whimsically on this head; for he
sometimes said he looked on himself as still married, and considered
his wife as only gone alittle before him, a journey which he should
most certainly, sooner or later, take after her; and that he had not the
least doubt of meeting her again in a place where he should never part
with her more — sentiments for which his sense was arraigned by one
part of his neighbours, his religion by a second, and his sincerity by a
third.
HENRY FIELDING

We note the expansive manner, the leisured delivery, the air of

knowing past as well as present events; knowing, also, not only
the central characters but the context that surrounds them. In its
turn, the mode derives from the essays and character sketches of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which are best consi-
dered as a secular and genial form of sermonizing — ‘He is now
in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty; keeps a good
house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but
there is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather
beloved than esteemed’. That is the fictional Sir Roger de Cover-
ley, described on his first entry into The Spectator (1711-14), a
periodical written almost entirely by two authors, Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele.
In the twentieth century — certainly until the 1950s — the
sophisticated reader tended to expect something very different in
fiction; the Impressionist mode. This contrasts very strongly
with the Didactic mode, which was not much favoured during
this period, and relates to the High-Mimetic mode in so far as
that mode derives from drama. The difference between the
High-Mimetic mode and Impressionism is that the latter tends
to break up a dramatic narrative very much after the manner in
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 49

which the individual characters might be thought to have ex-

perienced it.
From: Jacob’s Room (1922) Chapter 1
‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather
deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved
the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly
filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she
had the illusion that the mast of Mr Connor’s little yacht was bending
like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful
things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regu-
lar; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
‘...nothing for it but to leave,’ she read.
‘Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play’ (the shadow of Archer, her
eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and
she felt chilly — it was the third of September already), ‘if Jacob doesn’t
want to play’ — what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

When Betty Flanders cries, the bay quivers and the lighthouse
wobbles. In other words, the tears in her eyes distort the land-
scape. This is because the landscape exists as something seen by
her; it is the product of her vision. Though this seems modern in
its approach, John Donne in the early seventeenth century
addressed the sun, saying ‘I could eclipse and cloud thee with a
wink’. Bishop Berkeley wrote in the eighteenth century that
things only existed in the minds of those perceiving them. How-
ever, there can be no doubt that highly personalized viewpoints
such as these are more widespread in the twentieth century than
in centuries preceding. One of the greatest exponents of impres-
sionism was an exact contemporary of Virginia Woolf, writing
quite independently of her.
From: Ulysses (1922) Proteus
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him
the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé, Louis Veuillot
50 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

called Gautier’s prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind
have silted here. And there, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren
of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and
stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout’s toys. Mind you don’t get one
bang on the ear. I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well
boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz
odz an Iridzman.
JAMES JOYCE

Notice that the description is broken up into sense-impres-

sions and is interspersed with the random thoughts of the narra-
tor who is the protagonist. This protagonist is Stephen Dedalus,
a young man walking on the strand. The stream of conscious-
ness, as this form of writing is called, can go even further. James
Joyce himself went on to write a book, Finnegans Wake (1939),
in which a sleeping man half-remembers, half-fantasizes, jour-
neys and events — ‘Eins within a space and a weary wide space it
was ere wohned a Mookse.’
I have already instanced Donne and Berkeley as being rather
isolated examples of the Impressionist mode in their own time.
More accessible and definitely more popular in his own period,
which was just before the onset of Romanticism, was Laurence
Sterne.

From: Tristram Shandy (1759-65) Book IV

Chapter XI
We shall bring all things to rights, said my father, setting his foot upon
the first step from the landing. — This Trismegistus, continued my
father, drawing his leg back and turning to my uncle Toby — was the
greatest (Toby) of all earthly beings — he was the greatest king — the
greatest law-giver — the greatest philosopher — and the greatest priest
— and engineer — said my uncle Toby.
— In course, said my father.
FOUR MODES OF FICTION 51

Chapter XII
— And how does your mistress? cried my father, taking the same step
over again from the landing, and calling to Susannah, whom he saw
passing by the foot of the stairs with a huge pin-cushion in her hand
— how does your mistress? As well, said Susannah, tripping by, but
without looking up, as can be expected. - What a fool am I! said my
father, drawing his leg back again — let things be as they will, brother
Toby, ’tis ever the precise answer — And how is the child, pray? — No
answer. And where is Dr Slop? added my father, raising his voice
aloud, and looking over the ballusters — Susannah was out of hearing.
Of all the riddles of a married life, said my father, crossing the land-
ing in order to set his back against the wall, whilst he propounded it to
my uncle Toby — of all the puzzling riddles, said he, in a marriage state,
— of which you may trust me, brother Toby, there are more asses loads
than all Job’s stock of asses could have carried — there is not one that
has more intricacies in it than this — that from the very moment the
mistress of the house is brought to bed, every female in it, from my
lady’s gentlewoman down to the cinder-wench, becomes an inch taller
for it; and give themselves more airs upon that single inch, than all
their other inches put together.
LAURENCE STERNE

Here we are supposed to be aware that the consciousness is that

of the narrator who is also the hero of the book. Everybody
exists in so far as they relate to him, and yet he does not succeed
in getting born until the third section of his narrative. What we
experience ourselves in reading the book is a mixture of hearsay
and recollection, all told in a form of realism that is vivid but
broken. Such fragmentation makes for what was a pioneer
stream of consciousness based on the association of ideas. Here,
for instance, Mr Shandy’s meditations upon the occult philoso-
pher, Hermes Trismegistus, are interrupted by the accident of a
maidservant passing, and this brings to his mind the fact that, at
this moment, his son has just been born. Though his meditations
go on, they do not return to Hermes Trismegistus.
It may be thought that we have looked at variegated modes
D2 FOUR MODES OF FICTION

here, yet none of our expectations of narrative need be exclusive.

There is an element of the Didactic even in Impressionism. In
Tristram Shandy, for example, the author appears from time to
time, and not merely in his role as protagonist, to implore the
reader’s aid — ‘Holla! — you, chairman! — here’s sixpence — do
step into that bookseller’s shop, and call me a day-tall critick’.
This follows in the chapter following those from which I quoted
just now. Even so, Sterne is not didactic as Fielding and Thack-
eray are. The author is not a puppet-master but a character in
the book, though rather a special one, and no explicit moral is
put across.
As we have seen, it is possible to write well or badly in any
particular mode. But it is our job to read in such a way as to
make sense of the text. Quite often our judgement may be im-
paired by expecting one set of effects from a given mode when in
fact another is proffered. There is no point in requiring violent
action of Jane Austen; we must look for what she gives us and
try to understand it. Similarly, every mode has its economies. To
anticipate ironic detachment in Dickens is to ignore the circum-
stance that this would be incompatible with what in fact he is
able to give us: a powerful sense of drama. This is what else-
where, in my book A Theory of Communication, I have called the
Principle of the Roving Criterion. One should, figuratively
speaking, turn the text about to find the mode of reading that
gives the clearest sense of pattern and the clearest pattern in the
sense.
IV English prose style

This is a chapter on conceptual prose; that is to say, the prose of

non-fiction. It is an astonishing fact that this is the medium we
mostly read and through which we mainly express ourselves,
and yet for some reason it is the most neglected branch of litera-
ture as taught at universities.
I have deliberately drawn the examples that follow chiefly
from literary criticism. This is to further two ends. One is to in-
dicate that criticism itself is a form of writing; the other is to
show that different modes are possible in argumentative expres-
sion. I hope to suggest to you some of the possibilities inherent
in the craft of writing a critical essay.
As with the novel, four modes seem to offer the predominant
possibilities. There is a mode which hovers round about a text;
which, to some extent, seeks to replace it. This is the mode of the
literary journalist, the fine writer, the Belletrist.
Another mode became very dominant in the nineteenth cen-
tury and is especially associated with Victorian hortatory writ-
ings. It still persists, though normally only in moments of
afflatus or with personages who feel themselves to be isolated in
their opinions. It is the mode of the Prophet.
A further mode, attractive to read and difficult to compose,
can be read as literature in its own right. We find it characteristi-
cally when the critic is very much at home with his text and
— sometimes as a result of this — markedly hostile to other critics.
He will tend to recommend the text in such a way as to hold
 54 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

alternative interpretations up to contemplation in a register

ranging from gentle wit to black sarcasm. This is the mode of the
Ironist.
However, there is another approach still. The critic who has
great confidence in his material, argument as well as text, tends
to rely on that material to get him through. This is not necessari-
ly a simple matter. Many a sustained passage that finally reads
persuasively has previously been set up in a number of different
ways. The distinguished economist, J. K. Galbraith, said that, in
his own writings, he never managed a note of spontaneity until
the fifth or sixth draft! I am referring here to a mode that seeks
to achieve prose like a pane of clear glass, through which the
reader thinks he sees with no refraction the material to be con-
veyed. I call it the mode of the Expositor.
I am bound to say that these modes may not seem of equal
utility to the literary student, especially when he comes to writ-
ing essays himself. The mode of the Belletrist has its charms for
some, but my feeling is that it tends to dazzle where it should
illuminate. For example, here is an extract from an article on the
novelist, William Golding.

To read Golding entire, seeking, as it were, to possess him, is to

become aware, as may be with any writer, of an oeuvre with its own
structure of consiliences and reverberations. It is also to experience, in
_ the curving of one man’s mind and art, literature as process rather than
as product. The individual books, of course, hold to their own lines,
but they also melt into each other and in the melting we see develop-
ment. Accompanying our awareness of the structured body of work is
a sense of its own inner motions, the processes of its overall metabo-
lism. The processes observable in the work of Golding are of particular
interest. For Golding begins with a kind of total assurance, compas-
sionate but rigid, and moves with a momentum that each novel in-
creases, away from the grand, categorised, tightly sealed certainties of
Lord of the Flies, through Free Fall's Doctor Halde who ‘does not
know about peoples’ and Dean Jocelin’s transcendent acquiescence in
complexity, to the delicate, unforced recognitions of The Pyramid.
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE 55

If we take the first sentence alone, we may be puzzled at the

apparent antithesis between ‘consiliences’ and ‘reverberations’.
A consilience is a coming together of lines of reasoning derived
from different areas; a reverberation is a repeated or re-echoed
sound. The mock-precision of this prose may be seen to be nuga-
tory, however, when we notice that the critic here suggests the
structure peculiar to Golding may be held to be so with any
writer. Any writer’s body of work, in other words, possesses ‘its
own structure of consiliences and reverberations’. What the cri-
tic here is saying is that any oewvre has its own qualities. This is a
truism not made any the less truistic by being stated in a preten-
tious and elaborate manner.
Antithesis is to this critic a habit of style rather than a method
of reasoning. What, for example, is the difference between litera-
ture as process and literature as product? What is the distinction
between the ‘certainties’ of Lord of the Flies and the ‘recogni-
tions’ of The Pyramid? If there really is a difference, it can be
brought out only by frequentation and analysis of the text. It
certainly cannot be brought out in assertions such as these.
The tendency of the Belletrist mode is to refract its material. If
you are unduly aware of the critic’s prose, it is quite likely that
his prose is over-assertive. But there is no doubt that quite a
number of critics tend in this direction. I have no shortage of
examples, I assure you.

The basic and constant impulses of the novel always have been to-
ward the panoramic or the intimate or a combination of both. The
panoramic inevitably has an affinity with chronicle and, through his-
tory, naturally or presumptuously, to the collective extension of epic
and myth. The intimate is invariably drawn to introspection and
through psychology, humbly or desperately, to the mythic centrality of
singular sensibility. The panoramic and the intimate are not accidental
or occasional allies subdued to novelistic purposes. Rather their quests
for collective or singular definition have about them the character of a
novel. The reason history is a natural ally of the novel is that both are
unfinished.
56 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

If you feel confused by this, do not worry. The confusion is

not in your mind but in the writing. Again we have — what is
highly characteristic of the Belletrist — the false antithesis. In this
case, it is the contrast between the ‘panoramic’ and the ‘inti-
mate’. But the antithesis cannot be as strong as that. In the sen-
tence where the panoramic and the intimate are contrasted, the
critic tells us that they can also be combined. He then goes on to
contradict himself by suggesting that the two impulses belong to
different forms of writing: epic, on the one hand; introspection,
on the other. The critic in question may or may not have a valid
distinction here. All I can say is that the style in which this is
couched serves only to blur it.
Such writing has a history and has attracted considerable
praise. Perhaps its prime exponent was Charles Lamb, who for
almost a century was taken as a guide to essay-writing. In the
example from his work that follows, Lamb appears to be talking
about imaginative painting of the past and the extent to which
the moderns have fallen away from it. But is attention focused
upon any particular work of art or is it not rather drawn to the
ingenious methods the critic finds to talk about Art at large?
From: ‘Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty
in the Productions of Modern Art’ (1833)
Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty
years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story
imaginatively? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted,
that it has seemed to direct him — not to be arranged by him? Any upon
whom its leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyr-
annically, that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a
revelation? Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so
much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that indi-
vidualising property, which should keep the subject so treated distinct
in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to common
apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might say, this and this
part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in the
world but this?
CHARLES LAMB
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE bei

As in the more modern pieces, we notice here the antithetical

style. A distinction is drawn between the subject which directs
the painter and the subject which is arranged by him; between
‘clearness’ and ‘individualising’. These may be valid contrasts,
but it would take more than this mode of classification to bring
them out. The weight of emphasis lies on the terminology, not
on the work ostensibly under discussion. The Belletrist tends to
go in for poetic prose in lieu of citation.
The mode of the Prophet, while more intellectually respec-
table, may at times seem equally nebulous. Certainly it tends to
invoke a good many abstractions. They may not, however,
always be as abstract as they seem at first reading. Opinions
about the extent of abstraction in any given example will be
found to differ according to the extent to which the reader recog-
nizes, behind the prose, the pressure of felt experience.
From: English Literature in Our Time (1969)
Life is growth and change in response to changing conditions, and
modern civilization advances in the spirit of its triumphant logic at
such a rate that the fact of change is taken for granted. It is taken for
granted in such a way that the profounder human consequences and
significances of unceasing rapid and accelerating change escape notice.
The deduction I draw is that our time faces us with a new necessity of
conscious provision: we have to make provision for keeping alive,
potent and developing that full human consciousness of ends and
values and human nature that comes to us (or should) out of the long
creative continuity of our culture.
F. R. LEAvis

‘Life’, ‘growth’, ‘change’, ‘civilization’, ‘logic’ and, again,

‘change’: you may well be forgiven if you take these words to be
mere counters in lieu of a properly exploratory analysis of the
nature of modern life or the facts of change. This critic has
behind him a long record of writing and teaching -- his first work
was Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) — and the con-
cepts adduced in this passage were worked out in practical detail
 58 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

many years previously. Moreover, behind this prose is a range of

reference to previous authors — D. H. Lawrence, George Sturt,
L. H. Myers — who felt that the process of living was being
eroded by negative factors in modern society. However, younger
readers, coming across the passage in question for the first time,
may not know this: what is presented as self-evident conclusion
they will see as argument, and therefore they will find the prose
wanting in matter.
The tradition behind this kind of writing is strongly Victor-
ian: the secular prophet has taken over from the Bible. He has
the urgency, but also the isolation, of the voice in the wilderness.

From: The Stones of Venice, I vi (1851-52)

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder
than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this — that we manufac-
ture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen
steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to
strengthen, to refine or to form a single living spirit, never enters into
our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging
our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching or preaching,
for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to
them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. Itcan be met
only by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds
of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy.
JOHN RUSKIN

Like Leavis, Ruskin is speaking out against the inroads upon

. living made by the character and growth of the manufacturing
industries. We must beg the question as to whether the criticism
is valid: certainly it has been firmly held by a number of critics.
Our concern here is with the writer’s efficacy in expressing his
point of view. Ruskin is definitely more concrete than Leavis.
Behind Leavis’s reiterated ‘changing conditions’ and ‘fact of
change’ are Ruskin’s particulars of manufacture — we ‘blanch
cotton’, we ‘strengthen steel’. But even here there is a lack of
close acquaintance which alone could guarantee the assertiveness
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE 59

of tone. It seems to me that this lack of acquaintance inevitably

leads to the unbacked and pious hope for ‘a right understanding
on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for
men’. This is what Monroe Beardsley calls Instrumentalism. We
can all agree that we would like men to understand what kinds
of labour are good for them; but how we are to agree upon the
precise nature of that ‘good’, Ruskin does not tell us.
The Prophet tends to speak with sincere emotion ill-provi-
sioned by specific fact. There are exceptions to this stricture,
even in Ruskin; William Morris and Thomas Carlyle, too, can
rise to great heights in the mode. But it is all too capable of being
debased: the war speeches of Winston Churchill taught a gene-
ration of politicians how to be glibly oratorical, and a great
many prophecies of our own time are couched in a prose such as
this —
if there is one theme running through this conference, it is the theme of
change, the overdue need for this country to adapt itself to different
conditions...
or this —
We have had to face, and are still facing — and the way is going to be
hard — the problems of economic change as some of our industries de-
cline and we move over to the new ones...

This invokes the cry of change without even the pressure of im-
plication which some of us can detect in Leavis. The speakers
are Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and they are performing
at conferences of their parties in, respectively, 1963 and 1965.
Their use of language, here as elsewhere, shows that it is not
necessary to express oneself efficiently if one is to be a Prime
Minister. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the liability
of having an imperfectly literate voting public and the need for
as many of us as have the opportunity to attain as high a degree
of literacy as possible.
No one did more to educate a literate minority than F. R.
Leavis, but his work in that direction is not best exemplified by
60 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

his later, more prophetic, work. Rather he is at his best in hand-

ling language more elliptically. Paradoxically, it is in this way
that he achieves his individual kind of vividness. Here he is writ-
ing about Othello; but he does not do so directly. He chooses the
Victorian critic, A. C. Bradley, as a sort of butt representing a
viewpoint cited only to be discounted. This is highly characteris-
tic of Leavis, and of the Critic as Ironist at large. The prose takes
on the character of dialogue: one voice vainly pontificating; the
other, in countering that pontification, evincing his own, super-
ior, point of view. Bradley says ‘We must not call the play a tra-
gedy of intrigue as distinguished from a tragedy of character’.
Leavis replies:

And we must not suppose that Bradley sees what is in front of him.
The character he is thinking of isn’t Othello’s. ‘Iago’s plot’, he goes on,
a
Iago’s plot is lago’s character in action.
In fact the play (we need hardly stop short of saying) is Iago’s char-
acter in action. Bradley adds, it is true, that Iago’s plot ‘is built on his
knowledge of Othello’s character, and could not otherwise have suc-
ceeded’. But Iago’s knowledge of Othello’s character amounts pretty
much to Bradley’s knowledge of it (except, of course, that Iago cannot
realize Othello’s nobility quite to the full): Othello is purely noble,
strong, generous, and trusting, and as tragic hero is, however formid-
able and destructive in his agonies, merely a victim — the victim of
Jago’s devilish ‘intellectual superiority’ (which is ‘so great that we
watch its advance fascinated and appalled’). It is all in order, then, that
Iago should get one of the two lectures that Bradley gives to the play,
Othello sharing the other with Desdemona. And it is all in the tradi-
tion; from Coleridge down, Iago — his motivation or his motiveless-
ness — has commonly been, in commentaries on the play, the main
focus of attention.

This is vintage Leavis: ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero’

(1938), reprinted in a collection of essays, The Common Pursuit
(1952). It is a complex form of utterance and I should not advise
the aspirant critic to try it. But it has the virtues of strategy. In
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE 61

showing how Bradley puts an undue weight on the intellect of

lago, Leavis gets across the idea that the tragedy lies in quite
another direction, in Othello’s lack of awareness about what is
going on around him. He puts in perspective that quality most
people recognize in Othello. He shows us the limitations of
‘nobility’.
In Leavis’s hands the ironic mode has many possibilities. It is
in recent times that his fellow-critics have recognized his mastery
of nuance. In our next example he applies his prose to a different
problem and a different author. How alert and civilized was
George Eliot? Leavis seizes upon a bétise of Lord David Cecil’s
which seems to deny that great novelist qualities of alertness and
civilization. By parodying Lord David Cecil’s contentions, and
by treating his book as an inexhaustible source of folly, Leavis
contrives to put forward a persuasive case in George Eliot’s
favour. Lord David Cecil has said ‘Like most writers, George
Eliot could only create from the world of her personal exper-
ience — in her case middle- and lower-class rural England of the
nineteenth-century Midlands.’ Leavis pretends to agree.

Moreover, she was confined by a Puritanism such as James (apart

from the fact that he wasn’t lower-middle-class) had left a generation
or two behind him: ‘the enlightened person of to-day must forget his
dislike of Puritanism when he reads George Eliot’. Weighty, provinci-
al, and pledged to the ‘school-teacher’s virtues’, she was not qualified
by nature or breeding to appreciate high civilization, even if she had
been privileged to make its acquaintance. These seem to be accepted
commonplaces — which shows how little even those who write about
her have read her work.
This is from what may well be Leavis’s most important book, his
revaluing of the English novel, The Great Tradition (1947). Even
from this passage we can see that the resentment felt against
Leavis by the other critics was not, as was said at the time, because
he was grudging in his literary advocacies. So far as creative wri-
ters are concerned, he is generous and positive to a degree. He is,
however, hard on the critics. The resentment against him was
 62 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

provoked by his practice of using contemporary critics as cha-

racters in an unending comedy. Leavis has in this instance put
into the mouth of Lord David Cecil sentiments about George
Eliot which nobody would care to own. But one has to say that |
Lord David Cecil lent himself to this: his unconscious class-pre-
judice and unfortunate tendency of phrase (‘the school-teacher’s
virtues’) render him an all-too-vulnerable hostage to Leavis’s
irony. But the end is not the dislodgement of Lord David Cecil,
who in any case has survived pretty well. Leavis used him, as he
has made use of other critics, to put forward the authors he ap-
preciates and wants us to appreciate. Behind the caustic display of
wit, there is a genuine humanity.
I suggested that The Great Tradition might be Leavis’s most
important book, quite deliberately. It is hard for us now to real-
ize how comparatively recent is serious criticism of the novel. Its
- founding father was Henry James and he seems to have been
highly conscious of his role as pioneer. Indeed, he seems to have
been afraid of people thinking him too solemn. Therefore James |
evolved an elaborate form of deference to his reader which has
the effect of checking the enthusiasm of the claims he makes for
the authors he recommends. Yet, oddly enough, this very check
upon enthusiasm makes for a highly persuasive descriptiveness
when it comes to drawing our attention to those authors’ quali-
ties.

From: ‘Honoré de Balzac’ (1902)

A born son of Touraine, it must be said, he pictures his province, on
every pretext and occasion, with filial passion and extraordinary
breadth. The prime aspect in his scene all the while, it must be added,
is the money aspect. The general money question so loads him up and
weighs him down that he moves through the human comedy, from be-
ginning to end, very much in the fashion of a camel, the ship of the des-
ert, surmounted with a cargo. ‘Things’ for him are francs and cen-
times more than any others, and I give up as inscrutable, unfathomable,
the nature, the peculiar avidity of his interest in them. It makes us won-
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE 63

der again and again what then is the use on Balzac’s scale of the divine
faculty.
Henry JAMES
In refusing to claim for Balzac a higher spirituality, James
makes us aware of what the great novelist can do as a realist. At
first sight the urbanity of the style here may seem at an extreme
from the tart ingenuity of Leavis. But both critics work a
great deal through qualifications: Leavis, in the examples I gave
from his work, through parenthesis; James, in the example just
quoted, through progressive redefinition. You can see why I ad-
mire the mode and, at the same time, refuse to recommend it; at
least, not without a good many qualifications of my own. The
mode will work only in the hands of a mature master, and, on
the whole, most of us will have to content ourselves with being
straightforward.
In other words, ours is likely to be the prose of the Expositor.
Yet even this, as I indicated at the beginning, is not at all simple.
It is a matter for astonishment that universities require of their
students an ordered prose, as if to write in such a way were a
phenomenon frequent in nature. We can concede that the means
towards clear exposition lies in the hands of most literate people.
But the technique demands thought and this involves care, espe-
cially in revision, and such thought and care, in their turn, neces-
sitate a regard for the exigencies of one’s medium. We will treat
that medium with respect if we remember that it has been the
chosen mode of some of the wisest and most learned men of our
time.
We have already looked at Impressionism in so far as it is mani-
fest in the novel. Here is a reasoned attack on the Impression-
ist mode, in verse as well as prose, by one of the clearest-mind-
ed teachers of English in America.

From: Primitivism and Decadence (1937)

The so-called stream-of-consciousness convention of the contempo-
rary novel is a form of qualitative progression. It may or may not be
64 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

used to reveal a plot, but at best the revelation can be fragmentary since
the convention excludes certain important functions of prose — sum-
mary, whether narrative or expository, being the chief. It approximates
the manner of the chain of thought as it might be imagined in the mind
of the protagonist: that is, it tends away from the reconsidered, the re-
vised, and tends toward the fallacy of imitative form, which I have re-
marked in the work of Joyce and of Whitman. It emphasizes, wittingly
or not, abject imitation at the expense of art; it is technically natural-
ism; it emphasizes to the last degree the psychology of the hero, but
the least interesting aspect of it, the accidental.
Yvor WINTERS

There are unfamiliar words here, as there were in the prose of

the Belletrist, but they are definable. They are definable because
— unlike the antithesis of consiliences and reverberations — they
are necessary; they categorize concepts that were not separately
recognized before the time of writing. To give such concepts
names is therefore to extend our consciousness, and not in a
Joycean way. ‘Qualitative progression’, narrative by emotional
rather than by logical progression, is defined above, in situ.
Winters goes on to define ‘the fallacy of imitative form’.

This law of literary aesthetics has never that 1 know been stated ex-
plicitly. It might be thus formulated: Form is expressive invariably of
the state of mind of the author; a state of formlessness is legitimate
subject matter for literature, and in fact all subject matter, as such, is
relatively formless; but the author must endeavor to give form, or
meaning, to the formless — in so far as he endeavors that his own state
of mind may imitate or approximate the condition of the matter, he
is surrendering to the matter instead of mastering it. Form, in so far as
it endeavors to imitate the formless, destroys itself.

Winters takes great pains to define something that clearly he

very much dislikes. Nevertheless, the lucidity of his prose is such
that, even if we have never considered the matter before, we be-
come very well aware of it through his exposition. He is referring
to aberrations like the attempt to write a chaotic poem as a
ENGLISH PROSE STYLE 65

means of portraying a chaotic universe, or boring the reader

as a means of making him attend to a boring character.
It is difficult to speak of expository prose in terms that trans-
cend its material content: it is essentially a faithful servant of the
information to be conveyed. One could, however, point out, in
Winters as in other authors, a recognizable decisiveness of sen-
tence-structure. Each sentence, whatever its length, is governed
by a single idea, and there is no indecision as to the subject. This
is in the best tradition of our philosophic prose, and its greatest
exemplar in the twentieth century is Bertrand Russell. He, too,
seeks to define a concept where before there was vacancy. In the
case I am about to quote, Russell is concerned with the peculiar
fact that a sentence may seem to tell us something in faultless
grammar and yet be demonstrably false.
From: ‘On Denoting’ (1905)
By a ‘denoting phrase’ I mean a phrase such as any one of the follow-
ing: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present
King of England, the present King of France, the centre of mass of the
Solar System at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution
of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth.
Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distingu-
ish three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote any-
thing; e.g. ‘the present King of France’. (2) A phrase may denote one
definite object; e.g. ‘the present King of England’ denotes a certain
man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. ‘a man’ denotes not
many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases
is a matter of considerable difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame
any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with
which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory
which I am about to explain.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is an element of surprise in this prose. The list of possibili-

ties that Russell gives as examples of denotation contain some
oddities: the present King of France, and the revolution of the
66 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

sun around the earth, among them. A good deal of apparently

abstract philosophy is enlivened in this way by examples which
may be poetic or even grotesque. Much of Russell’s work in this
area came out of his catechizing an obscure German philoso-
pher, Meinong, who, in the course of denoting impossibilities,
formulated the concept of the Golden Mountain. This is some-
thing which has a patent existence in the mind yet which cannot
be said to ‘exist’ in ‘the real world’. But the problem Russell is
facing — the problem of the false sentence -- is concrete enough,
and this helps to give his prose its characteristic force and surge.
For Russell, as for most thinking men, there is no gap between
‘the real world’ and the world of speculation; it is speculation
that brings about the concept of the real world. In much the same
way, the characters in a novel precipitate themselves through
words into our minds and so become entities that we can talk
about: Elizabeth Bennet, Clarissa Harlowe, Guppy, Krook,
Betty Flanders, Stephen Dedalus. In this, criticism is a ‘real’
activity.
The difficulty for the aspirant is that some of the greatest cri-
tics have turned their activity into performance suited to their
own peculiar sensibilities. Brilliant though James and Leavis are
—and perhaps Lamb, too, in his highly individual way — we would
be ill-advised to write like them. It is the old conundrum that
one has to be a good deal like a person in order to take over his
style. Therefore I should not advocate taking over even a style
thatI approve, be it that of Winters or that of Russell; not at
least ad hoc. But I would say that these writers and their masters
— Bacon, Locke, Mill — have virtues from which we can learn,
and they are not virtues necessarily anchored to definitive per-
sonalities. They are rather qualities of expertise: lucidity, terse-
ness, specificity. These seem to me qualities one would like to
find in criticism and, indeed, in other forms of exposition. At
any rate, we shall be liable to lose our audience without them.
V Writing notes

The breath of inspiration may guide the pens of the fortunate,

but for most of us writing is hard work. It will seem even harder
if the writing in question is not planned.
The basic subject of a critical essay is the text, and anything
that is not about the text is open to scepticism. Biographical
data, historical background, awareness of the author’s philoso-
phical position — all these may have their place in our studies.
But they are relevant in criticism only to the extent that they
illuminate the text.
It is inadvisable to use the text to illuminate the author unless
you are writing a biography. Historical background must not
usurp the foreground of the text, unless you are writing history.
You should not, either, extrapolate from the author’s work a
system of thought; unless that author is a systematic thinker,
and you intend to write philosophy.
If the text is at the heart of a discourse, a prime requisite for
the person discoursing is possession of the text. By that I mean
not only the purchase of a book but its frequentation. One pre-
requisite is knowing that you are going to study a book ahead of
the time designated for its study. A first reading should take
place well before the book in question comes up for discussion in
lecture or tutorial.
One must avoid the sense of dispersion that seems to afflict
many students on reading a book as text. All scenes are not equal-
ly important; some are climactic to the book as a whole; and
68 WRITING NOTES

that whole has an individual structure. The recognition of that

structure is one of the techniques to which we must turn our
attention.
In reading a text there is no intermediary except the incidental
intervention of teacher or critic. To a considerable extent, what
one wrests out of a book is a matter between oneself and the
author. It is possible, under adverse circumstances, to read a
book and to be left with nothing that could be termed an inter-
pretation. This is not a fault of memory but a failure in the
technique of reading.
Reading is a technique that develops with practice. One way
of building up this technique is to make notes on what is read.
This does not mean that you should make an elaborate sum-
mary of any set text, or break off in your reading in order to re-
cord a quantity of impressions. Rather than either of these prac-
tices, it would be better to make no notes at all until you have
completed your reading of the whole. But, if you think yourself
to be an inexperienced reader, it can do no harm to make just
one or two notes after each chapter.
Suppose we take a text we have already glanced at in this book
as an example; say, Pride and Prejudice. | had occasion to refer
to an individual scene in Chapter 3; how would we set about
writing notes upon the whole novel?
Let us assume that you have read the book through once. Be-
gin your notes by writing a very brief summary of the plot. If the
summary is more than six or seven lines long, it is a bad one.
Something of this sort will do, and the technique may be adapted
to any novel you read:

The hero is a young man of large fortune and fashionable manners,

whose distinguishing characteristic is personal pride. The heroine, on
the first introduction, conceives a most violent prejudice against
Darcy, which a variety of circumstances well imagined and happily
presented, tend to strengthen and confirm. Explanations of the differ-
ent perplexities and seeming contrarieties, are gradually unfolded,
and the two principal performers are happily united.
WRITING NOTES ; 69

I had better confirm that this is not my own summary but that
of one of the book’s first admirers, a contributor to The British
Critic, who reviewed Pride and Prejudice in 1813. The summary
has the great merit of leaving out needless details in giving us an
overall sense of the plot. A summary such as this might well be
the first note you write about a novel once you have read it.
The error in remembering a book is to think of it as a host of
competing scenes. In a literary masterpiece every scene has its
place, but not all scenes are equally emphasized. Try to think in
terms of five or six key scenes; those scenes that represent climax-
es or hinges of the plot. No two readers will necessarily agree as
to which scenes are climactic. But this does not matter provided
you have attempted to make your own personal choice. The
scenes you have chosen will be in the foreground of the book as
you see it, and will help to determine its shape for you.
For example, in Pride and Prejudice, 1 personally would pick
out the following scenes.

Volume I, Chapter iii Longbourn. The Ball Scene, already

looked at.
Darcy: ‘She is tolerable; but not
handsome enough to tempt
me...
I xvi Meryton. Wickham’s narrative of his mis-
fortunes at the hands of Darcy.
Wickham: ‘I should at this time have
been in possession of a most
valuable living, had it pleased
the gentleman we _ were
speaking of just now’. This
prejudices Elizabeth further
against Darcy. Darcy’s pride
is set off against Wickham’s
plausibility.
if xix Longbourn. Collins’s proposal to Eliza-
beth,
70 WRITING NOTES

Collins: ‘And now nothing remains for

me but to assure you in the
most animated language of
the violence of my affection’.
Contrast between sentiment
and expression sets the fatu-
ous Collins off against both
Darcy and Wickham. Offer
refused.
IT xi Collins marries Elizabeth’s friend Char-
lotte and Elizabeth stays with them at
Hunsford Parsonage. Darcy’s proposal
— ‘I have no wish of denying that I did
everything in my power to separate my
friend [Bingley] from your sister [Jane]
... Towards him I have been kinder than
towards myself’ — and rejection.
III iv Darcy on his estate, Pemberley; hears
Elizabeth’s account of her youngest sister
Lydia’s elopement with Wickham; unex-
pected kindness. ‘Elizabeth felt how im-
probable it was that they should ever see
each other again on such terms of cordial-
ity as had marked their several meetings
in Derbyshire...’
II xvi Longbourn. Darcy has helped Lydia, i.e.
got her married to Wickham, and Eliza-
beth now accepts his proposal.
Darcy, referring to their early acquain-
tance:
‘The recollection of what I
then said, of my conduct, my
manners, my _ expressions,
during the whole of it, is
now, and has been many
months, inexpressibly pain-
ful to me.’
WRITING NOTES 7
These scenes were all chosen with a high regard to considera-
tions of plot. Another reader, one putting the emphasis more on
character, might very well prefer other scenes. The Ball Scene
would probably be common to both, and I think, too, that the
scene of Mr Collins’s proposal is crucial. But, with prime con-
sideration for character, other scenes might be:

Volume I, Chapter i Longbourn. Introduction to the Bennet

family.
Mrs Bennet: ‘A single man of large for-
tune...What a fine thing
for our girls!’
Mr Bennet: ‘How so? how can it affect
them ?’
IT vi Elizabeth’s visit to Lady Catherine de
Bourgh’s seat, Rosings. ‘When the ladies
returned to the drawing-room, there was
little to be done but to hear Lady Cather-
ine talk... delivering her opinion on every
subject in so decisive a manner as proved
that she was not used to have her judg-
ment controverted...’
IT xviii Longbourn. Lydia and the militia. ‘She
received an invitation from Mrs Forster,
the wife of the colonel of the regiment, to
accompany her to Brighton...She saw
herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirt-
ing with at least six officers at once’.
Ill yi and vii Longbourn. The return of Mr Bennet
from his search for Lydia and Wickham,
empty-handed.
Elizabeth: | ‘You must not be too severe
upon yourself’.
Mr Bennet: ‘I am not afraid of being
overpowered by the im-
pression. It will pass away
soon enough’.
de WRITING NOTES

One way of starting a second reading of the book is to go to

whatever scenes you have selected as climactic, these or others,
and re-read them with close attention, noting the patterns of lan-
guage especially. For example, in the Ball Scene, Darcy’s own
friend puts him ina light that invites prejudice. ‘I hate to see you
standing about by yourself in this stupid manner’, says Bingley,
though we ought to bear in mind that, in 1813, ‘stupid’ meant a
temporary lapse in spirits rather than a permanent state of in-
anity. The language of Darcy in answer, however, approaches
violence — ‘You know howI detest it...it would be insupport-
able. ..you are wasting your time with me...’ Through such
language an initially unpleasing character is created.
If we take another example: in Mr Collins’s proposal scene,
the author does almost the impossible in rendering a dull and
conceited man as a fascinating character. The joke lies in the fact
that Collins is ludicrously unaware of the effect he has on other
people. There is a gap between Collins’s estimate of himself and
that which is likely to be held by any reasonable person. The
reasonable person is represented by Elizabeth. It is through her
eyes that we mark the ‘solemn composure’ with which Mr Collins
informs her that he is ‘run away with by [his] feelings’. But the
hiatus between the character’s intentions and his effect upon the
reasonable person is signalled to us by the words he uses.
I am not, of course, suggesting that these scenes should be
looked at in isolation. After re-reading each scene intensively in
the way I have indicated, it would be as well to consider it in
context. We should think how each scene advances the plot,
develops the characters, sets up an atmosphere, hinges upon the
structure of the text as a whole. But the reader will imperfectly
grasp the text as a whole if he is unaware of the qualities of spe-
cific scenes and the ways in which those scenes inter-relate.
Something of this approach can be adapted as an aid to the
study of poetry. If you are confronted with a writer’s Collected
Poems, or even a selection of his work, the strategy is to make
out of that oeuvre your own anthology. In the nature of things,
all the poems will not appeal to you equally. Read through the
WRITING NOTES 73

volume and put a marker against those poems that interest you,
that you want to re-read, or that puzzle you. Puzzlement may
well be a manifestation of that quality I have elsewhere called
resistance (Theory of Communication, 1970). There may be more
happening in a poem than the conscious mind can take in at a
first reading and the result may be an initial antipathy. But one
seldom feels antipathy unless one’s feelings have been worked
upon, and this may well be a guarantee that further frequen-
tation will uncover qualities unforeseen at first. The real barrier
to further reading is not antipathy but indifference.
Once you have selected your personal anthology, try to estab-
lish which poems matter most to you; as with all texts, seek to
possess them. This is best done by reading them aloud, trying to
work out an interpretation. In some cases recording your perfor-
mance on to a cassette machine and playing it back can be very
useful. However, if circumstances do not admit of your reading
aloud, try to hear the poem in question with the inner ear; read
silently at the pace you would adopt under other conditions.
Many of the people who complain that they do not like or do
not understand poetry are reading it too quickly — at the pace
they would read their morning newspaper. Therefore they miss
the rhythm and so cannot hear the varying emphases the poet
puts on different words. Too fast a reading will lose, also, crucial
nuances of tone. Much of this can be avoided by committing
poems to memory. The point was repeatedly made by the Vic-
torian poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, who was also a school
inspector. Further, it is much easier to learn off by heart what
you like than what you don’t like. Probably the best way of
memorizing a poem is to rehearse several attempts towards an
intelligent reading. A poem once memorized is possessed in a
special way: it can be summoned to conscious attention at any
time.
What happens with regard to longer poems? We had a look at
an extract from ‘The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ in Chapter 2.
I am unrepentant at having dealt with this separately: it was
conceived as an independent poem and preserves many signs of
 74 WRITING NOTES

its separate structure. However, we have to learn very quickly

that there are several ways of looking at any one work. The por-
trait of Atticus will not lose by being seen in a context.
In his later years Pope consciously imitated Horace. That is to
say, he Chose to recognize certain likenesses between his world
of the 1730s and Horace’s world in and around the court of
Augustus Caesar, about 10 or 15 sc. His Imitations of Horace
are free translations of the elder poet’s work, and he prefaced
them with a dedicatory letter to a friend, Dr Arbuthnot. This
latter, though it makes various references to Horace, is an
‘original’ poem.
The Epistle as a whole falls into three parts. The first de-
scribes the way in which Pope, a poet of acknowledged eminence,
is beset with inferior writers all clamouring for his help in order
to further their careers. The second section describes the difficul-
ties of his own literary life, and instances his clashes with
various critics, patrons and libellers. These antagonists are
typified by the characters Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus. The third
section is a personal apologia: it states that he has shown
restraint when put upon and therefore must not be blamed for
his satire now.
Thus put baldly, the poem may seem to be literary in an
inbred way. But this is not so. “The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ is
infused with a great range of emotion and this is expressed in
a considerable variety of linguistic register.
The first section, lines 1-124, begins with a great onrush of
words, mostly in a high (but not shrill) denunciatory tone.
Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I said,
Tye up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead,
The Dog-star rages! nay ’tis past a doubt.
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and Papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land...

Once you have briefly summarized this section, in the manner in-
_ dicated above, it might be as well to write notes on at least some
WRITING NOTES a

of the key allusions. ‘Dog-star’, ‘Bedlam’, ‘Parnassus’ in lines 3

and 4 are representative instances. The allusions are part of
Pope’s meaning.
The Dog-star is Sirius, whose appearance was thought to
cause great warmth upon earth and therefore to heat men’s
brains. It appeared most strikingly in late summer, a season
which has traditionally been thought of as the Silly Season,
when frivolous stories abound. It was also, in Ancient Rome, a
season when people went in for poetry recitals. Therefore for
Pope the Dog-star is a way of linking up Parnassus, which was
sacred to the Muses who presided over the arts, and Bedlam,
which was an asylum for the insane. In other words, Pope is say-
ing that all poets are mad or that only madmen want to write
poetry.
All this may seem quite learned. But the information, if one
does not have it already, may be readily found in a Classical
Dictionary or a moderate-sized encyclopaedia or an annotated
edition of the work of the poet under discussion. The serious
student would presumably have all of these. They will certainly
help him in writing notes; and the writing of notes amounts to a
small-scale critical introduction.
However, to write notes on every allusion, especially in a
highly referential poem such as this one, would be a waste of
time. One must avoid confusing one’s interpretation with exces-
sive detail. Nevertheless, some personal annotation is necessary,
and deciding what one’s notes should be is a useful exercise in
criticism. That rare quality, commonsense, has to be the guiding
principle. The poem begins ‘Shut, shut the door, good John... .!
So long as we recognize that ‘John’ is a servant rather than, say,
Dr Arbuthnot himself, it does not matter whether or not we
remember his surname is Serle. You will find it much more use-
ful to recognize that the advice Pope gives the poetasters who
beset him, ‘Keep your piece nine years’, derives from Horace’s
Art of Poetry. Horace goes on to say “You can always destroy
what you have not published, but once you have let your words
go they cannot be taken back’.
76 WRITING NOTES
This is one of the ways in which Pope represents himself as the
Horace of his time. The representation would not work if Pope
did not have the art and technique with which to sustain a role
which in a lesser poet would. be vainglorious. In support of this
contention one could adduce the virtuosity with which the
besieging poetasters are created — ‘They rave, recite and madden
round the land’ — like an army of the insane. One could point to
the easy sarcasm which presents Pope’s foes in ridiculous pos-
tures —
Nine years! cries he, who high in Drury-Lane
Lull’d by soft Zephyrs thro’ the broken Pane,
Rymes e’re he wakes, and prints before Term ends,
Oblig’d by hunger and Request of friends...
The comedy lies in the hiatus between the poor circumstances of
the poet and the mock-courtesy with which these are presented
to us. It is akin to the humour which reduces coarse and lying
flattery to a caricature of itself — ‘I cough like Horace, and tho’
lean, am short’. Horace had attributes other than these, but they .
are not such as the poetasters would understand. It is a way of
saying that the poet who wrote these lines is, by virtue of his art,
the Horace of his own, diminished, age.
One’s understanding of the second section (lines 125-367)
would be enhanced by writing notes on the three characters it
puts forward. I have said that the portrait of Atticus would live
if no such person as its prototype, Addison, were known to us.
Yet it cannot do us any harm to know that Joseph Addison was
the most distinguished man of letters between Dryden and
Pope; that he held office in government under both Queen Anne
and George I; that his play Cato was celebrated in its time as an
example of classical tragedy and that he is now mainly known to
us as the essayist who was co-author of the periodicals The
Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711-12, 1714). Knowledge
can never be a disadvantage if one has learned how to apply it.
Only if one uses Pope’s portrait as a means of assessing Addison
will a knowledge of his life and work lead to irrelevance. But it
WRITING NOTES TT

will be as well to recognize that Pope takes up certain Addis-

onian traits, such as the great man’s habitual presence at But-
ton’s Coffee-House, frequented also by lesser writers such as
Thomas Tickell and Ambrose Philips.
Similarly, Bufo, according to the Twickenham edition of
Pope, was a composite figure drawing upon characteristics of
Bubb Dodington and the Earl of Halifax. Both of these were
minor poets, eminent only for their social station. If Atticus
represents the great writer who is flattered by his less able aco-
lytes, Bufo represents the wealthy amateur flattered by his needy
contemporaries. Both these figures stand in contradistinction to
Pope, who represents himself as eminent through his talents, un-
apt to be flattered even though poor.
In spite of this Pope finds himself pilloried by the third figure
portrayed in this section: Sporus. This, in its turn, was a lurid
caricature of the bisexual Lord Hervey. Such knowledge can
help us with lines like
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart...!

The third section (368-419) is the shortest. At first sight, it

seems the section most fraught with contemporary allusion. Yet
a good deal of the point is that the allusions are no longer cur-
rent. Pope tells us that he, the dreaded satirist, has in his time
tolerated such writers as Dennis, Tibbald, Cibber, and Moore.
Our reaction may well be to ask who these people are. But that is
the point: their laurels have faded. Nobody reads them now.
This dreaded Sat’rist Dennis will confess
Foe to his Pride, but Friend to his Distress:
So humble, he has knock’d at Tibbald’s door,
Has drunk with Cibber, nay has rym’d for Moor...

There would be no point in writing copious notes on these.

A brief indication of their obscurity should be enough: a men-
78 WRITING NOTES

tion of one work by each, or one circumstance of each life,

would do.
It is much more important to remember the Twickenham Edi-
tion’s notes on the last lines, 406-19. Apparently Pope wrote
these lines separately and sent them in aletter to a friend. It was
his way of disclosing his mother’s last illness. The lines therefore
really amount to a brief elegy.
O Friend! may each Domestick Bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing Melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender Office long engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age,
With lenient Arts extend a Mother’s breath,
Make Languor smile, and smooth the Bed of Death...

They come appropriately as a close to an epistle whose third sec-

tion shows Pope’s resentment at scurrilous attacks upon his
family. Earlier in the section he has written
. Let the two Curls of Town and Court abuse
His Father, Mother, Body, Soul, and Muse.
Yet why? that Father held it for a rule
It was a Sin to call our Neighbour Fool,
That harmless Mother thought no Wife a Whore, —
Hear this! and spare his Family, James More!
Unspotted Names! and memorable long,
If there be Force in Virtue, or in Song...

The directness of utterance here and in the rest of this third sec-
tion creates a sense of honest indignation. The Two Curls,
diminished by being intertwined, together with the obscure
James More, are reduced in the poem into spiteful traducers of a
good man’s family.
Taken as a whole, then, ‘The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ is
really a defence of Pope’s literary life. I have taken note of two
aspects: the shape of the poem as a whole, and the incidental
allusions scattered throughout. But I have tried to relate these
aspects to the language and indeed to the poetry of the work.
WRITING NOTES 719

The apologia can only come across if we are conscious of the

author’s virtuosity.
This is also true of Pride and Prejudice. 1 would direct any stu-
dent to write notes on the crucial scenes in the belief that decid-
ing which these are is itself a worthwhile critical exercise. But of
course several opinions on the matter are possible and this
recognition in its turn can give rise to useful discussion. Such
discussion will identify what is crucial to the book as a whole:
insight into character, creation of personality through the de-
ployment of language — the dismissive arrogance of Darcy, the
self-aggrandizing diction of Collins.
So, though your notes should have a factual basis, the facts
should be such as to help you towards a critical understanding
of the text. We need not point out a character trait or an allusion
only for the sake of trait or allusion. Such matters exist as essen-
tial details contributing to the effect of the work as a whole.
VI Structuring an essay

We are perpetually being asked to write essays about authors,

but what is an author? So far as the literary student is concer-
ned, an author is a body of work. Sometimes he can be a very
large body indeed. How, in such a case, do we select what we are
to talk about? How do we choose the points we have to make?
In the Papermac edition of Thomas Hardy’s poems, edited by
James Gibson, there are 949 titles. It is clear that, even if you
read all these poems, you cannot write about them all.
However, in Chapter 5 I said that, in any given novel, some
scenes were more crucial than others. This does not mean that
any scene is dispensable. But on certain scenes the plot hinges,
and quite often such scenes have a greater degree of emphasis
than their fellows. They are, in short, foregrounded.
Therefore one tends to give them most attention, and this
approach can be adapted with respect to a body of poems. Let
us grant that there is no poem by Hardy with which we would
care to dispense. There are still items in the total oeuvre which
are classics, and we read the whole corpus of work to find out
which these are. Such poems we read again and again, with close
attention, marking every nuance of rhythm and meaning.
We make, in effect, a personal anthology. No two anthologies,
it is true, will be exactly alike. A good deal depends on what
circumstances condition the reading. There is a difference be-
tween reading at large and a reading angled to satisfy the require-
ments of a tutor. You may, in the latter instance, be asked to
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 81

answer a specific question. Such a question may well determine

the shape of your personal anthology. You may be asked to dis-
cuss Hardy’s use of nature in his work. In such a case the spare
landscaping of ‘Neutral Tones’ or ‘The Darkling Thrush’ could
be put beside such great set-pieces as the description of Egdon
Heathat the beginning of Hardy’s novel, The Return of the Native.
The shape of an essay on Hardy and Nature will, however, be
quite different from one written upon another theme: Hardy
and the Supernatural, say, or Hardy and Old Age. The range of
options is reduced by the necessity of taking a line on Hardy’s
work. What you lose in width of application, you hope to gain in
focus.
You may be given a negative sort of question on which to base
your essay. The trend of criticism in the twentieth century has
favoured impressionistic or metaphysical poets such as T.S. Eliot
or Wallace Stevens, and it has shown distinct strain in seek-
ing to assimilate Thomas Hardy. This strain is quite often seen
in examination papers, almost as though the candidate is being
asked to counter an adverse view of Hardy. You may find your-
self being asked to defend (a) Hardy’s metrical clumsiness or (b)
his eccentric diction or (c) his tendency towards the prosaic or
(d) his predilection for the obsolete and archaic. In such circum-
stances, clearly the examination candidate has a choice. You can,
if you wish, attack Hardy, as you can any author put forward
for detailed discussion. But such a negative approach tends to
restrict the essay unduly. There is a distinct oddity in writing at
length on a text only in order to get the reader to set it aside.
Moreover, one always writes better about texts that one likes. It
might therefore prove rewarding to turn the question against
itself.
Let us look at objection (a) above. If one takes such metrical
structures as ‘Thoughts of Phena’ or ‘A Commonplace Day’, it
can be quite an engaging exercise to show how the elaboration
and repetition in fact are expressive. Indeed, on frequentation,
what seems a not always welcome originality comes to appear
inevitable. With regard to objection (b), turns of phrase that look
82 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

odd out of context — ‘stillicide’, ‘existlessness’ — fall into place

when considered in the body of such poems as ‘Friends Beyond’
or ‘The Voice’. Once more, it is largely a question of rhythm; of
reading the poems aloud, of seeking to hear them. To counter
objection (c) it should be easy enough to justify the directness of
‘I look into my glass’; the measured explicatory quality of “A
Broken Appointment’; or the circumstantial detail of ‘Beyond
the Last Lamp’. Objection (d), that Hardy was too much wed-
ded to obsolete themes, could be countered by showing the wealth
of anecdote, of historical as well as narrative interest, embodied
in such poems as ‘A Church Romance: Mellstock, circa 1835’;
‘The Oxen’; ‘Old Furniture’; “The Choirmaster’s Burial’;
‘Retty’s Phases’. In each and every case one should counter the
objections raised with poems by Hardy that you believe to be
good and interesting. In that way you can make a positive case
even out of a negative proposition.
There does not seem to be an adequate essay on Hardy’s dia-
logue poems. These are a neglected side of his output. Yet here,
with a technique honed on the writing of prose fiction, he brings
to bear a non-lyrical register of language upon lyrical themes
and brings off a number of unexpected effects triumphantly.
Here again, one should match the generalized concept of ‘dia-
logue poems’ with specific examples, and it is these examples that
will give form and content to essay. Poems that come to mind
in this connexion include ‘The Ruined Maid’, ‘The Workbox’,
‘Voices from Things Growing ina Churchyard’. The last displays
extraordinary ingenuity in creating the illusion of a whole com-
munity of the dead discoursing about life. Hardy sees the plants
which grow on and about the graves in a cemetery as bearing up-
ward into the air the traits of the characters buried in the soil.
Fanny Hurd says that she died young but
now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave...
Bachelor Bowring who danced his life away now, in death, is ‘a
dancer in green as leaves on a wall’. Thomas Voss has burrowed
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 83
into a yew, and Eve Greensleeves, once kissed by men, is now
kissed by glowworms and bees. The flowers, leaves and plants
are vegetable equivalents of those from whose remains they
grow. They dance by day and by night — as the refrain has it,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily.
This could lead you on to a further essay, about refrains in
Hardy or about the use Hardy makes of the ballad tradition. He
was a very great poet indeed, and lends himself to many differ-
ent critical approaches.
There is one aspect of Hardy’s art likely to be discussed as
long as English poetry is read. That is his use of the concrete im-
age. Words like ‘concrete’, ‘vivid’, ‘particular’ are really abstrac-
tions: they express a twentieth-century distaste for the genera-
lized and the vague. However, they have become so current in
modern criticism that they are used as positive evaluations,
without sufficient backing evidence. Yet it is no use saying that a
poem is concrete unless you show it is concrete and why in that
particular case concreteness is a quality to be admired. If this is
done with regard to three or four of Hardy’s poems, you have at
least the makings of an appreciative essay.
In a poem written about 1900, ‘The Self-Unseeing’, Hardy at
once looks back to a distant past and also sees himself through
his ageing eyes as a child living in a historic present.
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
84 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

Everything glowed with a gleam;

Yet we were looking away!

This poem has certain traits in common with ‘During Wind and
Rain’ which we looked at in Chapter 2. It simulates reality by
gripping on to particular circumstance. The tendency, in this
poem and in others by Hardy, has much in common with the
high-mimetic narrative we discussed in Chapter 3. What we can
initially be certain of is the ancient floor ‘footworn and hollow
and thin’. But the qualifiers also prefigure the image of a ghost,
and this is reinforced by the eerie phrase ‘Where the dead feet
walked in’ — a phrase which contains what seems to be a para-
dox. Can dead feet walk? They could, if we were to take the term
‘dead’ to refer to a previous time: the dead feet which then
walked. With this recognition, the poem slides back to the past.
At that time — then — the poet was a child, and his present self
remembers a past scene with the mother smiling into a fire and
the father playing the fiddle. It is the difference between ‘Here is’
and ‘She sat here’; the present tense and the past. In this way
Hardy relates times far apart; relates them through place; and
this is a characteristic of his finest poetry.
In looking at the concrete aspects of Hardy, one could seek to
indicate that he tends to use particularity as a way of rendering
concrete retrospective and even supernatural aspects of his
theme. He calls back the dead, as memory or ghost, as living
embodiments in a context which counteracts any suggestion that
they are alive. In ‘Logs on the Hearth’, what is being burned is
the tree that the poet and his sister climbed when they were
children. It is now ‘sawn, sapless, darkening with soot’; about as
dead as it could be. Yet in the firelight Hardy evokes the
memory of that long-dead sister, and she seems alive —

My fellow-climber rises dim

From her chilly grave —
Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave.
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 85

The evocation of individual characteristics, such as ‘her young

brown hand awave’, makes these dead seem to live. It is also a
way of coalescing the past and present experience. This point, in
its turn, will suggest another line of argument, and another
essay. The limitation of essay structure is such that these lines
cannot all be explored. Half the strategy is in deciding what line
to take. In theory it would be possible to write a whole essay on
a single poem or even, with a work of the stature of ‘After a
Journey’ or ‘At Castle Boterel’, on a single aspect of a poem.
However, you have to ration what you say. You may choose
your various points in such a manner as to link them together
under one head or another: thematic tendency, linguistic tex-
ture, sense of the past, basic construction — to name only a few
of the possibilities. The nub of all that has been said is this: criti-
cism is an art of selection.
This is no less so when the student is confronted with a single
work written on a large scale. There are difficulties in interpret-
ing Paradise Lost, The Prelude, The Faerie Queene, Bleak House
or Tom Jones. Such works have so many words that it is not easy
to remember how they are all related. But there are techniques
for discussing such works as these.
One could try to begin with making out a very terse summary:
the same approach as was adumbrated in the previous chapter.
The story of Tom Jones, for instance, could be encapsulated in
the following way: ;
Book 1, Chapter 2. Introduction. The widower Allworthy and his
spinster sister, Bridget.
3 Allworthy finds a baby in his bed.
1.4, 1.5 Bridget is delighted with the baby; her maid,
Deborah, is not.
1.6 Local girl Jenny Jones is supposed to be the
mother and admits to the supposition.
Ly Allworthy arranges for her to leave the village.
She refuses to name the father.
1.8 Bridget Allworthy discourages her maid
Deborah’s curiosity about the baby.
86 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

19 Local opinion believes Allworthy to be the

father and turns against Jenny.
1.10 Allworthy maintains as house guests first a Dr
Blifil, then also his brother, a half-pay officer.
1.11 Bridget accepts Captain Blifil for her future
husband.
They marry.
Captain Blifil drives out his brother
et cetera. But a treatment of the book as a whole on this scale
would be excessively long-drawn-out. Tom Jones presents a
structure markedly different from that of Pride and Prejudice.
To summarize in this manner here will tend to obscure the nar-
rative with detail. One might carry on with the summary as a
species of raw material: a kind of memorandum for private con-
sultation. But it cannot, as it stands, be the basis of an essay.
What is called for, rather, is a version of the technique employed
in Chapter 2 for looking at poems. One needs to look for a core,
a centre, a dominating issue.
At first sight, this will not seem easy. As Dr Leavis said, some
episodes of Tom Jones take place in the country and some in
town, some in the churchyard and some in the inn, some on the
high-road and some in the bed-chamber, and so on. Neverthe-
less, there is an order in the book, and it will become apparent
through acquaintance with the text.
One approach is to take Tom Jones to be, at its core, a gigantic
folk-tale. It has many of the marks: the unrecognized heir, the
wandering hero, the quest for the heiress, the contest between
hero and villain. All of these are recognizable components in
fairy-literature, and this is to suggest that they form the basis of
many more modern narratives. One of the most useful aids in
this form of analysis is Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir
Propp, a highly sophisticated account of the structure of primi-
tive stories. Using Propp’s terminology you could break down
the structure of Tom Jones in such a way as to get an idea of the
function of various key incidents. The first column below is a
codified means of classifying a phase in a story. The second
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

column gives that classification a name. The third column

defines the classification in such a way as to relate it to other
tales. The fourth column relates it specifically to Tom Jones. The
fifth column indicates the chapter or chapters in Tom Jones
where the incident in question takes place.

Number Designation Propp’s Definition Summary of TOM JONES Chapter

a lack One member of a Tom Jones wants Sophia 4.13,

family desires to 3.2
have something
E unfounded False claim Blifil finds out Tom’s 5.8,
presented by the parentage and conceals 6.4,
false hero his knowledge; tells 6.10
lies about Tom because
he wants Sophia himself
tT departure The hero is dis- Tom Jones is sent away
patched from home by Allworthy for his
as a result of presumption in paying
the false claim court to Sophia and
ingratitude to his
benefactor
D the first A hostile creature Tom is laid low by a
function of attacks the hero blow from Ensign
the donor Northerton
FE provision As a result of D, Partridge binds Tom’s 8.6
of an agent a character places wound and offers to
himself at the accompany him in his
hero’s disposal travels
G guidance Hero is led to Tom finds himself in 10.6
the heiress the same inn as Sophia
at Upton
H struggle Hero and villain Squire Western, Sophia’s 10.7
engage in father, attempts to
competition have Tom arrested
lf victory Villain defeated Magistrate acquits 10.7
in competition Tom
oO unrecognized Hero arrives in Tom reaches London in 12.14
arrival _ another country search of Sophia
M difficult Test of endurance Tom makes love to
task Lady Bellaston and is
supplied by her with
money
88 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

D the second Another hostile Fitzpatrick fights 16.10

function of creature attacks Tom, is wounded; Tom
the donor hero seized and imprisoned
J branding Hero receives a Tom branded as ee
wound in skirmish murderer
Q recognition Hero recognized Mrs Waters * 18.7
after previous (Jenny Jones) tells
period of Mr Allworthy Tom’s
separation true parentage;
Tom really his nephew
Bx. exposure What has occurred As aresult of Mrs 18.8
exposes the false Waters’s story and the
hero in his true lawyer Dowling’s con-
colours firming evidence,
Allworthy realizes the
badness of Blifil’s
nature
a trans- By means of the As a result of Mrs 18.10
figuration action of a helper, | Waters’s intervention
the hero effects a Tom, now discharged
new appearance from prison, is re-
instated with
Mr Allworthy
U punishment The false hero is Tom conveys Mr 18.11
punished Allworthy’s notice of
expulsion to Blifil
WwW wedding The hero marries Tom marries Sophia and _ 18.13
the heiress and takes over Western’s
comes into his hall
heritage

This is by no means the final shape of an essay; but it has the

merit of indicating a way through the immense labyrinth of
Fielding’s plot. The diachronic structure of narrated events, that
is to say the incident-by-incident sequence of plot, is only one
dimension. Another is the synchronic structure; that is, the logic
that relates the plot you are studying to other plots. There are
many more incidents possible to a tale than are found in Tom
Jones. Not all are found in any one tale. Those that are found
determine the kind of tale it is. For example, it is quite impor-
tant that the wandering figure of Tom Jones takes up with a
friendly agent or helper, the barber-surgeon Partridge. It may
not be accidental that this agent has the name of a non-human
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 89

creature. In folk-tale after folk-tale the hero is accompanied in

his travels by an affable beast. We think, for example, of Dick
Whittington and his cat; and, like those two, Tom and Partridge
reach London and make their fortunes. Another synchronic
relationship is with that order of folktale in which an apparently
low-born hero courts a princess. He is often found to be a prince
himself and so the interdict that barred his marriage is lifted. As
Mr Allworthy’s nephew and heir, Tom has access to Sophia
Western in a way impossible to one low-born and illegitimate.
A further structure of narrative, and hence of essay, may be
defined through the function of the various characters. The
status in the plot of the hero and of the heiress is clear enough in
any plain survey, whether it is the précis sketched out first or the
structural analysis projected after the method of Vladimir
Propp. But the latter suggests some form of order among the
more negative characters. Ensign Northerton and Mr Fitz-
patrick are donors: they bring the hero luck even though their
intentions towards him are hostile. The attack by Northerton
is the cause of Tom’s acquaintance with Partridge, first in his ca-
pacity as surgeon, then as travelling companion. The attack of
Fitzpatrick directly leads to Tom’s recognition as nephew, heir
and worthy suitor. There is a difference between their antagon-
ism and the role of Squire Western. The latter acts like a fairy-
tale ogre or villain. He is instrumental in getting Tom expelled
from Mr Allworthy’s house in the first place and, later on, he
tries to get him put in prison at Upton. Poetic justice dictates
that he suffers in a way that Northerton and Fitzpatrick do not.
At the end of the book he is deprived both of his daughter and
his hall. In a real sense Tom deprives him of his place, though
the punishment is only partial: he retains visiting rights. His
conduct has not been as reprehensible as that of — to keep to
Propp’s terminology — the False Hero. Adapting that termino-
logy to Tom Jones, it can be seen that Blifil attempts to supplant
Tom as Allworthy’s heir and Sophia’s suitor. Therefore he is
punished; not with partial banishment, like Western, but with a
banishment that is total. Indeed, salt is rubbed into his wounds
90 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

by the fact that it is Tom who bears the fatal message that his
fortunes have changed irrevocably for the worse. However, since
Tom Jones is a novel despite its affinity with the folk-tales, we
are given a hint at the end that Blifil has some hope of repairing
his fortunes in a sphere where his villainy will be appreciated.
Tom Jones is a novel: this suggests that Propp’s mode of
structural analysis is the beginning of criticism rather than the
whole of the story. One has to relate to the text more sharply
even than has been done in the discussion so far. There is a
further mode of structural analysis: in this particular case, Dor-
othy Van Ghent points out that even the linear narrative, the
diachronic sequence of narrated events, has a definite shape.
‘There have been six books of country life, in the centre are six
books of life on the highways, and the final six books are con-
cerned with life in London.’ This may give a clue as to how to
achieve a really defined discussion of the book. ‘From the cen-
tral scenes at Upton Inn, the novel pivots around itself. . .it is at
Upton Inn, in the mathematical mid-point of the story, that the
country and city come together.’
You should be sure that you have grasped the linear spine of
the story, whether by making a straightforward summary of the
salient facts of the novel or a structural analysis after the manner
of Propp. But you should also remember that your tutors and
examiners have read the novel, too, and that they are likely to
want you to talk about those aspects of it related to whatever
questions they have asked you. Quite a number of possible ques-
tions about Fielding will be found to bear upon the form or
otherwise of this picaresque novel, Tom Jones. In other words,
acentral query about the book will relate to whether the wander-
ings of the central figure — the picaro, the apparent plaything of
fortune — can be construed in such a way as to suggest a definite
narrative shape. We could therefore do worse than take up this
hint from Dorothy Van Ghent and start, not at the beginning of
the novel, but at the centre, the core. We can formulate an essay
by joining Tom at Upton; between Chapters 9.3 and 10.7 of
Tom Jones. ;
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 91

We find in this section that a surprising number of the char-

acters of the book have converged. Some have been introduced
before the Upton scenes, some come into their own afterwards.
Tom and Sophia are under the same roof for the first time since
6.8. In that chapter she had told him that she would refuse BIifil
but that she could not go so far against her father’s intention as
to bestow herself on Jones. Even now, they are only in the most
literal sense under the same roof; for they do not meet. Indeed,
they are the poles between which oscillate a series of fast-moving
situations.
Tom has rescued Mrs Waters from Ensign Northerton who
was trying to murder her. He does not know her to be the former
Jenny Jones, his putative mother; nor does she know him. So
there is nothing much to stop Tom from succumbing to her
charms and landing in bed with her (9.5). This is the climax of
the Upton episode; for this encounter suddenly becomes every-
body’s business.
A Mr Fitzpatrick, of great importance later on when he
attacks Tom (16.10), arrives at the inn seeking his wife. The inn’s
maidservant has heard enough talk of Mrs Waters to imagine,
erroneously, that she is the lady in question. This maidservant
therefore leads the enraged Fitzpatrick straight into Mrs
Waters’s bedchamber. There the fiery Irishman finds the lady he
takes to be his wife in bed with a gentleman, and immediately
proceeds to blows. This arouses the house, but Mrs Waters
manages to pass off the predicament by denouncing Tom, Fitz-
patrick, and a friend of Fitzpatrick’s who has also come in, as
rapists and murderers. Tom connives at the ruse by making an
apology to Mrs Waters for having appeared before her in his
shirt, assuring her ‘That nothing but a concern for her safety
could have prevailed on him to do it’. By this means Mrs Waters
is able to establish a new role, ‘that of a modest lady, who was
awakened out of her sleep by three strange men in her chamber’.
Fielding, in other words, plays upon the irony generated by the
gap between what the landlady and Mr Fitzpatrick are led to
believe and what we know. There is a further irony beyond this,
92 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

since we do not know as much as we think. The identity of Mrs

Waters is still kept from us, not to be revealed until 18.2.
Another effect Fielding is adept at producing is a sort of peri-
peteia or turnaround. No sooner do we think that Tom is safe
and all well than a fresh circumstance renders all ill again. We
must remember that, unknown to Tom, Sophia and her maid
have arrived at this same inn, fleeing from Squire Western, en
route to a female relation in London. Sophia’s maid gets talking
with Partridge, and discovers that not only is Tom upstairs but
that he is in bed with another lady. The fact is confirmed by the
talkative maidservant, she that showed Fitzpatrick into the bed-
chamber. Sophia resolves to go away forthwith but leaves her
muff behind with her name pinned on it to show Tom that she
knows what he has been up to. This muff has figured quite pro-
minently in the novel so far and is a kind of emblem for the
young lady herself. It is mortifying for Tom to find this, and he
is about to leave in pursuit, when Sophia’s father, Squire Wes-
tern, arrives in chase of his daughter and finds Tom in flagrante
delicto, with Sophia’s highly identifiable muff in his hand. Fitz-
patrick steps forward in the full knowledge that the woman Tom
was with in bed is not Mrs Fitzpatrick, and from this makes the
entirely wrong assumption that she must therefore have been the
squire’s daughter. He ushers Western into the bedroom, disturb-
ing Mrs Waters for the second time that night. Whoever else
Mrs Waters may be, she certainly is not Sophia, and so the
squire has to reduce his charge to accusing Tom of stealing the
muff. Here we have Western playing the part of ogre or villain:
the heavy father is in competition with the hero. But a further
peripeteia ensues. The inn’s maidservant, coming down at last
on the hero’s side of the matter, deposes that Sophia sent Tom
the muff voluntarily, and so Squire Western is defeated in this
particular contest. Everybody, apart from the people of the inn,
leaves in different directions. Western and Tom go their diverse
ways in pursuit of Sophia. Mrs Waters leaves in company with
Mr Fitzpatrick, and manages to fill the vacant place of his wife.
Through all this Fielding keeps up a judiciously distanced
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 93
style, and much of the effect is owing to the extent that it is at
odds with the farcical violence of the action. This is a deliberate
technique on Fielding’s part. It is an effect that keeps the action
at a fairly low level of mimesis, and so adds an edge at once to
the humour and the irony. It is a form of mythopoeia: the ren-
dering of action as legend or, as Fielding himself called it, comic
epic in prose. It suggests that the author himself was very well
aware of the archetypal or folk elements he had incorporated
into his fiction. ‘Thus ended the many odd adventures which Mr
Jones encountered at his inn at Upton, where they talk, to this
day, of the beauty and lovely behaviour of the charming Sophia,
by the name of the Somersetshire angel.’
A good deal of the irony can be understood fully only on a
second reading. There is an obvious irony in the difference
between the semblance of Mrs Waters, upon the first intrusion
into her room, and the reality; between a lady outraged by the
trespass of three rough men and the jolly adventuress who has
been enjoying the favours of one of them all evening. We may
see the humour in finding ourselves wiser than the landlady and
Mr Fitzpatrick. But there is a further irony, into which we are
not admitted on first reading the book, that she is really Jenny
Jones, thought to be the mother of Tom Jones, and therefore un-
known to herself committing incest. This is what, in a character-
istically ingenious essay, Sir William Empson called a double
irony. However, there is a further irony yet in the fact that the
imputation is false, and that, unknown to any first reader until
the denouement of 18.7, Jenny Jones merely consented toa stra-
tagem in order to conceal the identity of the true mother: Brid-
get Allworthy. So we have a kind of ironic layer-cake. Naughty
Mrs Waters goes to bed with a young man; when interrupted
she becomes virtuous Mrs Waters surprised by three young
men; later on it seems that she was unwitting but guilty Jenny
Jones in bed with her son; later on still, it seems that in fact she
was naughty Jenny Jones in bed with a young man whom she
does not know to be the foundling whom she acknowledged, in
order to protect another.
94 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

Yet another approach is possible. A related strategy is to look

at the novel as a process of demystification. Such a strategy
might well start with this basic datum:
Mr Allworthy had been absent a full quarter of a year in London on
some very particular business, though I know not what it was; but
judge of its importance by its having detained him so long from home,
whence he had not been absent a month at a time during the space of
many years. He came to his house very late in the evening, and after a
short supper with his sister, retired much fatigued to his chamber.
Here, having spent some minutes on his knees — a custom which he
never broke through on any account — he was preparing to step into
bed, when, upon opening the clothes, to his great surprise he beheld an
infant, wrapt up in some coarse linen, in a sweet and profound sleep,
between the sheets. . .(1.3)

We start the book with a mystery: who is the child? Further,

where are his parents? Further still, who put the child in Mr All-
worthy’s bed and why? The book may be taken as a progressive
series of movements in the direction of unveiling these mysteries.
Not all is mysterious: we know that Mr Allworthy is a widower
whose children died in infancy and we have seen him to be
deeply religious and basically kindly. Therefore it is reasonable
to suppose that he will take care of the infant. It is not surprising
to find him ‘owning a resolution to take care of the child, and to
breed him up as his own’. What is more surprising is to find that
his sister, Miss Bridget Allworthy, takes the good-natured side
of the question and commends her brother’s charity, for we are
told that she is a severe character with a great regard for what
the ladies are pleased to call virtue. This is an odd circumstance;
taken together with the fact that Mr Allworthy has been away
for some time, it gives a clue to the origin of the foundling. This
clue, however, is not sufficient to dispel the need for the strip-
ping away layer after layer of mystery. In its turn, such a strip-
ping away may provide you with a possible approach to the
book and be the basis of an essay on the subject.
The clues manifest themselves on repeated frequentations of
STRUCTURING AN ESSAY 95

the novel, and this is what makes it a classic. You cannot

exhaust the possibilities of Tom Jones in a single reading. In-
deed, re-reading such a work is as important as reading it. On re-
reading, certain effects fall into place and become attitudes. Tom
Jones, as Sir William Empson has remarked, possesses few
friends, and those are mostly fairly low on the social scale, like
Black George, the thieving gamekeeper. Therefore it is impres-
sive that Tom grows up with what are basically good impulses.
He makes mistakes but he is free of faults such as meanness and
slyness. This is a suggestion that his heredity is sound. However,
we do not know this for a fact until the final denouement in 18.7.
Tom’s father is never a presence in the book until invoked
retrospectively as the son of a friend of Mr Allworthy’s, a Mr
Summer, who died young. Because of this, there is never a
chance of the clues laid by Fielding giving us any genuine help in
demystifying the narrative. Only reading the book right through
can do that. It is almost as though Fielding were afraid of our
being able to anticipate his conclusion.
This point, in its turn, could lead you on to a moral consider-
ation of the novel. The hero, in order to survive in London,
makes love to the old and smelly Lady Bellaston (13.7, 13.8, et
seq.). This renders him a kept man; and what are the rights and
wrongs of that? In pondering this aspect of the novel, other con-
siderations come into play. Some of them are minor: for exam-
ple, Tom has promised to join the army (7.11) but in fact goes
after Sophia as soon as he has a clue as to her whereabouts
(10.6).
Let us develop this approach. He is represented as generous:
he takes punishment on behalf of Black George the gamekeeper
as well as himself (3.2); he gives away more than half the money
which a highwayman whom he has captured was attempting to
take from him (12.14); he forgives Blifil (18.11). He is also coura-
geous: he tries to rescue Sophia’s bird (4.3); he saves Sophia in a
riding accident (4.13); he rescues the Man of the Hill from rob-
bers (8.10), Mrs Waters from Ensign Northerton (9.2), a Merry
Andrew from his master (12.8) and defends himself vigorously
 96 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY

against Mr Fitzpatrick’s onslaught (16.10). He is, further, chi-

valrous: he is genuinely in love with Sophia (5.2 et seq.) and he
objects to Northerton insulting her (7.12); he intercedes with
Nightingale on behalf of a girl whom he has seduced and intends
to abandon (14.4, 14.7); he refuses to marry a rich widow for
money (15.11); he refuses Mrs Fitzpatrick’s advances (17.9),
even though he knows she is estranged from her husband and he
is sure he has no chance with Sophia.
But, on the other hand, Tom is wild. He gets irresponsibly
drunk in order to celebrate Mr Allworthy’s recovery from illness
(5.9) and so plays right into Blifil’s hands. He carelessly loses the
money Mr Allworthy has given him on sending him away from
~ home (5.12). He is also lecherous: making love to Molly Sea-
grim both before declaring himself to Sophia (4.6), and after
(5.10); he makes love to Mrs Waters (9.5), and to Lady Bellas-
ton (13.7). How, then, do we retain our general sense that Tom
is a hero deserving our sympathy? Perhaps Tom’s own remarks
regarding the virtuous girl whom Nightingale has injured are
pertinent here. ‘“I am no canting hypocrite, nor do I pretend to
the gift of chastity more than my neighbours. I have been guilty
with women, I own it, but am not conscious that I have ever in-
jured any.”’ This key statement is backed up by Fielding’s
general process of narrative: Molly Seagrim, it turns out, was
made pregnant by one Will Barnes before Tom ever saw her;
Mrs Waters is a lady of easy virtue anyway; Lady Bellaston has
an evil reputation. Moreover, all these experienced ladies made
the first advances to Tom and, though he succumbs to them, it is
he who in greater or lesser measure suffers. Therefore Fielding
achieves the effect of Tom Jones being a good enough young
man without having to whitewash him — as Richardson does Sir
Charles Grandison — into unearthly purity.
With a didactic text, such as Tom Jones necessarily is, you do
not need to go into intricate verbal detail. The sort of interest
such detail would afford is often a small part of the effect. The
prose of such a work is generally denotative, written for sense
and perspicuity rather than (as with Dickens) for powerful local
 STRUCTURING AN ESSAY oF
suggestion. The difference is that between the distanced intro-
duction to Allworthy that we looked at in Chapter 3 and the
dramatic presentation of the guilt and fear of the conspirators
in Dickens’s Bleak House, discussed in the same chapter.
I hope that this has shown a number of ways into Tom Jones
-and so a number of approaches towards structuring essays on
that text. I hope, also, what I have said about one particular text
may be taken as a set of working possibilities capable of being
adapted with regard to others. Whether one discusses a book in
terms of structure, demystification, irony or morality, the result
should be an essay designed to throw light upon the subject.
That there are difficulties in discussing large-scale works I know
from experience. However, if you bear in mind that the process
is one mainly of selection, all should go well. Not all scenes are
equally important, nor are all characters. The technique is to
consider climactic points after a first reading of the book. Proba-
bly even with that degree of selection you will find yourself with
too many points for a single essay. But the attempt to answer a
specific question, either in an examination or for a tutorial,
should bring some points into play more than others.
The construction of an essay, in other words, involves the
breaking down of a large-scale text into its discussible aspects,
and that involves a decision on your part about what you want
to discuss. I use the term “‘breaking-down’ because there can be
no final word on the matter. The essay is not there to replace the
text. By choosing a particular approach to a text you are giving
yourself a chance of seeing how it works in its component parts.
You are therefore giving yourself a chance to see how it is put
together.
VII Background and biography

So far, for the most part, we have been discussing texts on their
own, with little regard for the raw material that went into them.
This approach has the virtue of simplicity, but there is a degree
of impressionism latent in such a discussion. One is advancing
claims for a particular text, and one’s conception of (say) its
concreteness or irony can be backed up by adducing specimens
of texture and putting them forward for analysis. Yet the analy-
sis is partial: one cannot quite escape the imputation of talking
in a void.
Over the years I have found it more and more useful to look at
a text in juxtaposition with the source material: either the raw
anecdotage from which literature surprisingly often is refined, or
the literary work that most probably acted as influence. It can-
not be too strongly emphasized that no writer emerges fully-
blown: he has to go to school, to serve an apprenticeship, and
that apprenticeship is usually dominated by a particular master.
For example, in Chapter 2 I adduced a poem, ‘They flee from
me’, by Sir Thomas Wyatt. I put it forward as a great poem in its
own right and also as an example of the best that the sixteenth
century in England could do — a poem admirable of its period.
I also hoped that my discussion would be an example of a way
into a literary text; in particular, I sought to stress the importance
of the centre, core or dominance in a poem. What I did not do
was to suggest the poem’s provenance: I did not, at that point in
my general argument, lay any stress on where the poem came
from.
BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 99

In some ways it would be true to say that the poem came from
the author’s head. But that in itself suggests a cerebral quality in
writing. A text of any kind is a highly artificial production; ele-
ments of tradition and technique form a large part of its compo-
sition; and these can, in my opinion, be usefully pointed out as
part of our total appreciation. It is true that an effective text is
largely self-sufficient: one can never replace a reader’s experi-
ence with a whole lot of notes. If the text does not, to some extent,
speak to us, no amount of explanation is going to work in its
stead. At the same time, appreciation can be sharpened if we set
the source beside the text.
‘They flee from me’ seems so original a poem that for a long
time it was thought to be unique to Wyatt. Even within his out-
put, it differs from the formal lute-songs and Petrarchan sonnets
that form so large a proportion of his oeuvre. But in 1963 C. E.
Nelson established that some of the unusual quality of the poem
was due to the influence of Ovid.
Amores III vii remains untranslated in the Loeb edition, and
this is a sign of the primness of an earlier generation. It is an im-
potency farce. The lover has got the girl to bed but he cannot
perform. Ovid says

At non formosa est, at non bene culte puella,

at puto non votis saepe petita meis!
hanc tamen in nullos tenui male languidus usus
sed iacui pigro crimen onusque toro
nec potui cupiens, pariter cupiente puella,
inguinis effeti parte iuvante frui.
illa quidem nostro subiecit eburnea collo
brachhia, Sithonia candidiora nive,
osculaque inseruit cupide luctantia linguis
lascivum femori supposuitque femur
et mihi blanditias dixit dominumque vocavit
et quae praeterea publica verba iuvant. ..
100 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

Early in the 1580s, while he was still an undergraduate, Christo-

pher Marlowe translated this as
Either she was foul, or her attire was bad,
Or she was not the wench I wish’d t’have had.
Idly I lay with her, as if I lov’d not,
And like a burden griev’d the bed that mov’d not.
Though both of us perform’d our true intent,
Yet could I not cast anchor where I meant.
She on my neck her ivory arms did throw,
Her arms far whiter than the Scythian snow,
And eagerly she kiss’d me with her tongue,
And under mine her wanton thighs she flung.
Yea, and she sooth’d me up, and call’d me ‘Sir’,
And us’d all speech that might provoke and stir...

This is a direct description of a failed amorous encounter. Wyatt

turned it to dramatic effect by a technique of allegory. He loses
no sense of the particular in making us feel that this downfall is
part of a general reverse. He begins with this reverse —
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber...

There is a flashback to the time when he was successful —

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small...
In other words, Wyatt draws upon Ovid’s description of sexual
encounter in order to create a general, not a local, sense of im-
potence. Perhaps D. W. Harding, distinguished psychologist as
well as critic, was right when he suggested that the form of the
love lament offered indirect expression to a range of feeling that
might have arisen from quite other sources, such as the reversal
of Wyatt’s position at court owing to the fluctuation of the
BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 101

King’s regard or the intrigues of his various rivals. Certainly the

effect is one of general downfall, not of one particular failure
with one particular girl. Fortune who gives will take away —
tacta tamen veluti gelida mea membra cicuta
segnia propositum destituere meum.
truncus iners iacui, species et inutile pondus,
et non exactum corpus an umbra forem.
quae mihi ventura est, siquidem ventura, senectus
cum desit numeris ipsa iuventa suis?
a pudet annorum, quo me iuvenemque virumque?
nec iuvenem nec me sensit amica virum.

sic flammas aditura pias aeterna sacerdos

surgit et a caro fratre verenda soror...
(Ovip)
Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk,
It mocked me, hung down the head, and sunk.
Like a dull cipher or rude block I lay,
Or shade or body was IJ, who can say?
What will my age do, age I cannot shun,
When in my prime my force is spent and done?
I blush, that being youthful, hot and lusty,
I prove neither youth nor man, but old and rusty.
Pure rose she, like a nun to sacrifice,
Or one that with her tender brother lies...
(MarRLowe)
It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness. ..
(Wyatt)
We have the material here for a two-way, if not a three-way,
comparison. But the critical strategy would be to use the other
102 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

poems on this theme as foils to ‘They flee from me’. Such a pro-
cedure could not but work greatly to Wyatt’s advantage. The
Ovid love lament which the Loeb editor refused to translate, the
Marlowe translation which the public hangman burned in 1599,
suffer from their individualism and explicitness. It does not mat-
ter whether a youth is impotent with a particular girl: at least, it
is hard to make it matter to us. Wyatt, on the other hand, shows
something that touches us all: setback, disappointment, hopes
confounded, the fickleness of fortune. The eerie beginning may
have learned from Ovid — ‘They flee from me, that sometime did
me seek’. But it far transcends Ovid in proverbial sharpness,
resonant overtones and a sense of relating the particular to the
general. In this way Wyatt matches his experience to our own, to
that of the world. There is nothing in Ovid or Marlowe to equal
the sense of place that we find in Wyatt: ‘With naked foot, stalk-
ing in my chamber’. That ‘stalking’ gives the sense of beings
— girls, friends, mice in the prisoner’s cell — once gentle, in all
senses, and now wild and fearful. What comes across is a sense
of desertion: the prisoner is left alone.
What this discussion suggests is that very often you can get
across the quality of a text by comparing it with something
which does not have quite the same quality. The comparison is
all the sharper if one cites as foil a text which is related; an in-
fluence, a source.
I cited, also in my second chapter, T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Journey
of the Magi’. I cited it as an example of dramatic monologue;
I called attention to its ‘touches of sharp detail’; I said that the
tone was that of a weary man who has suffered to the extreme of
his endurance. What I did not do was set by the side of the poem
the prose sermon that most certainly gave rise to it.
A cold comming they had of it, at this time of the yeare; just, the worst
time of the yeare, to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in.
The waies deep, the weather sharp, the daies short, the sunn farthest
off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of Winter.

This is Lancelot Andrewes’s Sermon of the Nativity delivered at

BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 103

Christmas in 1622. Lancelot Andrewes was a writer Eliot parti-

cularly admired. What he says of Andrewes’s prose is also true
of his own verse adaptation. ‘He slightly but sufficiently alters
the rhythm in proceeding more at large...[He] appears to
repeat, to stand still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most
deliberate and orderly manner. There are often flashing phrases
which never desert the memory.’ That ‘alteration of the rhythm’
gave rise to the characteristic pattern of Eliot’s verse in this
poem. Not ‘they had a cold coming’ but
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter...’
It is plain to see how this comparison can give rise to analysis;
an analysis that will show quite clearly the efficacy of Eliot’s
verse. The narrative third person is put into a highly individual-
ized first person; the prose detail of ‘worst time’, ‘long journey’,
is backed up by the evocation of
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow...
It is as though hints in Lancelot Andrewes are developed in such
a way as to provide a highly distinctive atmosphere. Then we
can consider what, positively, Eliot has added. The evocation of
the luxuries the kings have left behind them, for instance —
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet...
which acts as a contrast within the poem to another severe dose
of the journey —
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters...
104 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

This is a kind of reference to and projection of various details

Andrewes mentions before the passage in his sermon that Eliot
actually uses: ‘all the way wast and desolate’, ‘over the Rocks
and craggs of both Arabies’. Noting this will give you a chance ©
to point out that, in every instance, Eliot sharpens the details
and integrates them into his poem. The ‘wast’ is given to us in
particulars, and these particulars are part of the struggle to
reach the Christ-child. Even that struggle is not so bitter as the
sense of agony the three Kings feel at that birth. Once more, the
citation of a source is a way of bringing home to your reader the
quality of the finished product, the poem.
Sometimes the provenance of the finished work can be very
rich and suggestive indeed. There is a great deal behind the scene
from Bleak House which we looked at in Chapter 3. By bringing
Dickens’s own writing into comparison with this background,
we can do something to demonstrate why his writing took the
shape that it did; more, we can demonstrate in what lies some-
thing of its efficacy.
The presiding idea is that of spontaneous combustion: the
idea that a person by ingesting spirits can set fire to himself in-
ternally and char to a heap of ash. Dickens had read, when he
was twelve, a horrific story reprinted from the Gentleman’s
Magazine of 1746. It told of an old lady in the habit of consum-
ing a great deal of wine and brandy who retired to bed and was
burned to ashes in the night by the action of the fiery evapor-
ations in her stomach. ‘All the rest was ashes, which had this
quality, that they left in the hand a greasy and stinking moisture.
The air in the room had soot floating in it...the said soot flew
about, and from the lower part of the windows, trickled down a
greasy, loathsome yellowish liquor, with an unusual stink...’
This anecdote is reinforced with much supposedly historical cir-
cumstance, and was taken up, quite independently of Dickens,
by a number of other writers. Charles Brockden Brown in his
novel Wieland (1798) narrates how the hero’s father is enveloped
by a fiery cloud which reduced his clothes to ashes and himself
to ‘insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction’. Quite
BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 105

likely this novel was known to Captain Marryat, who began his
Jacob Faithful (1834) with the death of the hero’s mother, an
alcoholic, who retires to rest and who turns to smoke and ashes.
In place of her body he finds ‘a black mass in the centre of the
bed. I put my hand fearfully upon it — it was a sort of unctuous,
pitchy cinder’. Marryat explicitly tells us that the woman per-
ished from spontaneous combustion, ‘an inflammation of the
gases generated from the spirits absorbed into the system’. Cer-
tainly Jacob Faithful would have been known to Herman Mel-
ville, another and far greater chronicler of the seas. In his novel
Redburn (1849), Melville has a sailor in an alcoholic stupor emit-
ting strange odours that combust when alight is held near his
mouth — ‘ina moment, the cadaverous face was crawled over by
a swarm of wormlike flames’.
One reason for the extraordinary currency of this notion may
have been fear, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, of
further political activity. The image of spontaneous combustion
furnished several writers with a convenient symbol for subver-
sion. Coleridge, an essentially conservative writer, compares
ignorance and superstition with a stifled and fermenting mass
which, at the first admission of light and air, ‘roars and blazes,
and converts the already spoilt or damaged stuff with all the
straw and straw-like matter near it, first into flame and the next
moment into ashes’ (The Friend, 1818). This image was taken up
by Thomas Carlyle on several occasions. ‘Let no man awaken it,
this same Berserkir rage! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the
centre, like genial central-fire, with stratum after stratum of
arrangement, traditionary method, composed productiveness,
all built above it. . .’ (Chartism, 1839). In the same work, Carlyle
relates this subterranean rage to gin — ‘liquid madness... If
from this black unluminous unheeded Jnferno, and Prisonhouse
of souls in pain, there do flash up from time to time, some dis-
mal wide-spread glare of Chartism or the like...are we to
regard it as more baleful than the quiet state...?’ Chartism,
I should say, was a reform movement in the Britain of the 1830s
and 1840s which worried many citizens because of its radical
106 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

tendency —a tendency to alter the existing system of society. It was,

not always fairly, associated with Luddism, or the wrecking of
factory machinery; also with incendiarism, particularly in the
form of rick-burning. Here is Carlyle again: ‘These Twenty-four
million labouring men, if their affairs remain unregulated, chao-
tic, will burn ricks and mills; reduce us, themselves and the
world into ashes and ruin’. Benjamin Disraeli, novelist as well as
politician, shows the aristocrats ignoring this tendency in his
novel Sybil (1845).
‘I wonder, talking of fires, that you are not more afraid of burning
ricks,’ said Egremont.
‘It’s an infernal lie,’ said Lord Marney, very violently.
‘What is?’ said Egremont.
‘That there is any incendiarism in this neighbourhood.’
“Why there was a fire the day after I came.’
‘That had nothing to do with wages; it was an accident...
*... but no one has discovered the accident.’
‘For my part I believe it was spontaneous combustion,’ said Lord
Marney.

The concept, so useful to political theorists, had its applica-

tion even in the area of science. The great physicist, Michael
Faraday, used to give lectures for children at the Royal Institu-
tion. In one of these lectures, ‘The Chemistry of a Candle’, he
used the image of human digestion as an analogy for burning. ‘It
is the combustion of the carbon by the contact of oxygen which
the body has supplied to it.’ This was written up in a popular
form for Dickens’s own journal, Household Words, and, in the
hands of the journalist doing the popularization, it acquired the
sensational aura of the anecdotage and fiction we have already
looked at. ‘The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic acid gas,
and leaves nothing behind but ashes. ..a candle is a little gas
manufactory in itself, that burns the gas as fast as it makes
it...Breathing is consuming oxygen, only not so fast as burn-
ing. ..man is a candle, eh? and Shakespeare knew that. ..when
he wrote “Out, out, brief candle!”’ (Charles Knight, Household
BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 107

Words, 3 August 1850). It is the human more than the candle

aspect of the matter that engages Dickens in Bleak House; and,
as a radical, he applied the political connotations positively.
We can plainly see that what we have in the death of Krook is
much more than the sum of a few anecdotes, a horrific novel or
two, some interesting analogies in politics and in physical
science. Spontaneous combustion is a powerful presence in
Bleak House, and it is directed against the existing political sys-
tem. The victims of law complain of injustice in its terms — ‘it’s
being roasted at a slow fire’ (Tom Jarndyce); ‘I have been
dragged for five-and-twenty years over burning iron’ (Gridley).
The court of Chancery is parodied by the old junk-merchant,
Krook, with his shopful of papers and must and cobwebs. He is
a highly distinctive figure: a stump of a man, frosted with white
hairs, who breathes as though he were on fire within. This image
is insisted upon throughout the book. Krook is ‘a bundle of old
clothes, with a spirituous heat smouldering in it’. Chancery is
Krook on a monstrous scale, a gigantic funeral pyre. The mud
of the earlier chapters metamorphoses into a dust that silts up
the papers of the lawyers and settles like a rain of soot upon the
ashes and broken bottles in the derelict shop of Lord Chancellor
Krook. This is a remarkable example of an image existing at
once as a fiction inside the novel and as a symbol outside it.
Krook’s chancery is, like the body of its owner, a closed sys-
tem, glutted, diseased and noxious. Krook soaks himself in gin
until one evening he actually sets fire to his guts and explodes, so
discharging his corrupt body into the atmosphere. It is an
atmosphere built up by an accumulation of unwholesome parti-
culars — vapour, soot, grease — that symbolically fuses together
pestilence and law. The lawyer Weevle is under the illusion that
he can trick Krook into letting him browse through secret docu-
ments; his friend Guppy believes this will lead them to uncover
the heroine’s identity and lead them to a great fortune. They
wait for the Lord Chancellor — Krook, not Lord Lyndhurst — to
unravel his mystery, but they might as well wait for the Court of
Chancery to come to a conclusion. Weevle and Guppy descend
108 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

to Krook’s parlour at the appointed time. But Krook has disin-

tegrated into bits and pieces, not immediately recognizable for
what they are. Yet, even in that state of disintegration, the corpse
retains a horrible likeness to what it was in life. As we saw in
Chapter 3, the withered body has become a charred log and its
white hairs are represented by white ashes. That seems actual
enough. On the symbolic plane, the death of Krook represents
the disintegration of Chancery, and, beyond Chancery, the
punishing and remorseless law of Dickens’s society.
The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has
died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authori-
ties in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are
made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your
Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been
prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally — inborn, inbred,
engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and
that only —Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths
can be died.

It takes Dickens to portray, in the death of a gin-soaked old

man, the explosion of an entire legal system; indeed, implied
through that, a society. Yet even Dickens could not have done
this without the wealth of antecedent available to him. Never-
theless, it took an extraordinary imaginative technique to link up
tall stories, gothic novels, political images, scientific analogies
into a narrative that has far more point than any of its prece-
dents. The raw materials would have remained disparate but for
the great novelist’s synthesizing hand whereby the literal and the
symbolic seem as one. Each detail, in other words, carries the
weight of several levels of meaning. Yet one does not experience
these levels separately. The technical term for this is synergy: the
whole is more than the sum of its parts.
However, we know that such spontaneous combustion cannot
take place: Dickens’s dramatic fabric is based upon an impossi-
bility. Nevertheless, the narrative works: partly because the im-
age symbolizes a basic human apprehension and partly because
BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY 109

of the accumulation of effect in a highly evocative prose —

a thick yellow liquor. ..a stagnant sickening oil. . .a little thick nau-
seous pool...a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a
dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. ..the cinder of a small
charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes...

Undoubtedly the power is in the language. This can be

brought out by comparing this passage of Bleak House with its
antecedents. Locally, the distinction is between the ‘greasy,
loathsome yellowish liquor’ of Dickens’s boyhood reading and
his own more concise rehandling, ‘a thick yellow liquor’. It is the
difference between “The floor of the chamber was thick smear’d
with a gluish moisture, not easily got off and ‘a dank greasy
coating on the walls and ceiling’. Dickens’s ‘coating’ reminds us
of the greasy coat of Krook as he was in life, almost a part of his
anatomy, yet it leads us on to the tactile quality of the walls and
ceiling as though Krook had in death spread himself throughout
his environment. In Dickens, the implication is that Krook — not
some nameless substance — is not easily ‘got off’! A great deal of
the effect in Dickens is his ability to evoke the man in death as he
was in his questionable life. More, he gives the distinct impres-
sion in his angling of the details that, if we ourselves do not
reform society, it is to this state it must eventually come. Partly
the effect is a matter of the building-up of tension; partly it is a
matter of rhythm and emphasis; partly, indeed, a judicious
admixture of comment amid the fiction: ‘this. . .is all that repre-
sents him’.
The fiction of Dickens has a colour, odour and savour all of
its own, and it is more than the sum of its sources. We adduce
the sources in order to discuss the quality of the text. It is a text
that is at once clearly derivative and highly individual. This is by
no means a paradox unique among the great writers. One thinks
of the use Chaucer made of novelle from the French and Italian
languages, and of sermons and religious tracts; one thinks of the
advantage Shakespeare took of old plays, chronicles, Latin lyric
110 BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

poetry, travellers’ tales; of Joseph Conrad and his reworkings of

anecdote, sailors’ lore, hearsay, autobiographies, old news-
papers. It is quite startlingly true of T. S. Eliot, as we have
already seen; and we can take the matter on in the next chapter.
VIII Comparison and analysis

In the previous chapter my concerns may have looked historical,

but in fact they were those which should engage the literary
student. I adduced Ovid in the original and in Marlowe’s trans-
lation to set off the quality of Wyatt’s best poem; I adduced
Lancelot Andrewes to show how an incisive prose could be adapt-
ed to bring new rhythms into verse; and I also tried to show how
the imagery of minor novelists like Brockden Brown and Mar-
ryat and of major social critics like Coleridge and Carlyle could
receive a decisive rehandling by Dickens in Bleak House. This is
not to discount the virtue of source-hunting or the relevance of
citing analogues. But, unless comparison enhances our apprecia-
tion of the literary text centrally under discussion, such back-
ground work is a branch of history. It may very well be a branch
worth study in itself, but from our point of view as literary stu-
dents its main function is to inform criticism.
This can be attempted in a way less sternly evaluative than
was the case in the last chapter. I hope there I said enough to in-
dicate that Bleak House is a very great work indeed; but its
greatness, of course, does not prevent its being, in its turn, an in-
fluence. Its very richness of texture has enabled it to serve as
matrix from which a number of writings have been stamped out.
Some of these are attractive but distinctively minor, like the
stories of Conan Doyle; some are remarkably different from
their source of origin, yet clearly owe allegiance to it.
M2 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

It is the more direct narrative of Bleak House that is behind

the texts we are to look at. This, for instance:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers
of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping
into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of
barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Green-
wich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the
stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in
his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shiver-
ing little *prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping
over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if
they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds...
I am not going to say that Dickens was the first author to in-
sist on fog as a physical presence. There are antecedents in two
writers who influenced him greatly, Thomas De Quincey and
Leigh Hunt; and the syntactical pattern of insistence here de-
rives from Leigh Hunt’s essays. But the extended tactile qualities
Dickens gives to the fog, the animal application of ‘fog creep-
ing. ..fog lying. ..hovering...drooping...’ — that, indeed, is
Dickens’s own. It gave a definite direction to the way in which
subsequent authors dealt with the phenomenon:
‘Stand at the window here. Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, un-
profitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and
drifts across the dun-coloured houses...’
(The Sign of Four)

A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses,

and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs, through
the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit, and shone on the white
cloth, and glimmer of china and metal...

(‘The Copper Beeches’)

COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 113

In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog
settled down upon London...after pushing back our chairs from
breakfast we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us
and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes. . .
(‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’)
These are snippets from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
stories, and I could easily double and redouble the instances.
Part of their undeniable charm is the imaginative use of
Dickens. Of course there was fog in London, and plenty of peo-
ple noticed it, but this is a particular mode of vision. The fog, as
with Dickens, is curiously alive — it swirls, it drifts, it rolls, set-
tles, drifts again and condenses in oily drops upon the window-
panes. Further, it gives rise to this —
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. ...
(‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’)
It is interesting that T. S. Eliot had to go to Conan Doyle as
114 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

an intermediary between himself and Dickens. Conan Doyle has

this odd distinction: that, though a devotee of Dickens, his work
is not eccentrically Dickensian. Many of Dickens’s imitators
pick up only the mannerisms of the great man: they cough like
Dickens, so to speak, and like him are short. The Inimitable
Boz, as he liked to call himself, was no easy influence to assimi-
late. Yet, in Conan Doyle, influence from a number of areas in
Dickens’s output was picked up and reshaped into a distinctive
texture. The partnership of an alert intelligence with one that is
prosaic, which we associate with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Wat-
son, may have been most immediately suggested by Eugene Wray-
burn and Mortimer Lightwood, the inseparable companions of
Our Mutual Friend; Dickens’s interest in crime is not necessarily
associated with fog, in Bleak House or elsewhere, but the asso-
ciation is made obsessively in Conan Doyle. Therefore it is no
wonder that Eliot, in his turn, moves from the highly imagina-
tive evocation of the fog in such stories as ‘The Copper Beeches’
and ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ to ‘There
will be time to murder and create’ and the recollection of the
breakfast scene that so often acts as a contrast to the fog in the
Sherlock Holmes stories — ‘a hundred visions and revisions /
Before the taking of a toast and tea’.
We can use Conan Doyle as a foil for comparison in this mat-
ter of the fog. It does not have, in his work, the inclusive
humanity of Dickens, with his wrathful skipper and shivering
*prentice boy. Nor does it have the convoluting life manifested
in Eliot. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle enabled Eliot to import
into his verse something of the monstrous character of Krook’s
end which is part of the less direct narrative mode in Bleak
House. Eliot’s fog is not content to stay outside the windows: it
seems about to effect an entry into the room. It does not just
swirl round the house: it curls round it, rubbing alternately its
back and its muzzle quite horribly against the window panes. It
licks its tongue into quite unspeakable corners of the evening. It
has a dramatic function in the story as, for all its qualities, the
‘Baker Street particular’ in Sherlock Holmes has not.
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 115

The comparison helps us to look at the texture of Eliot’s verse

more closely. In Eliot, the fog is a monstrous cat, sliding around
insidiously but capable of a sudden and terrible leap. No better
evocation has come my way of the sinister qualities of feline life;
perhaps no better evocation of fog.
The matter does not stop there. The fog itself wreathes round
the life of Eliot’s frustrated hero, the timorous Alfred Prufrock.
The fog is representative of the urban life that blots from him
the sources of vitality. He is pinned down by eyes that fix him in
a familiar phrase. On a good day he may get out to paddle on
the beach. But he is cut off from what, on a good day, he can
glimpse: the mermaids —
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black...
This evocation of freedom and energy gives us a sense of context
and a plangency which we do not find in Conan Doyle. We do
not find, it seems to me, the more positive aspects displayed here
even in Dickens.
Yet ‘Prufrock’, like a good deal of Eliot’s early writing, was
quite original enough to cause utter consternation among the
critics. It is by an act of historical imagination that we get a
sense of these poems being hotly advocated by Ezra Pound, I. A.
Richards, F. R. Leavis; advocated, moreover, against a tide of
incredulity and even contempt. George Gordon, Merton Profes-
sor of English Literature at Oxford, expressed what may be
taken to be an official view in his inaugural lecture in 1934.
Speaking of Eliot, he says ‘Over his London — for he is a town-
poet, and London is his dejected citadel — there hangs perpetual
fog through which we are conducted with fastidious dandyism
past all the staleness of its muddled and crowded life... We are
in danger of arriving at a kind of code or shorthand poetry, built
on allusion, and written by specialists for specialists...’ After
that, we hardly need to quote Sir John Squire’s response to “The
Waste Land’ — ‘a grunt would serve equally well’ (London Mer-
116 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

cury, 1922). Such critics failed in the most crucial task a critic
can undertake: holding the pass against the inertness of academic
opinion, recognizing the genuinely new writer at the time of
his writing. Being genuinely new need not, as we have seen, in-
volve a rootless modernity. Too often the Bad Critics resist the
great author of their time because they have forgotten the live
tradition in which such an author necessarily works.
Tradition, as I insisted in my book Tradition and Experiment,
is NO mere copying of existing mannerisms. It is rather a creative
use of past writing in an effort to make something live. The tech-
nique of comparison and analysis which I am seeking to demon-
strate here is one way of recognizing this. For example, there is
no more creative use of sources than that which you will find in
Jane Austen. We saw in Chapter 3 how she deployed a mode of
distancing; in Chapter 5 we looked at the way in which she
structured Pride and Prejudice, through key scenes. Now let us
consider how she refined the frequently crude usages of her pre-
decessors into literature.
The distancing mode characteristic of Jane Austen I called
low-mimetic, meaning that we were not encouraged to throw our-
selves into the action and to identify with the central character.
In Chapter 3 I suggested that Samuel Richardson and Fanny
Burney were, so to speak, Jane Austen’s neighbours in that
mode; but it was not my brief, at that juncture, to discuss the use
she made of them. Then I was concerned with similarities; but
now I am concerned with contrast.
This is because, it has to be said, often a good writer draws
upon material that is manifestly inferior. The supreme source-
book for Jane Austen was not, as might have been expected, the
great classic, Clarissa; it was Richardson’s later, and much less
readable book, Sir Charles Grandison. This must not be underes-
timated as a force in its time: it was an attempt to put forward
an ideal of civilization embodied in a perfect English gentleman;
and it was read all over Europe. But its interest for us now is
largely historical, and I shall have no qualms about using it as a
means of showing how its relative crudity was refined, through
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 117

the intermediary work of Fanny Burney, into the characteristic

precision of Jane Austen’s comedy.
Harriet Byron has been abducted by the evil Sir Hargrave Pol-
lexfen, a counterbalance in the novel for the perfect Grandison.
She is carried off from a fashionable ball by a substitute sedan
chair with substitute chairmen. She finds herself being impor-
tuned by Pollexfen in the home of a widow he has misled as to
their relationship.
The vile wretch entered. I left her, and kneeled to him. I knew not what
I did. I remember I said, wringing my hands, ‘If you have mercy; if you
have compassion, let me now, now, I beseech you, sir, this moment,
experience your mercy.’ He gave them some motion, I suppose to with-
draw, for by that time the widow and the other daughter were in the
parlour, and they all retired.
‘I have besought you, madam, and on my knees too, to show me
mercy; but none would you show me, inexorable Miss Byron! Kneel, if
you will; in your turn kneel, supplicate, pray; you cannot be more in
earnest than I was. Now are the tables turned.’
‘Barbarous man!’ said I, rising from my knees. My spirit was raised,
but it as instantly subsided. ‘Be not, I beseech you, Sir Hargrave, cruel
to me. I never was cruel to anybody. You know I was civil to you;
I was very civil ~
“Yes, yes, and very determined. You called me no names. I call you
none, Miss Byron. You were very civil. Hitherto J have not been unci-
vil. But remember, madam — But, sweet, and ever-adorable creature,’
and he clasped his arms about me; ‘your very terror is beautiful! I can
enjoy your terror, madam.’ And the savage would have kissed me. My
averted head frustrated his intention; and at his feet I besought him
not to treat the poor creature, whom he had so vilely betrayed, with
indignity.
‘IT don’t hit your fancy, madam!’
‘Can you be a malicious man, Sir Hargrave?’
‘You don’t like my morals, madam!’
‘And is this the way, Sir Hargrave, are these the means you take to
convince me that I ought to like them?’
‘Well, madam, you shall prove the mercy in me you would not
show. You shall see that I cannot be a malicious man; a revenge-
118 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

ful man; and yet you have raised my pride. You shall find me a
moral man.’
‘Then, Sir Hargrave, will I bless you from the bottom of my heart!’
‘But you know what will justify me in every eye for the steps I have
taken. Be mine, madam: be legally mine. I offer you my honest hand.
Consent to be Lady Pollexfen.’
‘What, sir! justify by so poor, so very poor, a compliance, steps that
you have so basely taken! Take my life, sir! But my hand and my heart
are my own: they never shall be separated.’ I arose from my knees,
trembling, and threw myself upon the window-seat, and wept bitterly.
He came to me. I looked on this side, and on that, wishing to avoid
him. ‘

What is worrying in this prose is the way in which the violent

action fails to be contained by the narrative. It is an example of
the fallacy of imitative form; naturalism gone wrong. The narra-
tive is too near that which it narrates. Richardson has violated
his own low-mimetic mode, and done so to no effect. A phrase
like ‘vile wretch’ names, but does not display, the wretch’s vile-
ness. In life, a girl in this situation might very well make violent
gestures, yet ‘wringing my hands’ is a phrase too well-worn to do
more than state a probability. This is not so much an imitation
of life as a recollection of stage melodrama: ‘“Barbarous man!”
said I, rising from my knees’ ; ‘my averted head frustrated his in-
tention’; ‘the poor creature, whom he had so vilely betrayed’
— the emotion is stated, in these imprecise terms; it is not acted
out as significant narrative.
But even what I have said is statement, not over-precise; and
it can perhaps be made precise only by means of comparison.
This crude aspect of Richardson was, as I have said, influential,
and we shall now see Fanny Burney trying to make use of it. Pol-
lexfen’s attempt at abduction is, in Evelina, geared down to a
strategem on.the part of an unwelcome suitor to secure a private
interview. As with Richardson, so here: there is a close associ-
ation of private interview with means of transport. In this case,
Sir Clement escorts Evelina to his carriage and prolongs the
journey by instructing his coachman to go the wrong way.
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 119

I courtsied my thanks. Sir Clement, with great earnestness, pressed

me to go; and while I was thus uneasily deliberating what to do, the
dance, I suppose, finished, for the people crowded down stairs. Had
Lord Orville then repeated his offer, I would have accepted it notwith-
standing Sir Clement’s repugnance; but I fancy he thought it would be
impertinent. In a very few minutes I heard Madame Duval’s voice, as
she descended from the gallery. ‘Well,’ cried I hastily, ‘if I must go —’
I stopt; but Sir Clement immediately handed me into his chariot, called
out, ‘Queen Ann Street,’ and then jumped in himself. Lord Orville,
with a bow and a half smile, wished me good night.
My concern was so great at being seen and left by Lord Orville in so
strange a situation, thatI should have been best pleased to have remain-
ed wholly silent during our ride home; but Sir Clement took care to
prevent that.
He began by making many complaints of my unwillingness to trust
myself with him, and begged to know what could be the reason? This
question so much embarrassed me, that I could not tell what to an-
swer; but only said, thatI was sorry to have taken up so much of his
time.
‘O Miss Anville,’ cried he, taking my hand, ‘if you knew with what
transport I would dedicate to you not only the present but all the
future time allotted to me, you would not injure me by making such
an apology.’
I could not think of a word to say to this, nor to a great many other
equally fine speeches with which he ran on; though I would fain have
withdrawn my hand, and made almost continual attempts; but in vain,
for he actually grasped it between both his, without any regard to my
resistance.
Soon after, he said that he believed the coachman was going the
wrong way; and he called to his servant, and gave him directions. Then
again addressing himself to me, ‘How often, how assiduously have
1 sought an opportunity of speaking to you, without the presence of
that brute, Captain Mirvan! Fortune has now kindly favoured me with
one; and permit me,’ again seizing my hand, ‘permit me to use it in tell-
ing you that I adore you.’
I was quite thunderstruck at this abrupt and unexpected declar-
ation. For some moments I was silent; but when I recovered from my
surprise, I said, ‘Indeed, Sir, if you were determined to make me repent
120 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

leaving my own party so foolishly, you have very well succeeded.’

We may not be disturbed by the crudities so evident in the tex-

ture of Sir Charles Grandison, but it is impossible to remain at
ease with this style. I think it is a matter of instability in tone:
Fanny Burney has adapted the Richardson mode by importing
into it a number of comic effects, yet the overall effect is not that
of comedy. It would not be simplifying our criticism too much
to say that we cannot tell how funny Evelina is trying to be. The
novel is full of sudden, rather fussy, movements: ‘I courtsied my
thanks’, ‘Sir Clement... pressed me to go’, ‘the people crowded
down stairs’, ‘Sir Clement immediately handed me into his char-
iot...and then jumped in himself’. Instead of Pollexfen’s rude
attempt to kiss the heroine, Fanny Burney has Sir Clement seize
Evelina by the hand; instead of ruffianly sneers and threats, we
have Sir Clement’s asseverations; where Harriet Byron ‘wept
bitterly’, Evelina is ‘quite thunderstruck’. The melodrama has
been toned down to an element of horseplay, but this is not quite
assimilated. It is not helped by an overlooking presence, an auth-
orial self, not absorbed into the first-person narrative. The ef-
fect is that of self-consciousness — ‘I was silent. . .I recovered...
I said’. The ‘I’ attracts the wrong sort of attention and interposes
itself between reader and narrative.
Yet this, and the Richardsonian element of violence, is
absorbed into the texture of Emma and thoroughly utilized. We
have the sense of quick action, but the quickness is in aid of
comedy. There is a sense of affront on the part of the young
lady, but we ourselves do not have to share it: the reader is
conscious, as the heroine is not, of the absurdity of the scene.
Emma has been seeking to recommend her dull little friend
Harriet Smith to the attention of the handsome young vicar, and
the result is that he mistakes her intentions and supposes them
to be directed towards himself.

Isabella stept in after her father; John Knightley, forgetting that he

did not belong to their party, stept in after his wife very naturally; so
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 12]

that Emma found, on being escorted and followed into the second car-
riage by Mr Elton, that the door was to be lawfully shut on them, and
that they were to have a téte-d-téte drive. It would not have been the
awkwardness of a moment, it would have been rather a pleasure previ- —
ous to the suspicions of this very day; she would have talked to him of
Harriet, and the three quarters of a mile would have seemed but one.
But now, she would rather it had not happened. She believed he had
been drinking too much of Mr Weston’s good wine, and felt sure that
he would want to be talking nonsense.
To restrain him as much as might be, by her own manners she was
immediately preparing to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of
the weather and the night; but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had
they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she
found her subject cut up — her hand seized — her attention demanded,
and Mr Elton actually making violent love to her: availing himself of the
precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already well
known, hoping — fearing — adoring — ready to die if she refused him;
but flattering himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love
and unexampled passion could not fail of having some effect, and, in
short, very much resolved on being seriously accepted as soon as pos-
sible. It really was so. Without scruple — without apology — without
much apparent diffidence, Mr Elton, the lover of Harriet, was profes-
sing himself her lover. She tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go
on, and say it all. Angry as she was, the thought of the moment made
her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak. She felt that half this
folly must be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it might be-
long only to the passing hour. Accordingly, with a mixture of the seri-
ous and the playful, which she hoped would best suit his half and half
state, she replied—
‘Tam very much astonished, Mr Elton. This to me, you forget your-
self — you take me for my friend — any message to Miss Smith I shall be
happy to deliver; but no more of this to me, if you please.’
‘Miss Smith! — Message to Miss Smith! — What could she possibly
mean!’ — And he repeated her words with such assurance of accent,
such boastful pretence of amazement, that she could not help replying
with quickness —
‘Mr Elton, this is the most extraordinary conduct! and I can ac-
count for it only in one way; you are not yourself, or you could not
122 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

speak either to me, or of Harriet, in such a manner. Command yourself

enough to say no more, and I will endeavour to forget it.’

Jane Austen, here as elsewhere, uses as a technique of comedy

the contrast between how people see themselves and how they
may seem to the reader. It is more complex than the proposal of
Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice ; here, both participants in the
dialogue make fools of themselves. The technique is worthy of
remark: a phrase like ‘she was immediately preparing to speak
with exquisite calmness and gravity’ carries some odd overtones.
This is Emma talking, not the author: it would seem more ap-
propriate to Emma’s way of seeing herself than to our way of see-
ing her; it is that word ‘exquisite’ that gives the clue. In any case,
she is never given the chance to proceed. Like the heroine of
Evelina, Emma finds that her hand is seized, and the seizure bor-
ders not on violence but on incongruity. This incongruity at once
points the comedy and keeps at bay the sentimentality which
is never far away in Evelina. So confident is Jane Austen of her
tone that she speaks of Mr Elton as actually making ‘violent
love’. It is a calculated over-statement. In fact the ‘violent love’
manifests itself as a torrent of sentiments relayed to us through
the ironically detached sensibility of the author. The words are
those of sentimental theatre, but they are so copious, so broken
up and so encapsulated by the surrounding irony, as to have the
effect of at once seeming familiar and being absurd — ‘hoping
— fearing — adoring — ready to die if she refused him; but flatter-
ing himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love and
unexampled passion could not fail of having some effect...” In-
direct speech, of which this is a fine example, is a precarious
technique: there is always the possibility of a hiatus between the
force of the sentiments and the manner of their relay. Jane Aus-
ten is not only aware of the hiatus; she utilizes it. It is a dramatiz-
ation of the gap between what Elton thinks he is doing and what
we — through the eyes of the author — see actually done.
A technique not wholly dissimilar is used with regard to Emma
herself. Ina Victorian novel a heroine might well express herself
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS £23

in the tones of a Lord Chief Justice pronouncing from on high;

and the author might well be behind her. But Jane Austen was
no Victorian. Emma’s eloquence is unsupported by any authorial
warrant and consequently sounds pompous. ‘“Command your-
self enough to say no more”’ out of context sounds like a line
of blank verse from a heroic tragedy and in context sounds like
Emma fooling herself at the same time as she unintentionally
makes a fool of Mr Elton.
Jane Austen’s prose, as all this will show, bears a degree of
analysis hardly equalled by that of any other author. It is be-
cause of dexterity and variegation of nuance that she remains
almost indefinitely re-readable. What is functionless incongruity
in other works becomes, with Jane Austen, a mode of comedy.
But I doubt whether the point could be made so firmly if one did
not have Evelina and Sir Charles Grandison to draw upon as
foils. Comparison is a sound foundation for analysis: one does
not only describe that which one believes to be excellent but
also calls upon contrast from works that are manifestly inferior
in order to reinforce the valuation.
Comparison is not always so straightforward as this. One could
point to a different sort of contrast between Recollections of
the Lake Poets (1834—40) by Thomas De Quincey and The Spirit
of the Age (1825) by William Hazlitt. These are two books very
much of their period, a mixture of criticism and biography, of-
ten dealing with what seem to be the same topics. Yet De Quin-
cey remembers Wordsworth in one way, and Hazlitt in another,
and there is no method of settling the differential between them.
It is quite likely that the reader will prefer one to the other, but
it would be difficult to state the preference in critical terms. De
Quincey is unendingly garrulous, but full of insight and incident
as he rambles on. Hazlitt is far more purged and prosaic, very
much a man talking to men, but somehow lacking in the quality
of vision that intermittently illumines De Quincey. De Quincey
describes Wordsworth by comparing him with Scott and throw-
ing a piercing side-glance at the head of Charles Lamb — ‘abso-
lutely truncated in the posterior region — sawn off, as it were, by
124 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

no timid sawyer’. Hazlitt sees Wordsworth in terms of a Holbein

portrait ‘grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour,
kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of
the person’. De Quincey moves from description of physical
semblance to interpretation; often in fantastic, if not extrava-
gant, terms — j
Neither are the eyes of Wordsworth ‘large’, as is erroneously stated
somewhere in ‘Peter’s Letters’; on the contrary, they are (I think) rather
small; but that does not interfere with their effect, which at times is fine
and suitable to his intellectual character. At times, I say, for the depth
and subtlety of eyes varies exceedingly with the state of the stomach;
and, if young ladies were aware of the magical transformations which
can be wrought in the depth and sweetness of the eye by a few weeks’
walking exercise, I fancy we should see their habits in this point altered
greatly for the better. I have seen Wordsworth’s eyes oftentimes affected
powerfully in this respect; his eyes are not, under any circumstances,
bright, lustrous, or piercing; but, after a long day’s toil in walking,
I have seen them assume an appearance the most solemn and spiritual
that it is possible for the human eye to wear. The light which resides in
them is at no time a superficial light; but, under favourable accidents,
it is a light which seems to come from depths below all depths; in fact,
it is more truly entitled to be held ‘The light that never was on land or
sea’, a light radiating from some far spiritual world, than any the most
idealizing light that ever a painter’s hand created.
The tone is that of the inspired gossip, the raconteur, the biog-
rapher.
The tone of Hazlitt, on the other hand, is that of the critic. He
anchors his remarks on Wordsworth’s appearance very much to
the great writer reading his own poetry, and in the end it is the
poetry that is the object of his attention —
He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manli-
ness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His manner of
reading his own poetry is particularly imposing; and in his favourite
passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning la-
bours slowly up from his swelling breast. No one who has seen him at
these moments could go away with an impression that he was a ‘man of
COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 125

no mark or likelihood’. Perhaps the comment of his face and voice is

necessary to convey a full idea of his poetry. His language may not be
intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is
either mad or inspired.

This comparison may serve to remind us that the discussion of

literature is not always a matter of ‘either/or’. We are lucky to
have the prose of both De Quincey and. Hazlitt. The qualities of
the one are not the qualities of the other; indeed, it is remark-
able to consider that, at a given period, a given language could
produce writers, ostensibly utilizing the same form, so utterly
contrasting.
Comparisons can take us along this line of argument further
even than that. Suppose one had a writer who was wedded to
detail; scrupulously honest, but incontestably dull. Suppose, in
contrast, there was a writer treating the same subject but angling
its detail, and even distorting it, to produce a caricature whose
traits were dubiously recognizable. Some kind of preference
ought to be indicated here, but it is no easy matter to say quite
what it should be. ‘
My case is not hypothetical. I would like you to consider the
two passages following. Both are about Florence Nightingale
who supervised nursing services in the Crimean War and who is
usually thought to be the founder of nursing as a profession. The
first passage is an extract from her official biography, published
by the sometime editor of the Daily News in 1913.

It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to

their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of the
man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in life; to
magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come there-
after. Material is available for such treatment in the case of Florence
Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse and bandage
dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book about the heroine of
the Crimea contains, too, a tale of ‘first aid to the wounded’ which Flo-
rence administered to Cap, the Shepherd’s collie, whom she found with
a broken leg on the downs near Embley. ‘I wonder,’ wrote her ‘old Pas-
126 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

tor’! to her in 1858, ‘whether you remember how, twenty-two years

ago, you and I together averted the intended hanging of poor old Shep-
herd Smither’s dog, Cap. How many times I have told the story since!
I well recollect the pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog
then gave to your young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to
me not indeed an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of
that I never dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent
disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of
it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that the
very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale which
has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is contained in
a tiny book, about the size of a postage stamp, which the little girl
stiched together and in which the instruction is written, in very childish
letters, ‘16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, and 7 for a
child’. But these things are after all but trifles. Florence Nightingale is
not the only little girl who has been fond of nursing sick dolls or mend-
ing them when broken. Other children have tended wounded animals
and had their pill-boxes and simples.
Sir EDwARD Cook

The second extract is from Eminent Victorians (1918) by

Lytton Strachey, critic, historian and star of the Bloomsbury
Group.
Ah! To do her duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased
God to call her! Assuredly she would not be behindhand in doing her
duty; but unto what state of life had it pleased Him to call Charlotte
Corday, or Elizabeth of Hungary? What was that secret voice in her
ear, if it was not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those
mysterious promptings towards. . .she hardly knew what, but certainly
towards something very different around her? Why, as a child in the
nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her
dolls to pieces, had she shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up
again? Why was she driven now to minister to the poor in the cottages,
to watch by sick-beds, to put her dog’s wounded paw into elaborate
splints as if it was a human being? Why was her head filled with queer

' The Rev. J. T. Gifford

 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 127

imaginations of the country house at Embley turned, by some enchant-

ment into a hospital, with herself as matron moving about among the
beds? Why was even her vision of heaven itself filled with suffering
patients to whom she was being useful? So she dreamed and wondered,
and, taking out her diary, she poured into it the agitations of her soul.
And then the bell rang, and it was time to go and dress for dinner.
= LyTTON STRACHEY

No one can fail to find the first passage less intrinsically inter-
esting than the second. The style is plodding: ‘It is a natural
temptation. ..’; ‘Material is available. ..’; ‘It has been record-
we

ed’ — there is a heavy dependence on the passive voice and the

verb ‘to be’. This goes along with an avoidance of sensational-
ism. Wisely, but not captivatingly, Sir Edward Cook declares
that many young children play at nurse with dolls but only one
of them became Florence Nightingale.
In contrast, Lytton Strachey’s sparkling style goes with the
positive embracement of sensationalism. ‘Ah! To do her
duty. ..What was that secret voice in her ear. ..? why had she
felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious promptings.. . ?’
Not only does Lytton Strachey proclaim Florence Nightingale’s
trafficking with the sick-bed to be exceptional to herself but he
pronounces it morbid. It is all part of a debunking of Florence
Nightingale as a Victorian heroine in particular, and the Victor-
ians in general.
Here, and elsewhere, Lytton Strachey is not particular about
fact if he can angle it in the direction of sensationalism. His is
the mind of the so-called investigative journalist: it is not that of
the respectable critic or historian! In the official life of another
Victorian worthy, it is recorded that Cardinal Manning, then a
Protestant clergyman, made no entry in his diary about his meet-
ing with Pope Pius IX in 1848. This lacuna Lytton Strachey
turns into a ‘fact’. In the absence of any statement by which he
could be confuted, the author of Eminent Victorians invents
‘ wildly. ‘What did Pio Nono say? It is easy to imagine the persua-
sive innocence of his Italian voice “Ah, dear Signor Manning,
128 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

why don’t youcome over to us? Do you suppose that we should

not look after you?”’ I could give kindred instances from
Strachey’s ‘lives’ of his other Eminent Victorians: Dr Arnold,
General Gordon, Queen Victoria herself.
No one could call Strachey dull; merely inaccurate. Even this
would not matter if he did not purport to be presenting history.
Admittedly history, like criticism itself, is based on selection;
but it is impermissible to fill up the absence of fact with inference,
and to flesh out facts that are tenuous with wild imagining.
The equivalent in criticism would be reading into an unsatisfac-
tory text one’s private fantasies. Lytton Strachey has fallen be-
tween two areas of writing. It is interesting to consider what
would have been the difference of effect if he had presented his
facts as fiction. He could have written stories loosely based upon
the lives of the Victorians yet not explicitly presenting themselves
as biography. Then we should have had something like the fol-
lowing —
Why, as a child in the nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy
pleasure in tearing her dolls to pieces, had Jennie Linnet shown an al-
most morbid one in sewing them up again...?
(Jennie Linnet, Nursing Sister)
... What did Hadrian VIII say? It is easy to imagine the persuasive in-
nocence of his Italian voice “Ah, dear Canon Bonynge, why don’t you
come over to us? Do you suppose that we should not look after
you...?
(Over to Rome: an Ecclesiastical Romance)
‘ We can accept as fiction what we know to be founded on fact,
even if the fact can be somewhat distorted. It is the names in
Strachey that throw us off balance because they bring us up
against other areas of information, some of which relate to know-
ledge we already have and which therefore seem preferable. The
fictionalized ‘Florence Nightingale’ or ‘Cardinal Manning’ that
Strachey puts forward jostle uneasily against their historical
prototypes.
 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS 129
The difficulty is even greater when the fiction is presented not
only as though it was fact, but wittily; while the history, as hon-
est history sometimes tends to be, is dull. A trenchant modern
instance can be found in the brilliant cinematography of Ken
Russell. I found his film The Music Lovers an absorbing experi-
ence, but he should not have called his central character Tchai-
kovsky.
What I have done here is to use analytical comparison to de-
- monstrate not only a critical point but an aesthetic one. We have
entered literary theory. However, whether one is aware of it or
not, there is an implied theory in any and every critical state-
ment. Nowadays it is best expressed by urging the reader to be
aware of his standpoint. I am conscious, in writing here, of using
a prose derived, at however many removes, from Bertrand Rus-
sell and Yvor Winters. My attitude towards literature relates to
that of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis; the latter, in fact, was my
teacher. This means, of course, that my own approach to literat-
ure is angled. No doubt a technical Marxist or a doctrinaire
Freudian would approach a text in a different way. This could be
a falsification if, say, the Marxist were to blame Jane Austen for
failing to describe the labouring poor of Longbourn or High-
bury in terms of the class struggle. Any such approach would be
to ignore what Jane Austen offers in favour of something that
she does not. In effect, it would be to substitute for the text a
fantasy. Yet there have been Marxist critics who put their char-
acteristic standpoint to good use: Marx himself on Timon of
Athens, Lenin on Tolstoy, Trotsky on Formalist Criticism — to
come no nearer to our own time. Much, no doubt, depends on
the text chosen for comment; much depends on its relationship
with the critic choosing to discuss it.
As I said in Chapter 1, what we are doing in criticism is argu-
ing a case. It would not do to suppose that any one critic has a
key to the Eternal Verities. Rather, what he says has to be ap-
propriate to his circumstances, appropriate to the text — and ap-
propriate to the reader, too. We must recognize in that sentence
how great a weight is put on the term ‘appropriate’. It can only
130 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

be made functional by particularizing more closely, and saying

that in the present instance I am a teacher of literature address-
ing himself to students in the context of a university. This involves
the implicit taking up of certain assumptions; such as my
readers believing in the utility of literature and wishing themselves
to gain some proficiency in writing about it. My words would
fail to persuade a general in El Salvador, a Yahoo from the land
of the Houyhnhnms, very small children, or visitors from Alpha
Centauri. Clearly, then, there is a presumed relationship between
text and reader, and between the reader, when that reader is a
critic writing for publication, and a presumed audience. But this
need not, as I hope to show in the next chapter, lead us to
absolutism.
IX The model essay/Breaking the model

From what I have said you may think that I have an ideal essay
in mind to which all future essays must conform. This is not so.
Nevertheless, I would advocate the following techniques as
being among the desirable methods to follow.
(1) When faced with a task, whether it be a tutorial essay or an
examination paper, assemble your materials — texts, critical ad-
juncts, notes — well in advance. Try to commit some portions of
your text to memory.
(2) If you are writing a tutorial essay on a given topic, be sure to
answer the question that has been put to you and do not wander
off into irrelevance.
(3) What I have said under (2) also applies to examination pa-
pers. In addition, remember that timing is essential. It is no use
writing a copious first answer, followed by a sketchy second
answer and concluding with an unfinished scrap. If three answers
are called for, timetable the paper in such a way as to fulfil this
requirement. If you find timetabling difficult, write practice
answers under examination conditions in your own time.

(4) Write three or four notes before you begin an answer or an

essay. Label them in such a way as to suggest a sequence of
ideas. If any one note does not fit it, cancel it before you start
writing extensively.
32 THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

(5) Whether in or out of the examination room, address yourself

to particulars. Try to back up each statement with a quotation
(or detailed reference) and each quotation (or detailed reference)
with some show of analysis.
(6) Endeavour to write a lucid prose. Especially make sure that
every sentence has a clearly determinable subject.
(7) Try to write persuasively. In particular, make sure that you
begin and end strongly.

Now, at first sight, this may seem highly prescriptive. But if

you ask a person, as I do in (4) above, to structure an essay, you
are not necessarily imposing.a structure on that person. The es-
say could focus on one particular scene of a play and build a
context of argument involving other aspects of the play around
it. It could take a play and hunt a particular image or image se-
quence through it. The essay could take a character and analyse
that character in terms of its function in the total drama. Other
possibilities include problems of dramaturgy, or the relationship
of the various sources with the finished work. When I speak of
structure, then, I do not mean to say that only one structure is
possible. What I think, however, is that to a great extent structure
is determined by the subject prescribed for an essay or the
question asked in an examination paper. It is no good the student
discussing the symbolism of Othello if he has been asked to
gauge in terms of dramatic effect the machinations of Iago.
Many will feel that such an approach narrows down the pos-
sibilities of a critique. It does: criticism, as I have said, is a craft of
selection. It is my view that many critical essays suffer because
they extrapolate from a text or ramble around it rather than fo-
cus on any particular aspect. However, there are ways of dealing
with this problem, as with others. If you are writing about a spe-
cific poet, clearly you cannot cover all of his output. You will
have to concentrate on three or four of the poems in depth.
Which ones they are will be to some degree dependent upon the
question you have been asked. However, it is possible to bring in
THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL 133

other poems treated glancingly, either as foils for comparison or

as bridges from one part of the argument to the next. This is one
of several techniques that can be deployed to give the impression
of windows opening out of what might otherwise seem a restrict-
ed line of argument.
Similarly: I recommended, in (6) above, that a student should
do his best to write a lucid prose. But I also intimated, in Chap-
ter 4, that several modes of prose were possible. It is true that
I expressed my own preference for the mode of the Expositor:
the kind of prose I associate with such writers as Bertrand Rus-
sell and Yvor Winters. But, even here, a considerable variety of
style is possible. Let me put forward three examples. To designate
quality, I shall select extracts from critics whom experience
has shown me to be particularly useful to students. To maintain
focus, I shall choose examples from essays they have written on
Shakespeare.
The first is from ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’
(1933) by L. C. Knights. The function of the essay is to show the
question — associated with A. C. Bradley’s genre of character-
analysis — to be meaningless.

Macbeth is a statement of evil. I use the word ‘statement’ (unsatis-

factory as it is) in order to stress those qualities that are ‘non-dramatic’,
if drama is defined according to the canons of William Archer or Dr
Bradley. It also happens to be poetry, which means that the apprehen-
sion of the whole can only be obtained fromalively attention to the
parts, whether they have an immediate bearing on the main action or
‘illustrate character’, or not. 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 assumptions about the category ‘drama’; Macbeth has greater af-
finity with The Waste Land than with The Doll’s House...

The second example is from an essay on As You Like It,

published in 1940 by James Smith. The author is concerned to
134 THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

indicate that many of the same elements occur in comedy as in

tragedy; at the same time, he intimates a distinction between
the way in which those elements are deployed. This is the (very
decisive) start of the essay.
It is a commonplace that Jaques and Hamlet are akin. But it is also
a commonplace that Jaques is an intruder into As You Like It, so that
in spite of the kinship the plays are not usually held to have much con-
nection. I have begun to doubt whether not only As You Like It and:
Hamlet, but almost all the comedies and the tragedies as a whole are
not closely connected, and in a way which may be quite important.
Recent criticism of Shakespeare has directed itself with profit upon
the tragedies, the ‘problem plays’ and certain of the histories. The early
comedies, on the other hand, have either been disparaged or entirely
overlooked. Yet the same criticism owes part of its success to a notion
of what it calls Shakespeare’s ‘integrity’; his manifold interests, it has
maintained, being co-ordinated so as rarely to thwart, regularly to
strengthen, one another. Hence he was alert and active as few have
been, while his writing commanded not part but the whole of his re-
sources...
My third example is from Woe and Wonder (1951), an essay
on the emotional effect of Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cun-
ningham. At this juncture Cunningham is concerned with the
way in which Donatus, a fourth-century follower of Aristotle,
redefined the theory of tragedy; especially the belief that tragic
characters were essentially figures of high social position.
The first distinction is that the tragic characters must be great, and
this means of high rank. It is the modern feeling that this is an artificial
stipulation, explicable only in light of the erroneous social ideas of our
ancestors. But The Death of a Salesman is not a tragedy in the old sense,
and so one might conjecture there is something else involved: there
is involved a radical difference in the nature of the tragic effect. For the
field of tragedy will be the state, since men of high rank are rulers of
the state. Tragedy will then involve not private life and private feeling
— this is the province of comedy — but public life and public feeling. But
public feeling is different in kind from private. A public calamity
moves us ina different way than does a private one. The murder of John
THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL 125
Doe is one thing; the assassination of Trotsky or of Admiral Darlan is
another. Hence the tragic emotions in the older tradition will be pre-
dominantly communal and public, and we will find that a similar quali-
fication is implied in the other principles of order which Donatus
distinguishes. . .

Although these three represent something of a similar order of

discourse, there are personal differences. I could not myself mis-
take the urbane tone of Knights, modestly deprecating his termi-
nology as he goes along, for the more moralistic voice of James
Smith. Apart from anything else, the one is, at a great remove,
derivative from the late-nineteenth century, the other from the
mid-eighteenth. Both of them, further, are quite distinguishable
from the tone of J. V. Cunningham. Apart from his greater deg-
ree of intensity, he speaks in an American accent. Neither
Knights nor Smith would have written: ‘A public calamity
moves us in a different way than does a private one’. Than
does’ is an American idiom ; though perfectly acceptable, it would
not ring true coming from an Englishman. Having said all this,
I am also bound to say that there are ideas in common. All three
critics are concerned to indicate the way in which a particular
kind of poetic tragedy differs from the account of an individual
downfall or domestic disaster. -
This is a highly acceptable mode of critical discourse. It allows
for personal characteristics at the same time as it provides a
means of communication between participants in a dialogue.
Let me quote two more examples, ina similar vein, from sources
not likely to be published.

The ‘Problem Plays’ are not concerned merely to expose weaknesses

of human nature. If that was all they did perhaps only the naive would
be disturbed. What is disturbing is their tone, the complexity of the
issues they raise and their failure to offer a satisfactory resolution.
A play like Measure for Measure troubles us because it does not quite
‘come off’. Certainly however (without imagining an embittered Jaco-
bean Shakespeare) we must be immediately struck by the disconcer-
tingly bitter tone of these plays. We have black comedy, literally gal-
136 . THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

lows-humour — ‘You must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardino’

says Pompey in an extraordinary scene in Measure for Measure (IV iti
22-23)...

If the reversal of order and the turn of Fortune’s wheel was all that
lay at the heart of the mature tragedies, they would be much hollower
and less agonising than they are. The problem of evil in relation to
man, his reactions to it within and without him given a particular set of
circumstances and his own changeful nature: the predicament of good
in a fallen world — these are also integral parts of Shakespearian
tragedy.
In the character of Macbeth for example, these concerns are expres-
sed in the form of paradoxes. Macbeth is a good man: he has real
loyalty to Duncan (I iv 22-25), and the milk of human kindness within
him, together with his moral scruples outside the banqueting chamber
at Inverness and his moral sensitivities before and after the murder re-
veal his considerable potentialities for good. But always from the same
spring comes the other urgency, the divine itch of ambition — I iv
50-53:
yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see...

These are taken from two final Honours examination papers

written for the university at which I have the privilege of teach-
ing. I am bound to say that not only to myself but to my col-
leagues these essays seemed worthy of high regard, and both
candidates were awarded First Class degrees in English Liter-
ature. It is also worth remarking that both these extracts come
from the beginning of the essays concerned and so reinforce my
contection that one should seek to grip the reader’s interest
from the outset. While both items are in the same mode, the
styles are dissimilar: one would not confuse the formal,
epigrammatic manner of the first with the impressionistic and
disquisitory manner of the second. They are related, however
distantly, the one to Hazlitt, the other to De Quincey.
THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL ey)
Yet, when I have said all this, I am conscious of the need to
voice a qualification. One recommends these — and Knights,
Smith and Cunningham — as examples of critical discourse; but
are they great criticism? Isn’t there surely, in the end, a lack of
zest, audacity, the capacity to disorient and to disturb?
There is; but I cannot suggest that one should inject such
qualities into one’s prose, even were it possible. Moreover, the
audacity whose absence I am implying is more often scorned
than applauded. It is the quality that I find in this —

Othello, it will be very generally: granted, is of all Shakespeare’s

great tragedies the simplest: the theme is limited and sharply defined,
and the play, everyone agrees, is a brilliantly successful piece of work-
manship. The effect is one of a noble ‘classical’ clarity — of firm, clear
outlines, unblurred and undistracted by cloudy recessions, meta-
physical aura, or richly symbolical ambiguities. There would, it seems,
be something like a consensus in this sense. And yet it is of Othello that
one can say bluntly, as of no other of the great tragedies, that it suffers
in current appreciation an essential and denaturing falsification...

or in this —

Any consideration of the Tragedy of Othello must be primarily oc-

cupied, not with its official hero but with its villain. I cannot think of
any other play in which only one character performs personal actions—
all the deeds are Iago’s — and all the others without exception
only exhibit behaviour. In marrying each other, Othello and Des-
demona have performed a deed, but this took place before the play
begins. Nor can I think of another play in which the villain is so com-
pletely triumphant: everything Iago sets out to do, he accomplishes
— (among his goals, I include his self-destruction). Even Cassio, who
survives, is maimed for life. . .

or in this —

I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean

thing he seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or any-
body else. His nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps
138 THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always
intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-
dislike and a spirit of disintegration.
There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self—dislike, through
much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In
Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious
revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet
frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh...
The first two extracts come at the very outset of the essays
from which they are quoted, and in many ways I regard all three
essays as great criticism. Yet I cannot encourage you to write in
this way in the examination room without at the same time warn-
ing you of possible calamity. The first extract comes from F. R.
Leavis, the same essay as the one in which he attacks Bradley’s
notion of Othello (see Chapter 4); and Leavis had a singularly
unfortunate university career, established only in his middle for-
ties. The second extract comes from an essay called ‘The Joker
in the Pack’ (1961) by W. H. Auden; and Auden began his career
with a Third Class Degree in the Oxford English School, and
even now is hardly thought to be the major critic which to my
mind he undoubtedly is. The third extract comes from a revision
(1915) of an essay on the Theatre in D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight
in Italy, and I cannot find anyone, apart from F. R. Leavis, who
considers it to be criticism of any sort, let alone major.
What the extracts from Knights, Smith and Cunningham had
in common was the possibility of being accepted; they were dis-
courses, with all their varieties, addressed to the disinterested,
reasonable man. By contrast, the essays by Leavis, Auden and
Lawrence seem more like shock tactics. We get a sensation of
being bombarded by the critic’s personality; and, in my view,
that is precisely what is happening. More, without the implied
presence ofa life-long struggle and the availability of the critic’s
other works, it is unlikely that any of the essays in question
would have much credibility. Any one of them would be likely
to incur displeasure exposed to the uninstructed eye of the
examiner!
THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL 139

Moreover, I am bound to say that, while I personally agree

with Leavis on Othello, | am aware that many other reasonable
people would not. I find Auden on Othello entertaining but
wrong-headed; and Lawrence on Hamlet I believe to be not only
a misreading of Hamlet in particular but conducive to a mis-
construction of Shakespeare at large.
Why, then, do I continue to believe these essays to be im-
portant criticism? It is, I suppose, not because they are about
Shakespeare but because they are about, respectively, Leavis
on Shakespeare, Auden on Shakespeare, Lawrence on Shake-
speare. The personality of the critic becomes as central as the
integrity of the text. Each critic’s reaction to his text is appropriate
to him as it would not be to his fellows. Auden’s reading of Othello
is dramatically different from that of Leavis. It is in the wake of
A. C. Bradley who believed the play was about the invincible
cunning of Iago pitted against the noble Othello. Where
Auden’s reading differs from that of Bradley is in being much
sharper in its response to the text, and that is what it has in com-
mon with Leavis, even though it takes Auden in a different direct-
ion. This is what we call the first-hand responSe, and it helps to
decide the course’ of literature.
We read Knights, Smith, Cunningham to some extent to agree
with them, and certainly to learn from them about Shakespeare.
We read Leavis, Auden, Lawrence to learn about Leavis, Auden,
Lawrence. In the process I think we shall learn about Shakes-
peare, too, but not directly. One’s reaction may be negative;
we may reply to the onslaught of Lawrence ‘no, surely Hamlet
was “The glass of fashion and the mould of form”’. However, in
formulating our negative we shall, in effect, be frequenting Ham-
let again. A brilliant tutor might well begin a seminar with some
such gesture as that of Lawrence, to get the students to speak, to
talk back; essentially, such a seminar would be open-ended. It is
what is nowadays called a process of deconstruction: when the
critic shows what can be seen in a text rather than what has
hitherto been held to be there. For such a critic, the ‘hitherto’ is
less decisive than the ‘what can be seen’.
140 | THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

The technique of Knights, Smith and Cunningham, on the

other hand, is that of the ordinary decent academic: you will
find yourself in his seminars receiving what amounts toalecture.
If Knights voices the fact that Hamlet differs from The Doll’s
House or Death of a Salesman, no one much is going to disagree
with him; there will be singularly little room for comment on the
part of the students present. For better or worse, given the formal
circumstances of the university, the student writing an essay or
sitting an examination is likely to assume that position; to add
to the discourse of Knights and Smith, not to astonish the exam-
iner with fireworks displays of wit, with multiple readings of
texts, or with analyses based upon irreconcilable paradoxes, as is
the way of Leavis, Auden, Lawrence, and, latterly, Barthes and
Derrida.
In effect, I have implied that there is no such thing as a model
essay. An area of discourse there certainly is, and that discourse
is to be initially recommended to the student as that of a teacher
expounding a centralized view. At the same time, we must re-
member that it took some pyromania and bloodshed to get that
view across originally, and that is none the less true if the pyres
were no more than the rejected drafts of past disquisitions and if
the blood shed was that of the pioneering critic. Knights and
Smith stand in some degree ancillary to Leavis. A good deal of
their best work, creditable as it is, was distilled from hectic dis-
cussions when they were graduate students and represents, in all
senses, a second phase of activity. I have no doubt that a similar
process will take place with regard to the seminar technique of
our own day; that the passionate deconstruction by Derrida of
the avant-garde story-writer Maurice Blanchot will eventually
settle down into discourse of a nature acceptable in tutorial
essays. Indeed, there are signs that this is already beginning; in
books like The Critical Difference by Barbara Johnson and
Structuralism and Since edited by John Sturrock—useful guides
to the frenetic activity among critics of the last twenty years.
The policy of many teachers is essentially that of the contra-
puntalist Albrechtsberger, who taught Beethoven. It is necessary
THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL 141

to learn to construct fugues before you deconstruct them. An

apprenticeship in all forms of traditional metre is perhaps the
best foundation for writing free verse. Learning to use the ex-
pository mode of conceptual prose will be quite enough to fill
your undergraduate years: the fireworks of Leavis, of Auden, of
Lawrence, were achieved through a prolonged assemblage of
kindling.
Leavis, Auden and Lawrence were sorcerers; the student, while
he remains a student, is their apprentice. By the time he has
grown up into a mastery of his craft, he will be writing in a man-
ner quite other than theirs. To write like Leavis now would be to
wish oneself back in the headily intellectual Cambridge he des-
cribes so well in his memoir of Wittgenstein, with its glimpse of
W.E. Johnson, the great philosopher’s own teacher. We are none
of us in a position to speak like ‘an established familiar in the
little drawing-room, which was a quarter filled with the Broad-
wood grand on which the old logician used to take his exercise
playing Bach’. Not only is the circumstance different from any
we are likely to find ourselves in; the style, of necessity, is differ-
ent, too. A pupil who has learned effectively from his master
will be unlikely to copy his externalities: he will not ‘cough like
Horace’.
It is because of this that we can still read Dryden, Johnson,
Coleridge and Arnold, and call them great critics. Nobody is go-
ing to imitate their style directly; nobody is going to lose his
awareness of the personality and the historical standpoint of the
critic he is reading; nobody is going to read such critics simply
for guidance on the text. At the same time, the way in which they
struggle with their texts in order to formulate their concepts may
serve us better than many more straightforward examples of crit-
ical discourse; it may, for example, improve our terminology.
So there is no ‘ideal essay’, no ‘working model’; only an area
of acceptable discourse through which the student discovers
what he responds to and by which he communicates that re-
sponse. Critical writing leads in many directions. A competent
teacher in the field is likely to remember with affection his literary
142 THE MODEL ESSAY / BREAKING THE MODEL

pupils: a scattering of distinguished poets, a leading playwright

or two, professors and lecturers in several universities. He may
also number among his former pupils a major political figure;
an international opera star; senior executives in oil companies;
several tax inspectors. Most important of all, his former pupils
are bound to include some hundreds of people fulfilling their
destinies in unremarkable walks of life. Any competent teacher
would like to think that the study of literature — writing about it
as well as reading it - in some way had improved their capabili-
ties. After all, we live in a verbal world. As I said at the outset,
the training of a critic is also the training of a citizen.
Bibliography

GENERAL

Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism (First Series, London, 1865; Second

Series, London, 1888)
Coleridge, S. T., Shakespearean Criticism (Lectures of 1808, 1811-12, 1812-13,
1818-19, Notes, Marginalia), ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1960)
— Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. G. Watson (London, 1960)
Dryden, John, ‘Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay’ (1668), in Of Dramatic Poesy
and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson (London, 1962)
Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood (London, 1920)
— Selected Essays (London, 1932)
Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930, 1949)
Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets (1779-81), rep. Oxford (1905,
1906)
Johnson on Shakespeare (Proposals, 1756; Preface and Notes, 1765; Rambler
No. 168), ed. W. Raleigh (London, 1908, 1925)
Knight, G. Wilson, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930, 1949)
Leavis, F. R., Revaluation (London, 1936)
— The Great Tradition (London, 1948)
— The Common Pursuit (London, 1952)
Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924)
— Practical Criticism (London, 1929)
Winters, Yvor, Jn Defense of Reason (Denver, 1947)
Wordsworth, William, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Lyrical Ballads,
ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London, 1963)

I THE USE OF CRITICISM

Blackmur, R. P., Language as Gesture (London, 1954)

Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (London, 1961)
144 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Douglas, Thomas Hardy (London, 1954)

Empson, William, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935)
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (1966), tr. anon. (London, 1970)
— The Archaeology of Knowledge (1962), tr..A. Sheridan (London, 1972)
Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913), in Works, tr. J.
Strachey, XII (London, 1953-66)
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (1962), tr. anon. (London, 1972)
Marx, Karl, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), in Early
Writings, tr. R. Livingstone and G. Benton (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1975)
Mukajyovsky, Jan, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’ (1932), in A
Prague School Reader, tr. and ed. P. Garvin (Washington, D. C.,
1964)
Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912)
The Conquest of Happiness (London, 1930)
Shkovsky, Victor, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism:
Four Essays, tr. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (Lincoln, Nebraska, and
London, 1965)
Smith, James, Shakespearian and other essays (Cambridge, England, 1974)
Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution (1924), tr. R. Strunsky (Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1960)
Il WuHat TO SAY ABOUT A POEM

Brown, Douglas, Thomas Hardy (London, 1954)

Erlich, Victor, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (New Haven,
Connecticut, and London, 1955, 1965, 1981), especially Chapter XI
Leavis, F. R., The Living Principle (London, 1975)
Tynjanov, Juri, ‘On Literary Evolution’ (1929), in Readings in Russian
Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. L. Matejka and K.
Pomorska (Massachusetts and London, 1971)
III Four MoDEs OF FICTION

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, New Jersey,

1957)
Hobsbaum, Philip, A Theory of Communication (London, 1970; published as
Theory of Criticism, Bloomington, Indiana, 1970)
James, Henry, Critical Prefaces (1907-09), rep. as The Art of the Novel, ed.
R. P. Blackmur (New York and London, 1934)
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London, 1973)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 145

Leavis, F. R., Klingopulos, G. D., ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem’, Scrutiny

XIV (1946-47), XV (1947-48), etc.
Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York and
Oxford, 1966)
Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader, First Series (London, 1925)

TV ENGLISH PROSE STYLE

Arnold, Matthew, Reports on Elementary Schools, ed. F. Sandford (London,

1889)
Hobsbaum, Philip, A Theory of Communication (London, 1970)
James, Henry, ‘Honoré de Balzac’ (1902), in Selected Literary Criticism, ed.
M. Shapira (London, 1963)
Lamb, Charles, Essays of Elia (1823, 1833), rep. Oxford (1946)
Leavis, F. R., English Literature in Our Time (London, 1969)
Ruskin, John, The Stones of Venice (1851-52), rep. London (1981)
Russell, Bertrand, ‘On Denoting’, Mind XIV (1905)

V WRITING NOTES
Erskine-Hill, H. H., The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (New Haven,
Connecticut, and London, 1975)
Van Ghent, Dorothy, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York,
1953)

VI StrRUCTURING AN ESSAY

Empson, William, ‘Tom Jones’, Kenyon Review XX (1958), rep. Henry

Fielding, ed. C. Rawson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973)
Mukarovsky, Jan, “Standard Language and Poetic Language’ (1932), in A
Prague School Reader, tr. and ed. P. Garvin (Washington, D. C.,
1964)
Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale (1927), tr. L. Scott
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1958; Austin, Texas, and London, 1968)
Scholes, Robert, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven, Connecticut, and
London, 1974)
Van Ghent, Dorothy, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York,
1953)

VII BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

Eliot, T. S., ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in Selected Essays (London, 1932)

146 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harding, D. W., ‘The Poetry of Wyatt’, in A Guide to English Literature, ed.

B. Ford, I (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1954)
Hobsbaum, Philip, 4 Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens (London and New
York, 1972)
Nelson, C. E., ‘A Note on Wyatt and Ovid’, Modern Language Review LVIII
(1963)
VIII Comparison AND ANALYSIS

Cook, Edward, Florence Nightingale (London, 1913)

De Quincey, Thomas, Recollections of the Lake Poets (1834-40), rep.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex (1970)
Hazlitt, William, The Spirit of the Age (1825), rep. London (1910)
Hobsbaum, Philip, Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (London and
New York, 1979)
Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians (1918), rep. Harmondsworth, Middlesex
(1971)

IX Tue MopeL Essay / BREAKING THE MODEL

Auden, W. H., The Dyer’s Hand (London, 1963)
Barthes, Roland, Critical Essays (1964), tr. R. Howard (Evanston, Illinois,
1972)
Bloom, Harold and Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, et al. Deconstruction and
Criticism (London, 1979)
Cunningham, J. V., Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, 1960)
Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena (1976), tr. D. B. Allison (Evanston,
Illinois, 1973), esp. translator’s introduction
Knights, L. C., ‘Hamlet’ and other Shakespearean essays (Cambridge, 1979)
Lawrence, D. H., Twilight in Italy (1916), rep. Harmondsworth, Middlesex
(1960)
Leavis, F. R., English Literature in Our Time (London, 1969)
Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1982)
Smith, James, Shakespearian and other essays (Cambridge, England, 1974)
 Index

Addison, Joseph 48 Bradley, A. C. 60

“Adventure of the Bruce—Partington Plans, Brown, Charles Brockden 104
The’ (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), Brown, Douglas 14
and influence of Dickens 113 Burney, Fanny, and influence of Evelina
allusion, in poetry 74—8 on Jane Austen 37—9, 116—23
‘ambiguity’, in poetry 20
Andrewes, Lancelot, and influence Carlyle, Thomas 59, 105, 106
on T. S. Eliot 102—4 Cecil, Lord David 61—2
Antony and Cleopatra ‘centre’, of a poem or story 19, 21, 22,
(William Shakespeare), 29, 32, 86; in Tom Jones 90—3
high—mimetic mode in 45 Churchill, Sir Winston 59
Arnold, Matthew 10, 73, 141 Clarissa (Samuel Richardson) 39—41
As You Like It Coleridge, S. T., as critic 10, 141;
(William Shakespeare), in an essay as poet 105
by James Smith 134 Common Pursuit, The (F. R. Leavis) 60
‘Atticus’ (Alexander Pope) 24—7; ‘concreteness’ 13, 83—4
E and see “The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ Conrad, Joseph 14
Auden, W. H., as critic 137—41 Cook, Sir Edward 125—7
Augustans, Peace of the 24 “Copper Beeches, The’ (Sir Arthur
Austen, Jane 14, 47, 52, 129; and Pride Conan Doyle), and influence
and Prejudice 36—9; influences of Dickens 112
on 116—23; and Emma 120—3 criticism, history of 9—11, 62; nature
of 11—16; and value judgements 15;
purpose of 16—17; and different
Balzac, Honoré de 62—3 } modes of fiction 52; and styles
‘Belletrist’ mode, in non-fiction 53, 54—7 of critical writing 53—66, 133—42;
Berkeley, Bishop 49, 50 comparison in 111—30; and the
Bleak House (Charles Dickens), critic’s standpoint 129;
high-mimetic mode in 41—3; and the personality
influences on 104—9; influence of the critic 138—9; and see poetry,
of 111—2 criticism of
148
Cunningham, J. V., and a theory of Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) 50
tragedy 134—S; as an‘acceptable’ form, analysis of 14
critic 137, 138, 139, 140 Foucault, Michel 11, 13, 16
Frye, Northrop 35
De Quincey, Thomas 123—5
Dickens, Charles 44—5; and Bleak House Golding, William 54
41—3, 104—9; influence of 111—5 Gordon, George, on T. S. Eliot 115
didactic mode 36, 52; in Pendennis Grand Style, the 45
46—7 Great Tradition, The (F. R. Leavis) 61—2
Disraeli, Benjamin 106
Donne, John 49,50 Hamlet (William Shakespeare), in an
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, and Charles essay by D. H. Lawrence 137—8
Dickens 111, 112—4 Hardy, Thomas 28—30, 80—5
Dryden, John, as critic 9—10, 141 Hazlitt, William 123—5
‘During Wind and Rain’ (Thomas Hardy) Herbert, George 21—4
28—30, 84 high-mimetic mode 35, 47, 84; in Bleak
House 41—3; in Macbeth 42—5S;

Eliot, George 61 in Antony and Cleopatra 45

Eliot, T. S., as critic 10, 13; as poet
Historical Intentionalism 10
30—3, 102—4, 113—5 history, and literature 125—9

Eminent Victorians (Lytton Strachey)

126—8 impressionist mode 36, 48; in Jacob’s
Emma (Jane Austen), influences on Room 49; in Ulysses 49—S0;
120—3 in Tristram Shandy 50—2;
Empson, Sir William 10, 13, 14, 20, 93, 95 attack on 63—4
English Literature in Our Time (F. R. influences, on writers 98—110; study
Leavis) 57—8 of, for comparison 111—30
‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, The’ ironic mode, in non-fiction 54, 60—3
(Alexander Pope) 25, 73—9
essay, structure of an 80—97; techniques
Jacob Faithful (Captain Marryat) 105
in writing an 131—3; styles of 133—42
Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf),
Evelina (Fanny Burney) 37—9; influence
impressionist mode in 49
on, and comparison with, Emma
James, Henry 14, 62—3, 66
116—23
Johnson, Samuel, as critic 141
examination questions 81
‘Journey of the Magi, The’ (T. S. Eliot)
expository mode, in non-fiction 54, 63—6
30—3; provenance of 102—4
Joyce, James 36, 49—50
fiction, modes of 3452; key scenes
in 69—72 ‘key scenes’ 69—72
Fielding, Henry 47—8, 85—97 Knight, G. Wilson 14
 149
Knights, L. C., and Macbeth 133; as an non-fiction, modes of 53—66
‘acceptable’ critic 135, 137, 138, 139, notes, in literary criticism 68, 74,
140 Toy 16s Fa, 19

Lamb, Charles 56, 66 Odyssey (Homer) 45—6

language, analysis of 13—14; in poetry Othello (William Shakespeare) 60—1;
23—4, 29; in key scenes 72 in essays by Leavis and Auden 137—8
Lawrence, D. H., as critic 137—41 Ovid, and influence on Sir Thomas Wyatt
Leavis, FOR. 10,91; 13; 14) 35,63," 66; 99—102; Marlowe translation 100—2
as ‘Prophet’ 57—8; as ‘Ironist’
59—61; and Othello 60—1, 137—8; Pendennis (W. M. Thackeray) 46—7
and George Eliot 61—2; and Tom plot, in Pride and Prejudice 68—72;
Jones 86; and T. S. Eliot 115; and the in Tom Jones 88
personality of the critic 138—41 poetry, criticism of 18—34, 72—9, 80—5;
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 10—11, 13, 16 memorizing of 73
Lillo, George 40—1 Pope, Alexander 24—7, 74—9
literacy, importance of 59 Pound, Ezra 115
‘Logs on the Hearth’ (Thomas Hardy) Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen),
84—5 low-mimetic mode in 36—8; and
London Merchant, The (George Lillo) Evelina 39; plot in 68—72
40—1 Primitivism and Decadence (Y vor
Lordof the Flies (William Golding) 54, 55 Winters) 63—5
“Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ ‘prophetic’ mode, in non-fiction 53, 57—9
(T. S. Eliot) 113—5 Propp, Vladimir, and an approach to Tom
low-mimetic mode 35, 47; in Pride and Jones 86—90
Prejudice 36—8, 116 prose see fiction; non-fiction
‘Pulley, The’ (George Herbert) 21—4
Pyramid, The (William Golding) 54, 55
Macbeth (William Shakespeare),
high-mimetic mode in 43—5; in an
essay by L. C. Knights 133 reading, asa technique 67; and re-reading
Marlowe, Christopher, and translation of 95
Ovid 100—2 ‘Recollections of the Lake Poets’
Marryat, Captain 105 (Thomas De Quincey) 123—5
Melville, Herman 105 Redburn (Herman Melville) 105
metrical structure, in Thomas Hardy’s rhythm, in poetry 27, 29, 82
poems 81 Richards, I. A. 10, 13; and T.S. Eliot 115
moral considerations, in criticism 95—6 Richardson, Samuel 39—41, 116
Morris, William 59 Ruskin, John 58—9
Mukaiyovsky, Jan 13 Russell, Bertrand 11, 65—6
150
‘Self-Unseeing, The’ (Thomas Hardy) ‘They flee from me’ (Sir Thomas Wyatt)
83—4 18—21; provenance of 98—102
Shakespeare, William 14, 41; Tom Jones (Henry Fielding), and the
and Macbeth 43—5; and styles didactic mode 47—8; approaches to
of criticism of 133—9 86—97; a classic 94—5
Shklovsky, Victor 13 tone, analysis of 25
Sidney, Sir Philip 9 tradition, in literature 116
Sign of Four, The (Sir Arthur Conan tragedy, in Othello 60—1; in an essay
Doyle), and influence of Dickens 112 by J. V. Cunningham 134—5; in
Sir Charles Grandison (Samuel essays by Leavis and Auden 137
Richardson) influence on, and Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) 36;
comparison with, Emma 116—8 impressionist mode in 50—2
Smith, James 14; and As You Like It
133—4; as an ‘acceptable’ critic 135,
137, 138, 139, 140 Ulysses (James Joyce), impressionist
Spirit of the Age, The mode in 49—50
(William Hazlitt) 123—5
Squire, Sir John, and ‘The Waste Land’
(T. S. Eliot) 115—6 value judgements, in criticism see
Steele, Richard 48 criticism, and value judgements
Sterne, Laurence 36, 50—2 Van Ghent, Dorothy 90
Stevens, Wallace 81 Vanity Fair (W. M. Thackeray) 47
Stones of Venice, The verbal analysis see language, analysis of
(John Ruskin) 58—9 ‘Voices from Things Growing in
Strachey, Lytton 126—8 a Churchyard’ (Thomas Hardy) 82
“stream of consciousness’ 50, 51, 63—4
Structuralism 10—11
structure, analysis of 14, 23—30, 67—8; Wilson Knight, G. 14
in Tom Jones 86—90 Winters, Yvor 13, 14, 66; and the
summary, making a 68—78, 85—6 expository mode 63—5
Sybil (Benjamin Disraeli) 106 Woolf, Virginia 34, 49
symbolism, in ‘The Journey of the Magi’ Wordsworth, William, as critic 10;
31—2; in Bleak House 105—8 descriptions of, by De Quincey
and Hazlitt 123—5
Thackeray, W. M. 46—7 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 18—21, 98—102
 Critical essays are the basic mode of
ESSENTIALS expression young people studying litera-
OF ture at universities and colleges are ex-
LTTE Raby pected to master, yet they are given no
special instruction in this area. To make
CRIFICTSM good the deficiency, Philip Hobsbaum
demonstrates that there are techniques in
writing criticism which can be both
taught and learned. He himself had the
advantage of studying under such major
critics as F.R. Leavis and Sir William
Empson, and has had many years’ ex-
perience as a professional critic and a
teacher of literature. After defining the
uses of criticism, he provides invaluable
guidance on such topics as what to say
about a poem, English prose style and
structuring an essay, in each case taking
examples from the works of well-known
authors. Here at last is the means of
bridging the gap between the student as
reader and the student as writer.
PHILIP HOBSBAUM Born in 1932 in London, PHutip
HossBAvM attended Belle Vue Grammar
School, Bradford, before going to Dow-

POR ning College, Cambridge, where he

- REFERENCE ONLY studied under Dr F.R. Leavis. Then a

further four years were spent at the
University of Sheffield studying under
———— Professor William Empson, during
Thames and Hudson
. which he received his M.A. from Cam-
ca: > OQ C) bridge. In 1962 he went as Lecturer in
English to Queen’s University, Be a
net in UK only and in 1966 he moved to the Unive =
of Glasgow, where he is now Read
THAMES AND English Literature. He has Writte
number of works of literary | criti
HUDSON
including Reader’s Guides to C
30 Bloomsbury Street Dickens and D.H. Lawrence Publ
London WCIB 3QP by Thames and Hudson.
Printed in Hungary ISBN 0 $00 272
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