The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades--Blamires--Unit III

M. Phil English, Bharathiar University--Blamiers—

Approaches--Unit III

Summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar

Syllabus for Unit IIIThe Romantic Age (Blamires, pp 217-380)The Victorian AgeThe Twentieth Century I: The Early DecadesThe Twentieth Century II: Post-war Developments

The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades

PART I

[the study  material is in two parts]

The early twentieth century was a period of extraordinary literary activity in England. The publishing industry was expanded and modernized as there was a huge demand for books. There were various reasons for this:

·        Elementary education became universal

·        The public library system was developed

·        There was reaction against excessive working hours from the trade unions and laborers got vast increase in leisure.

The age produced great writers like Joyce and Eliot, Lawrence and Yeats. It also gave birth to lesser writers like Galsworthy and Wells, Wodehouse and Masefield.

Major developments of the period

·        The First World War and the relentless slide into the Second World War

·        The Russian Revolution and the rise of dictatorships

·        The popularization of ideas from Freud and Einstein

Henry James

By the end of the Victorian Period, novel became the most popular form of Literature. But there was no theorizing about the novel as a genre as there were for tragedy and epic.  As a form the novel had grown free of any methodological limitations. It was left to the American, Henry James, to make amends.

James did not think that the novel was any worse for a lack of theoretical attention. But he clearly resented the lack of professionalism in it.  James said, ‘There was a comfortable, good-humored feeling around that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it’.

Form of the Novel

The apparent formlessness of the novel offended James. In the series of prefaces he wrote for his novels, he made his points clear. In the Preface to the Portrait of a Lady, James says that the artistic concept grew from ‘the germ’ of an idea. In the case of the Portrait, it was ‘the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman’.  ‘The house had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation’.

James placed the centre of the subject in the woman’s consciousness. Then he added the consciousness of the heroine’s satellites, especially the male. Thus stage by stage, the ‘needful accretion’ took place and the ‘unordered puzzles’ fell into place.

James takes up the same subject again in The Ambassadors.  He locates the first germ of the novel in remarks made by an older man to a younger man in a Paris garden:  “Live all you can so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” From this germ grew the concept of the aging man who regrets missed opportunities. Step by step James traces how his hero Strether’s background and errand were formulated and the ‘story’ fashioned.

Detachment of the Author

In the Preface to The Golden Bowl, James speaks of his efforts to shake off ‘the muffled majesty of authorship’. He wanted to get down into the arena and wanted ‘to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse’ with his characters.

Narrative method

James was not satisfied with the ‘First – Person’ narrative style. He believed that it will lead to looseness. He disapproved the ‘Third- Person’ narrative mode of Dickens stating that in novels like David Copperfield, the hero is both subject and object.  James preferred the method of setting up for his hero ‘a confidant or two’ who can enlighten the readers on what is going on in the novel.

H. G. Wells and Henry James

James was full of admiration for Kipps, the novel written by Wells. The two men became friends but the friendship was short-lived. James was not happy with the other novels of Wells as he believed that Wells had no idea about the form of fiction.

Wells believed that James was ‘the culmination of the Superficial Type’. Wells castigated James for omitting all opinions from his novels. ‘Living human motives’ are lacking in the novels of James.

The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar.

Conclusion

James’s Prefaces exist to explain innovation and account for a technique or a content which the reader might have found difficult or bewildering. He thoroughly explained the process of novel writing. His works offer a careful exhibition of the workshop of the writer’s mind. They offer ‘a delightful running commentary on what is happening to the genre’.

THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

Literary innovation was the dominant trend in the early years of the 20^th century and many writers undertook close examination of the creative process.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Yeats, more than any other writer, gave expression to the dramatic changes in poetic form and substance that took place during his period.  His views on ‘modernism’ were much influential in fermenting a new literary trend.

In a celebrated essay, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, Yeats developed the ideas found in Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement. Yeats said that formerly writers used to lose themselves in ‘externalities of all kinds’, in ‘picturesque writing’, and in ‘word-painting’.  By contrast, writers during his period were concentrating on evocation and suggestion, in short upon symbolism.

It is symbolism that makes poetry moving by the way emotions and ideas are embodied, and the consequent evocations have a restorative effect on the human heart.

T.E. Hulme (1883-1917)

Hulme was a philosopher and writer who was killed on the Western Front during the First World War. He left behind a number of literary remains which were gathered together and published posthumously by Herbert Read in Speculations (1924). Pound and Eliot made extensive use of the ideas expounded by Hulme, especially his recommendation of a dry hard style of poetry. Hulme is the thinker behind the Pound-Eliot revolution in English poetry.

In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ Hulme speaks about the root of romanticism:

“…man the individual is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress”.

Hulme defines classicism thus:

“Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him”.

Classical and romantic in verse

When people talk of classical and romantic in verse, the contrast comes into their mind between Racine and Shakespeare. This idea is not correct according to Hulme.  Shakespeare is not exactly romantic but neither is he a classic like Racine. There are two kinds of classicism, the static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the classic in motion.

A particular convention of art is like organic life. It grows old and dies. If we look at the extraordinary flowering of poetry during the Elizabethan period we see that the discovery of the blank verse was one of the main reasons for it. It was new and the poets wanted to play with the new tune. Hulme says, “Each field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who gathers a full harvest from it”.

 Classicism, Romanticism and the idea of beauty

Classicism defines beauty as lying in conformity to certain standard fixed norms. The romantic view drags in the infinite. Art must aim at precise description and Hulme says that it is a very difficult thing to give a precise description. Mere carefulness does not bring exactness of expression. The use of language by its very nature is a communal thing. It never expresses the exact idea. But what it expresses is a compromise. Language has its own conventions and special nature. We can express anything exactly only through concentrated effort.

 Hulme’s Prophecy and views on the languages of prose and poetry

Hulme says “I prophecy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming”. Hulme’s prophecy was proved accurate by the poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot and others. Hulme says that in prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters, which are moved about according to certain rules. Poetry can be considered an effort to avoid this effect of prose.

Hulme says, “Visual meanings can be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose- a train which delivers you at a destination”. 

Ezra Pound and Imagism

Ezra Pound ( 1885-1972)

He was more responsible than anyone else for the complete break that took place between Victorian and Modern poetry. Pound castigated Victorian poetry for being ‘blurry’ and ‘messy’ .  He declared

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions

Pound later collaborated with Richard Aldington and HD (Hilda Doolittle) in what is called the ‘Imagist Movement’.

Pound defined image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". In formulating this definition Pound was influenced by a form of Japanese poetry known as "Haiku" (or "Hokku") . 'Haikku' is a poetic form of seventeen syllables and Pound himself composed one after seeing a crowd in a Parisian metro station:

            The apparition of these faces in the crowd

             Petals on a wet black bough.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)

He was the most astonishingly neglected writer in the history of English literature. His tetralogy Parade’s End is one of the finest in English fiction of the century.

Ford’s critical works includes essays written for the English Review which he edited. His other works include Henry James: A Critical Study  and Joseph Conrad: a Personal Remembrance. But there is a vast amount of critical material scattered about his works.

Greene, one of the young writers Ford encouraged, comments on the vitality and vividness of Ford’s critical writing. It was like ‘shot of vitamin in the veins’. Ford recognized the greatness of poets like Pound, ‘What poetry should be,  that they are’.

Ford was a keen experimenter with the ‘time-shift’ by which the totally unnatural method of strictly chronological presentation is avoided. He goes into detail about the best way to introduce new characters and convey appropriate information about their history. He believed in the greatness of the novel,

We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day.

‘You can explore any department of life or thought in it. The only thing that you cannot do is to propagandize, as author, for any cause’.

BLOOMSBURY AND EASTWOOD

Virginia Woolf,  E.M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry  

Virginia Woolf  ( 1882-1941)

She was the center of the Bloomsbury group which included Lytton Strachey and the economist Maynard Keynes.

Woolf’s essays and reviews were posthumously collected by her husband Leonard Woolf in four volumes of Collected Essays.  An essay ‘Modern Fiction’ has assumed the status of a critical milestone.

Woolf rebelled against what she called the ‘materialistic’ fiction of Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. By this she meant that they wrote about ‘unimportant things’. They spent ‘immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring’.

Virginia Woolf believed that James Joyce achieved in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man what the materialists could not. She denigrated the practice of heaping up facts. She foresaw Wells and Galsworthy paying for contemporary success by the total neglect of posterity.

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

Forster delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge which were published as Aspects of the Novel. They are chatty and ought not to be subjected to scrutiny under any searching critical lens.

Forster makes a distinction between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters which has found its way into school classrooms as a handy tool for examination purposes. ‘Flat’ characters can be summed up in a sentence. ‘Round’ characters are more highly organized, they ‘function all round’, and seem capable of extended life beyond the bounds of the book in which they appear.

Forster hailed the works of Jane Austen, Proust and Tolstoy. He considered Tolstoy the greatest novelist and Proust as second only to Tolstoy.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Lawrence blasted away aggressively in defence of the novel in his essays on the subject—‘Morality and the Novel’, ‘The Novel’ and ‘Why the Novel Matters’. Lawrence says that novel has superior morality which lies in its acceptance that ‘everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance’ and false outside.

Lawrence scathingly attacks the conventional divisions of man into body and soul. It is ‘bunk’ to regard the body as a ‘vessel of clay’. Saints, philosophers and scientists are all ‘renegades’. The novelist is superior to them all because he deals with the whole Man.

Tolstoy, Forster, Conrad and Joyce do not escape Lawrence’s censure. They are bracketed with authors of best sellers like The Constant Nymph. Lawrence is stimulating even when he is wrong-headed. He presents his criticism as largely emanating from the novel itself in protest against abuse of its own vitality and integrity.

John Middleton Murry  ( 1880-1957)

Murry edited a journal Rhythm from 1911 to 1913. The journal was supportive of modernist innovators in literature and art.

In his essay ‘The Function of Criticism’, he makes his allegiance to philosophic criticism. Coleridge’s criticism is praised because of the philosophical content in it.

In The Problem of Style, Murry explores the difference between poetry and prose which is not always happily argued. The importance of the fashion of the age in literary genre is illustrated by him cleverly. He argues that Hardy was not comfortable with the novel form as Shakespeare was comfortable with the drama.

Murry was an earnest crusader who threw himself passionately into a series of causes inspired by spiritual ideals. His admiration of Lawrence was deep. His personal intimacy with Lawrence and his wife was turbulent. Murry presents Lawrence as a man grossly misled by his own psycho-sexual abnormality and the doctrines it led him to embrace.

T.S.ELIOT

T. S. ELIOT (1885-1965)

His classicism

Eliot’s critical work consists mostly of essays and lectures, written or delivered from time to time and collected together in book form subsequently.

The most important among them are:--The Sacred Wood, Homage to John Dryden, For Lancelot Andrews, Selected Essays, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Elizabethan Essays and Essays Ancient and Modern.

Eliot stands for orderliness in art and in criticism. He believed that the right approach to criticism is the classical. Criticism is about something other than itself. He dislikes the abstract form of criticism. A precept given by Horace or Boileau  is simply an unfinished analysis. For  a work to conform to it blindly is to ignore the call of the present altogether which  alters the past as much as it is altered by it.

True criticism is the institution of a scientific enquiry into a work of art to see it as it really is. It is ‘the disinterested exercise of intelligence’.

Impersonality of poetry

One of his remarkable contributions is what he himself calls the ‘impersonal theory of poetry’. He holds the view that the poet and the  poem are two separate things and ‘that the feeling, or emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet.

The past is never dead; the past is always present in a poet. If we approach a poet with an open mind, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.

The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. If this is admitted, there is very little of the purely personal left in him to be transmitted to is work.

There is no connection between the poet’s personality and the poem. The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates….Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality…” The emotion of art is impersonal.

Other Concepts

Objective Correlative

This phrase occurs in the essay, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’. Eliot explains how emotions are transmitted from the mind of the poet to the mind of the reader. It hs to turn itself into something concrete—a picture or a person, pace, or thing suggestive of it— to evoke the same emotion in the reader. The object in which emotion is thus bodied is objective correlative (equivalent). In the sleep-walking scene, Lady Macbeth repeats all the actions she has done immediately after the murder of Duncan.  This unconscious repetition of the past actions is the objective correlative of her present agony.

Dissociation of Sensibility

This is another phrase made popular by Eliot. This is the typical fault of 17^th century poetry according to Eliot. It opposite quality is ‘unification of sensibility’ which Eliot says existed in the poetry of Donne and the Metaphysicals. In the poetry of Donne thought is transformed into feeling to steal its way into the reader’s heart. It is the union of the two that constitutes poetic sensibility.

When the  poet’s thought is unable to convert itself into feeling, the result is dissociation of sensibility—a split between thought and feeling. A poet must have the best ideas to convey but they server no purpose unless they issue forth as feelings. Tennyson and Browning, says Eliot, fail to satisfy this test: ‘they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.

The Value of his criticism

u Eliot’s model critic is Aristotle who had a scientific mind which is wholly devoted to inquiry. Eliot calls himself a classicist in literature because he likes to follow the scientific methods of Aristotle.

u Eliot does not like the practice of amputating an author by the rules of dead critics. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all. It would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art.

u In life and art, the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

u Eliot considers poetry as a form of superior amusement.

u As a classicist Eliot applies the method of science to the study of literature and this is his contribution to present-day criticism.

END OF PART I

please go to Part II

S. SREEKUMAR

To be concluded