Notes from René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism: 11750-1950. Vol. 5. English Criticism, 1900-1950 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986). Handwritten notes taken by José Angel García Landa, c. 1995.
Preface to vols. 5&6
vii- Minimal interchange in the 20th century. The Americans and English are ignored (by Continental European critics). But Marx and Freud influence them, even if "actual literary critics from the Continent remained virtually unknown." Except Croce for Spingarn and Collingwood. Contacts between England and America are close, with interchange of scholars. But criticism develop quite separately: Bloomsbury group vs. leftists and muckrakers.
Introduction to volumes 5 and 6. Method and scope
xvi- History without a thesis is impossible (vs. Crane and Saintsbury). Cf. Hegel's history of philosophy, vs. previous doxographies: for Hegel, "the history of a subject depends closly on the concept one has of the subject".
xvii- Criticism is an isolatable subject (vs. Croce & Auerbach); "criticism is any discourse on litrature. It is thus closely circumscribed by its theme." A causal conception of ideology is not applicable, as an element of freedom remains;
xviii- a work is the necessary condition of another, but does not cause it. There is a seamless relationship between criticism and related activities: aesthetics, literature, etc.
xix- But criticism is bracketable. There are persistent questions all through the history of criticism, which have to be thought anew always.
xx- We need to assume that an understanding of previous ages is possible (with Dilthey, etc.). "We have to find a way of thinking of an internal history of criticism."
xxi- The History of Criticism is not the same as cultural history; it does not merely place critics as representatives of a period or a trend; it has a point of view.
xxii- An evolutionary history of criticism is impossible. But Wellek opposes Kuhn's paradigms: an Aristotelian model replaced by Kan & Herder and then by Eliot...? Wellek rejects this incommensurability. There is a continuity, a growing core of agreement.
1 - SYMBOLISM IN ENGLISH
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
1- Yeats developed a Symbolist theory of his own. A weird system of the world, but a striking unity in his theory of poetry.
2- Romantic definition of art as "a traditional statement of a certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius but never abandones." Cf. The Celtic Twilight (1893), folk traditions, vs. England and industrialism.
3- —and vs. the "muddy torrent of shallow realism" (Yeats). He edits Blake and tries to make sense of his symbolism. "Art is not a 'a criticism of life' but a 'revelation of hidden life'." He moves between Neoplatonism, Emerson, and Jung. Or: "our minds giving a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must call a supernatural artist"; macrocosm mirrored in the microcosm of the poet's minor creation.
4- The poet as a priest celebrating a ritual. Yeats's symbolism is at times apocalyptic. He is little literested in criticism of resources, and is often vague. "A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence", inherent or arbitrary and emotional / intellectual (contemporaries are hopelessly intellectual); he opposes allegory.
5- Are symbols created or discovered? This is ambiguous. Sometimes a humbler assumption: the symbol as an invocation or suggestion.
6- Three levels: suggestion, arbitrary construction, and genuine symbolism as vision. He bridges the gap between the sensuous and the spiritual.
7- Art turns from the mirror to the lamp (Yeat's expression). He favours impersonality, and opposes plot and naturalistic scenery; pro lyricism, vs. comedy and character types. Yeats: "tragedy is passion alone, and rejecting character it gets form from motives, from the wandering of passion, while comedy is the clash of character."
8-11: Yeats embraces extreemes and finds they are compatible. A Hegelian, pro unity of being in traditional cultures, forfeited by modern civilization, Specialization of man as a deterioration. Literature is gounded on Freedom, God, Immortality. The fading of these leads to the fading of literature.
12- Yeats never fully accepted modernism; he is anchored in an earlier conception of poetry.
Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
13- The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), an influential book but not high criticism.Poetry is always symbolist, but today consciously so.
14-15: "Symbolism is 'a revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition'"; it is "an endeavor to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists." It is "a kind of religion." There are omissions, errors.... Symons uses few critical tools, and often surrenders the critical task: it is impossible to analyze a good poem. At first he was pro "decadence" as "an intense self-consciousness". Yeats converted him to symbolism, and learnt about the French in turn. Symons is OK as a critic of English poetry (The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, 1909).
16- He values the "visionary" aspect of Romanticism and (not seeing any contradiction) "art for art's sake";
17- "the book is the last prominent display of metaphorical criticism dominated by a concept of poetry as the intense moment." (Wellek opposes impressionism). Symons's later criticism is scrappy and marred by pathological obscurantist obsessions.
George Moore (1852-1933)
18- Impressions and Opinions (1891); Moore knew the Symbolists before Symons. Sketchy and poorly informed.
19- "An Irishman must fly from ireland if he would be himself" (Hail and Farewell), but he participated in the Irish literary renaissance. Criticism in his late works. Pro pure poetry, as poetry free from thought, ideas, morality, propaganda: it is free from personal emotion, a poetry of things and not of feelings. "The poet creates outside of his own personality". Vs. blighting, the subjective taint. (An Anthology of Pure Poetry, 1924). "Moore wants not descriptions but images, pictorial clarity, the visual world he was seeking as a novelist and critic of novels."
20- From Zola he turned to Balzac and Turgenev. Avowals & Conversation in Ebury Street, critical dialogues.Violent prejudices and contradictions, easy dismissals.
21- Vs. Fielding, but pro Sterne; vs. Thackeray, pro Dickens, in spite of his 'waste'. Vs. Charloter Brontë 6 Hardy, vs. James, "lost in trifles."
22- Moore is insensitive to what smacks of romanticism. Impressionistic, he trusts only his sensibility. Criticism is only "the story of the critic's soul" (Confessions of a Young Man, 1888; 367-8).
2. ACADEMIC CRITICS
23- "In the early twentieth century criticism found a home in the universities", differentiating itself from journalism. The 'man of letters' who combines both of them disappears. Academic criticism already in Blair and Wharton. "But none of the important critics of the early nineteenth century taught in the university." Arnold becam Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. The teaching of literature expands through the 19th c.,
24- but "the teaching of English literature either meant antiquarian factual literary history . . . or was an unsystematic, often preachy or gusty commentary on men and books." "Oxford and Cambridge hold out longest." John Churton Collins pro divorcingh literature and philology, and vs. the upholders of classical education: hope in imitating their methods and standards.
Walter Raleigh (1861-1922) and Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944)
Q-C and Raleigh pro appreciation and praise, vs. technical scholarship. They created a type. Vs. pedantry and novelty. "Walter Raleigh's Letters reveal a crudity of feeling and expression one would not have expected from the erstwhile aesthete who wrote a precious little book on Style (1899). Ashamed of being a critic. Coarse and flippant judgements. Amateurishness, but learning (e.g. The English Novel, 1894). Milton (1900) finds him of the devil's party; Wordsworth (1903) is "a true visionary", etc. Shakespeare (1987) stresses Sh's irony and detachment.
Quiller-Couch is gentler but he shares Raleigh' distaste for criticism. Vs. "all general definitions and theories" (On the Art of Writing 18), vs. German scholarship, vs. Croce and Spingarn; "All critical discernment, or taste, is relative" (Studies in Literature, 1919, 22, 29; 3:208). "No book can mean the same to any two men" (SL 3:211). Vague ideas of poetry approaching to the Platonic harmony of nature, etc.
28- They set a tone, but are of little critical worth. At least they are tolerant. Their influence waned in front of I.A. Richards.
A.C. Bradley (1851-1935)
Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), great and influential (except in the 30s); Leavis vs. Bradley. Bradley is indebted to Hegel and other Germans, e.g. Freytag. German discussion of the tragic was unknown at the time in England. England was Aristotelian (catharsis);
29 - Schelling "was the first to break with this tradition and to look for the tragic in the dialectic of freedom and necessity." Bradley a monist: the finite is a partial manifestation of the infinite; metaphysics informs his aesthetics. Evil is inevitable (an attempt at isolating finitude) since all part is an imperfect image of the whole. "Tragedy is an image of the world drama . . . a defense of the world order." A collision of forces, of the tragic hero vs. the order of the universe; ultimately he perishes. "We feel that this spirit, even in the error and defeat, rises sublimely into ideal union with the power that overwhelms it" (Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909: 292);
30- "mere passive suffering cannot be tragic"; the hero must be responsible, free. "Pure chance would destroy tragedy"; madness too, Bradley favours a "strict connection between act and consequence." The hero need not be moral, but sublime, he becomes infinite. Catastrophe as a mysterious justice. He diminishes death as unimportant, the world is all spirit (idealism). Souls vs. the infinite —> character.
32- Bradley on reconstructing hidden aspects in character (cf. Stanislavski); OK, but he sometimes confuses art and life; ridiculed in L. C. Knights's malicious How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933). Bradley does rather "whimsical mental experiments,
33- . . . rhetorical devices to make us realize the different characters and situations more clearly." He is not unaware of the stage, as is often argued.
34- "Still, Bradley does belong, after all, to the tribe of Lamb, who would rather read Shakespeare than hear him performed." He accepts, though, things effective on state but not necessarily for the plot, unperceived inconsistencies, etc. He emphasized he criticized from the tragic point of view, not the psychological one. He was the first to appreciate the 'spatial' qualities of Shakespeare's plays (G. Wilson Knight). His interest is wider than character: imagery, language... A poetry of life ("Poetry for Poetry's Sake"); he refutes in advance these accusations.
Empson (verbal interest) agrees with Bradley's emphasis on the need of coherence of character and action; interest in motivation, not merely metaphor. Bradley does not seek a "spatial pattern" like G. Wilson Knight. He defines tragedy as "a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate" (Shakespearean Tragedy 11-12); analysis using Aristotle through "Freytag's streamlined modernization."
36- "On the whole B. was wary of finding symbolism and allegory in Shakespeare." He is more interested in "a description of the presumed emotional reaction of the audience, which, when Bradley seems uncertain of its universality, is stated often bluntly as his own personal reaction."
38- Shakespeare's blemishes are (as Samuel Johnson found) unimportant. Tragic emotions are "stirred only when such beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move the agents, and the conflicts which result from these forces, attain terrifying and overwhelming power." Shakespare was unable to dethrone Falstaff: "There is truth in this." Lear's cosmic pessimism is causeed by reasons "outside the dramatic nexus"; —an aesthetic flaw? No, there is redemption at the end ("vs. Kott"). "Religion denies that real life . . . is the whole and final truth; and this is just whant poetry, which asserts nothing, nevertheless suggests (Bradley, The Uses of Poetry, 1912).
30- Bradley pro the infinite suggestion of poetry; tragedy "forces the mystery on us." Touching infinity —> importance of Wordsworth as a mystic, sublime and visionary. Visionary feeling as "The intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary 'reality' . . . At its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into the infinite being" (134).
Wordsworth equivalent to Hegel in his treatment of infinity (in fact with the idealists). Nature is not the mere "outward world" in Wordsworth and Sheleey. Bradley opposes Arnold in this respect. Romanticism as "the great ideal movement" parallel to German philosophy (both are the roots of Bradley).
The stated ambition of Bradley's criticism is to make us share the author's imaginative conception of his work [equivalent to intention? JAGL]. Bradley raises what Wellek calls "the most burning question of recent criticism: is there or is there not a correct interpretation? There are, indubitably, many incorrect ones."
Bradley influenced Middleton Murry's Keats and Shakespeare, 1925.
Elton, Ker, Grierson and Garrod
Ranging from 1855 to 1960.
Elton (1861-1945), "The Meaning of Literary History"; Modern Studies (1907). Pro comparative literature and international knowledge. Criticism as a fine art, "like friendship". Vs. analysis of impersonal forces.
A Survey of English Literature (1730-1880), 1912-32. Expository, OK. Emphatic, unabashed comparisons between writers.
44- "a tempered, subdued romantic, basically Victorian taste". He notes the ebb and decadence of English literature after praising the "intensely ethical, exalted and didactic temper" of the Victorian age. The English Muse (1935), A Sheaf of Papers (1922), Essays and Addresses (1939).
In "The Nature of Literary Criticism" he argues the independence of all works, "inner harmony" as the only canon of value, but he admits "a harmony between discords". Pro ranks and values in literature, and pro "defining once more the virtue of the classics."
Ker
45- Epic and Romance (1896), Teutonic epic vs. Romance romance. Ways of telling, feudal vs. courtly. Also an idealized theorist.
46- "On the Philosophy of Art" (1883). Art is an end in itself, creates independent and inexhaustible objects, which remain indifferent to change and history. Ker assumes nevertheless a Hegelian succession of periods. Art is historic, but alive forever. Elsewhere:
46-47- "Art and literature are living things which assert themselves against the historian and cannot be made into a mere matter of narrative" (of a methodological literary history). Wellek: "This view has not, to my mind, been refuted."
47- Ker: "The poem as an individual thing is all form; and what is not form is not poetry" —Crocean, but he recognizes the need for a history of forms. The study of literature is a compromise between emphasizing the work or its belonging to a school. "He remained a historian in spite of his ambition to become a critic . . . Ker did not develop any analytical tools to satisfy his own ambition" of studying the work itself; "he could not emancipate himself from the basically eclectic, indiscriminately tolerant Victorian taste, its basic historicism."
Grierson (1866-1960)
He edited the metaphysicals, he sees in them a "peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination" (Eliot reviewed him in his essay on 'The Metaphysical Poets'). He deals above all in the history of ideas. Critical History of English Poetry (with J. C. Smith, 1946) is bad, with an unfair estimate of the moderns. Wellek: "Bad poetry is bad poetry as great poetry is great poetry, whatever its age and whatever our particular sensibility" (Wellek vs. literary history).
Garrod (1878-1960)
A Raleighian, his criterion is liking, vs. transcendental questions. But rigorous in textual scholarship. He also appreciates organic unity in the work, and the verdict of ages as proof of genius.
52- Garrod favours an eclectic approach, accepts all methods, and opposes criticism as the self-expression of the critic. He emphasizes the communal participation in art and criticism. Garrod: "The public acts the play, and in a sense it writes it." He thinks of poetry as atemporal. He accepts universality (and he dismisses Jane Austen as narrow); vs. "realism"; but: poetry shows the object in its individuality—he can't decide on a final answer.
3 - THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
55- Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West. Basis: G. F. Moore's Principia Ethica: "by far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness, which many be roughly described as the pleasure of human intercourse, and the enjoyment of beautiful objects." Timeless states of contemplation, aesthetic approach to life. But also social compromise and individual emancipation.
56- Vs. scientism. Vs. anti-romanticism, A& vs. impersonality and moralism"; a "cliquish self-conscious superiority", but separate figures.
Roger Fry (1866-1934) and Clive Bell (1881-1964)
Fry: View of art as communication, a communal product, but subjective reaction. Art is in the main self-contained and has internal principles of development.
57- Art has no connection with morals or sex. He advocated post-Impressionism, "constantly argued for the rejection of both realistic and impressionistic art, accpeting even the logical conclusion in abstact or non-representational art." Frye: "All the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form"; "as poetry becomes more intense the content is entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all." Special art-emotion exists, but no pure art: "The aesthetic emotion has greater value in highly complicated components than in the pure state." Frye educated the public in the new art, and developed a new vocabulary for painting (from Wölfflin) - Vision and Design, 1920.
58- Bell (Art, 1913) had greater impact; invents "significant form" —Not form that means something beyond formal relations, points to a reality, expresses or conveys an emotion—rather mere aesthetic exaltation—Vs. representation. We become aware of the universal in the particular. Vs. historicism. Art is appreciated in itself, emphasis on the present moment. Opposed by Shaw.
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Biographies; Eminent Victorians (1918). As a critic, after Pater; tolerant historicism, skeptical of theory, neoclassical in spirit. Landmarks in French Art (1912) , pro 18th-c. in England and France; he accepts the conventions of the couplet, or of Restoration comedy, as preconditions. —"In vacuo" - praises Boswell's absurdity as the condition of his consummate art. Pro detachment in critic, "the antithesis of the bestial". He introduces the stock market image in literature (rising and falling reputations, etc.). He recognizes several critical sttandards; too tolerant for Wellek: "Strachey is thinking in therms of a history of sentiment (...) His criticism can be thought of as the exemplification of such a historical scheme."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
65-66- Impressionist? No: Personal, metaphorical and whimsical criticism, but a Moorean realist, rather aims at grasping an object. Although she thinks criticism must share "the excitement, the adventure, the turmoil of creation". In favour of poet-critics, but nevertheless assigns a limited and even humble mission to criticism, it teaches how to read.
67- Pro interest in works apart from their author. Art is rooted in its age even if it transcends it. Vs. Art pour l'art. Woolf on the readers of Sidney's Arcadia: "Each has to read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial"; "Writing is a method of communication" - "To know whom to write for is to know how to write" (Woolf). Alliance between writers and readers.
68- Woolf "Sketches a story of the economic support of English literautre" but "She is rather concerned with the writer's declared or implied attitude to his reader." Obscurity is seen as despising the public. She shows different reactions to the same work But Wellek argues that "There is ... a structure of determination which prevents arbitrariness." Woolf rejects judging a novelist with simple morality.
69- "She wants to master the 'perspective', understand 'how the novelist orders his world'"—his "vision." Sidney has forgotten his relationship to his characters in Arcadia, who speaks.
70- On Sterne: obsessed with his own mind, not an analyst of other people (the simple, eccentric, erratic); Woolf: "In no other book are the characters so closely dependent on the author. In no other book are the writer and the reader so involved together."
71- Woolf is warm to Jane Austen in spite of her narrowness and her fear of passion; cool to Scott, critical of George Eliot and Meredith. George Eliot's heroines "bring out the worst in her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic and occasionally vulgar" (Woolf). She underrates George Eliot and overrates Emily Bronte's mysticism.
73- (Wellek is impatient with her metaphorical criticism): "She forgives all the shortcomings and failures of Hardy, 'the greatest tragic writer among English novelists." Similar sympathy for Conrad. Woolf has a preference for the universally human, for the power of generalizing, for characters who have
74- "something symbolical about them which is common to us all"; "Imagination is at its freest when it is most generalized." (Cf. Johnson and Wordsworth). Moore and Gissing write only about themselves. On James she is curiously divided: "The horror of The Turn of the Screw is tame and conventional" (Woolf); in Maisie, characters live in a vacuum. She appreciates his rendering of the past and his sanity, but he is "vulgar, a snob, an American".
75- But she admires him for his design (not for plot or character); "She seems to be describing her own procedures". She rejects Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, encumbered by "bushels of fact" (she overshoots her mark); Vs. their conventional use of conventions & conventional characters; she advocates a new novel.
76- "Virginia Woolf proclaims the end of realism and phophesies the age of a novel of sensibility." She is not satisfied with Dorothy Richardson; we are inside another mind, OK, but "distressingly near the surface ... never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances."
77- Woolf: "We read Mr. Lawrence as one reads Mr. Bennett—for the facts and for the story"; but actually he disturbed her, "Rapture of physical being" is OK, but Lawrence is too moralistic; Woolf pro ridding art of preaching. Joyce's Ulysses: a failure, diffuse, tricky, stunty, pretentious, egotistic.
78- Woolf eventually thought that the new novel had failed to keep its promise. She classifies novelists: 'Truth-tellers', 'Character-mongers', 'Poets', 'Psychologists', 'Romantics', 'Satirists and Fantasists'. Inevitability of mimesis: balance between "the power of bringing us into close touch with life" and "style, arrangement, construction." She does not care for the term 'form'—pro "emotion" and "process of reading."
79- —> the containing principle she calls "art." This balance is at the root of many of her critical judgements of novelists. On Forster's Aspects of the Novel: He neglects language, distrusts beauty. Fiction is parasitic from life... His concepts are too traditional. Woolf: "If the English critic were less domestic, less assiduous to protect the rights of what it pleases him to call life, the novelist might be bolder too. He must cut adrift from the eternal tea-table ... The story mighw wobble, the plot might crumble; ruin might seize upon the characters. The novel, in short, might become a work of art" (The Moment and Other Essays). But she insists on coherence—no ambiguity—one type of reality—> but see her own fiction! Another criterion: the contrast of national types and traditions; she is acutely aware of the class character of 19th-c. fiction.
80- Remedy vs. the limits of English fiction: the Russian novel—large, sane, sincere and profound ("The Russian Point of Viw")—She is unfair to the English, unreal about the Russians; sweeping generalizations; she is best on the criticism of particular Russian authors.
81- Turgenev, for Woolf, wrote and rewrote to clear the truth of the unessential, But Dostoesky would say that everything matters. Pro Turgenev's fiction organized around one central Character. She defends inconclusive endings in Chekhov.
Male vs. Female is another source of preoccupation for Woolf—& the condition of women writers.
82- Sometimes she wants a femininet literature, or attackes the "sentence made by men" as pompous. On Dorothy Richardson: "She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own use a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." But ultimately Woolf can contradict herself and say "a writer has no sex", a writer does not lay stress on sex, or that stress upon the sex of a writer is irritating and superflous. Like Coleridge, she favours the androgynous mind.
She is mainly interested in the novel and in biography. Rhyme is "childish" and dishonest. "Modern poetry shirks contest with life and is absorbed by the self"—pro poets going out of themselves. Modern poetry is vulgar, coarse, ugly, and obscure.
83- "Again and again she voices her preference for the novel and the drama because they require the writer to enter into other people's minds." Advice to critics, too: "Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice." There are no laws in art, no conventions. Vs. moral criticis: pro Lamb, Pater... "The essay should give pleasure", no facts, no dogmas. Some fierce attachment to an idea as backbone.
84- As in Coleridge, the critic must seem to bring to light what was there beforehand, not imposing anything extraneous. Criticism is not creation but "an interpretation."
Not an important contribution—but she singles out her author and stamps his personality-
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
Aspects of the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).
85- He upholds aestheticism even more extremely than the rest at Bloomsbury. "I believe in art for art's sake ... A work of art—whatever else it may be—is a self-contained entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has internal order. It may have external form." "A poem points to nothing but to itself." Self-supportive universe, expressly contrasted to the disorder of society. Criticism's aim: 1st, to consider the object in itself; 2nd, in its relations (cf. in phenomenology: the work of art vs. the art object). He unnecessarily rejects the historicity of the work of art in Aspects. Pro seeing literature beyond time (Eliot). Lif in time is inferior to life in values, etc. A preference for space in the simple geographical sense—uncritical, irrelevant view. On his "aspects":
86- "He loosely mixes an analysis of the strata of a novel with an attempt at a typology of the novel." He minimizes story and plot; interested above all in characters (his best pages), our knowledge, and the illusion of power. "Forster's metaphor of 'flat' versus 'round' has deservedly become established as a fortunate formulation" (Huxley before him). He endorses James's 'exit author', though half-heartedly; for Wellek it is not clear why a writer can't speak about his characters.
Forster is oddly silent on language, and gives and unsatisfactory typology of novels. Disappointing, though occasionally OK. He appreciates Woolf: she and Joyce are the only innovators on form; and sympathizes with her rejection of naturalis.
88- "Ultimately we must conclude that Forster, in spite of the apparent advocacy of 'art for art's sake', applies standards of realism to literature and to his own novels. He cannot get away from them as a novelist." Woolf is "a poet" for him, but did not wholly avoid the pitfall of aestheticism, boring to read... "a central deficiency of Forster's criticism, his refusal to think clearly about the creative process, the status of the work of art and its function." "As a good empiricist he disparages theory and criticism. Aesthetic theories are 'beds of Procrustes'." Forster: "The claim of criticism to take us to the heart of the Arts must be disallowed." Criticism is not creation. Forster gestures towards love or affection as standards of criticism—or 'bouncing'! He is enclosed in the tradition of the critical realist, he is narrower and has less force than Lytton Strachey or Virginia Woolf.
Desmond MacCarthy (1878-1952)
Criticism (1932).
89- "the most conservative critic of the group." Arnoldian, moralistic; the aim of the writer is to "create or suggest a rational coherent ideal" of life. Pro Santayana. Critic as a "creature without a spiritual home" (Sainte-Beuve); his "first obligation is to permit himself to be absorbed in the vision of a writer" (MacCarthy). The psychology of the reader is a part of the critic's subject: the critic must replace the historical perspective, etc. Even impreessionism is accepted at times—making us feel what he felt. MacCarthy vs. Leslie Stephen as "the least aesthetic" of critics. "But in most of his writings, MacCarthy is himself a moralist who judges from an ideal of a sane but somewhat gloomy and disillusioned view of life." Pro Proust, who attempts to turn aesthetic into religious experience; "probably a vain hope" (MacCarthy). MacCarthy rejects obscurity, mysticism and Catholicism. Vs. irrationalism and experiment in Modernism.
90- D.H. Lawrence is "a religious prophet who was mistaken for a pornographer"—but his mysticism is nonsense to those who believe in civilization for the sake of sanity (i.e. MacCarthy himself). There is some truth in Lawrence's criticism of modern civilization, though. MacCarthy vs. psychoanalysis, vs. stream-of-consciousness, etc. Virginia Woolf is criticized as impressionistic. Joyce is a prodigious talent but also "a frightened enslaved mind. Much of Ulysses is cold, nasty, small and over-serious" (MacC). Stream-of-consciousness is a new convention, artificial as any other. Vs. G. Stein, vs. "patterns of words" like coloured pebbles—pro what makes literature valuable to man.
MacCarthy is vague on poetry: he can't discuss technique. He uses comparison to achieve his effects—one writer vs. another. As a theatre critic, Ibsen and Chekhov are best for him: realism and symbolisml
91- "poetry can help us do one thing which religion helps us to do, to live life spirtually, that is, intelligently and disinterestedly" —but it is not a complete substitue.
MacCarthy is a minor, appealing figure.
4. THE NEW ROMANTICS
92- John Middleton Murry, D.H. Lawrence and G. Wilson Knight "restore romantic or at least irrationalist attitudes which are still with us today."
John Middleton Murry (1889-1957)
To be continued
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