SUMMER BOOKS
Counter-Revolution
BY FRANK KER MODE Wist: men, no doubt, have long ago accepted the complicated din of modern criticism as one of the nuisances of an epoch of promis- cuous communications, like the noise of helicop-
ers. They may, in consequence, entertain with some scepticism the assertion that they might now, if they chose to listen, hear significant sounds, the noise of critics making up their minds about something of general interest and import- ance. Yet this is true; and so various are their methods of approach, and so harmonious their conclusions, that it really looks as if these critics may be inaugurating one of those periodic re- appraisals of literary history which normally accompany some major alteration of taste. The latest and also in many ways the most civilised and well-informed of these pioneers is Mr. Graham Hough, and his book* absolutely re- quires to be read by anybody who claims an interest in modern literature.
If the achievement of Joyce, Mr. Pound, Mr. Eliot and the others was a revolution, then this new movement is a belated reaction. Nothing radically new has happened since they founded `modern' literature all those years ago; and, as Mr. Hough says, we still think of their work as `Modern.' The word sticks to them because, how- ever hard we try to see their innovations as pro- foundly related to the main body of European literature, we cannot quite get over the feeling that these writers did in fact break with tradition, that they are difficult in unprecedented ways. The real question is why we have so much wanted to accept what is evidently a dubious position—the traditional character of the modern poetic. Occa- sionally it seems that we have enjoyed believing what is clearly absurd—the much-advertised affinity, for example, between 'modern' and 'metaphysical' poetry, Why have we been so un- critical? Perhaps everybody was too busy work- ing out the implications of the new doctrines (so many new poets to master, Provencal to learn) and after a while deviation became a fatiguing and isolating activity. Anyway, for whatever rea- son, the Revolution has lasted remarkably, in an age which normally encourages premature obso-
lescence. The Waste Land is still a kind of test; those who think it a mistrke are branded as
cranks or fools. Yet there are these obvious ques- tions to be asked, so evidently legitimate that their suppression over all these years suggests a hysterical loss of the critical function. Now there arc signs of returning power.
Mr. Hough's book, admirable throughout, is dominated by its long opening section, 'Reflec- tions on a Literary Revolution.' He is no less amiable than acute, and one hopes that his placid, rather donnish, wit will not conceal the almost explosive importance of what he has to say. Mr. Hough has come to believe that 'modern' poetry is the result of 'a few very powerful
* IMAGE AND EXPERIENCE. By graham Hough. (Duckworth, 21s.) talents' which have 'succeeded in establishing idiosyncratic positions, and that it ought to be seen as a fascinating backwater, not as the main stream. He calls the revolution 'Imagist,' a good enough name for it, and defines its programme as `Symbolism without the magic' (but the magic creeps in again at the back door). Poetry was to be made of images (later called ideograms) juxta- posed without regard to rational connections, concrete in themselves but with suggestive powers borrowed from the older Symbol. Such a theory of poetry entails the anathematising of a good deal that had formerly been regarded as legiti- mate: interest in the personality of the poet, for example, and concern for rational meaning, which becomes merely the meat brought by the burglar to keep the dog quiet, a mere sop to the reader's troublesome intellect. All this, says Mr. Hough, is related 'to the root idea that the sub- stance of poetry is the image and its resonances.' Poetry proceeds by 'a logic of imagination,' not by 'a logic of concepts.' The words are Mr. Eliot's; they occur in an important and confused passage in his introduction to the Anabasis of St.-John Perse, and with that passage Mr. Hough deals brilliantly. He also considers the possibility that this confusion and error is re- flected in The Waste Land. a poem constructed in accordance with such theories.
It does not seem sufficient to say that the matter is of no importance since the poem has evidently succeeded; opinion has been extensively deluded before now, and the emperor was, after all, not decently dressed. What if The Waste Land should be, after all, an extremely hap- hazard and incoherent poem, if it comes to be agreed that 'the collocation of images is not a method at all, but the negation of a method'? Can it be that the desertion of the 'common reader' is partly the result of a 'wilful Alexand- rianism,' that there is a danger—made more acute by 'the clotted rubbish of academic imagist criticism'—of poetry degenerating, perhaps for centuries, into 'a meaningless esoteric exercise'?
Mr. Hough is eloquent and just on this topic; but he finds some hope in the enduring influence of Yeats, who never lost his faith in 'rational order.' He might have added, what is too often ignored, that MaHarm& certainly in some ways the father of Imagism, never entirely lost his, either, and that intellect, like nature, has, in all but a few extreme cases, so far defied absolute expulsion by the theorist's pitchfork.
The remaining essays in Mr. Hough's book— especially the studies of Free Verse and Psycho- analysis—are valuable in themselves as well as contributory to the force of his main thesis. If we were a truly lively literary society, his argu- ment, and its enormous implications for past and future literature, would be for long the principal topic of debate. And should this unlikely debate ever take place, it will prove convenient that the work of Mr. Yvor Winters has at last been published in this country,t for Mr. ;Winters. the
strangest and in some respects the most remark- able of all modern American critics, has been for a generation a bitter and resourceful counter- revolutionary. Mr. Hough gives him brief but honourable mention; as a matter of fact he says nearly everything Mr. Hough says, though his manner is entirely different. (A good example of this is their handling of the same passage in the introduction to Anabasis: rarely has a critical pronouncement been riddled by such cross-fire.) Mr. Winters is, as a critic, both explicit and bitter. His critical position is clear enough for most readers to reject it out of hand, and he has made many enemies. Another idiosyncrasy mili- tates against the success of his ideas: his prefer- ences among modern poets are entirely inexplic- able, even on his own theories. To call Sturge Moore and Bridges superior almost beyond com- parison to Yeats and Eliot, let alone Pound, for whom he has an implacable contempt—'a bar- barian loose in a museum,' a sensibility without a mind'may be called challenging; to stake out similar claims for Adelaide Crapscy and Elizabeth Daryush is simply eccentric. Hence his reputation for crankiness. But he is superbly serious; and any single-handed attempt to correct modern taste and rewrite the history of modern literature would look eccentric unless it turned out to be right. Of course it cannot be done; and that is why Winters is so much less valuable as a discoverer of neglected talent than as an assailant of temporary ,orthodoxies. He lacks Mr. Hough's urbanity and is sometimes too evidently pleased by his own severity. But he re- mains serious. If he enjoys consigning Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Tate, Ransom and others to limbo, he adds Hart Crane to the batch with obvious regret, for he knew and liked the man; yet .he does even this duty with oracular zest. '
Winters is the John the Baptist of the Counter- Revolution. His critique is useful even if one dissents from his own programme. He defends reason, believing that literature communicates objective truth and 'is good in sa far as it Makes a defensible rational statement about a given human experience . . and at the same time communicates the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of that experience.' A man holding this and related opinions is fundamentally hostile to what he re- gards as the revolutionary heresies of 'post- Romantic obscurantism,' and Winters dears systematically with them, providing useful labels. One of these is `pseudo-reference'—the device by which a poem preserves an air of coherence and also suggests a kind of hinterland of meanings without having either; a branch of pseudo- reference is 'reference to a non-existent plot,' as when Burbank and Princess Volupine were to- gether and fell, or when Tiresias, by undisclosed means, binds together the separate poems of Vic
t IN DEFENSE OF REASON. By Yvor Winters. (Routledge, 42s.) Waste Land. Another heresy is that of 'qualita- tive progression'—more or less the result of Mr. Eliot's 'logic of the imagination,' which produces a graduated progression of images owing nothing to the reason, instead of a normal plot. Related to this heresy is the notion that the chaos of the world can and should be represented by formal chaos in art. By tracing this error—`the fallacy of imitative form'—to Henry Adams, Winters usefully associates it with another, the opinion that there was a time, before the great 'dissocia- tion of sensibility,' when the world was not chaotic (though he is wrong in supposing that these are characteristically New England opin- ions). Another heresy is the modern cult of Laforguian irony, the 'double mood,' which is found to be immoral, irrational and (in Winters's special sense of the term) decadent. All these heresies have been championed by Mr. Eliot, who is accordingly the main target of all the counter- revolutionaries; Winters devotes to him a long, fierce essay, and holds him to be an urbane but utterly confused critic, and a poet who has wasted what was in any case a small talent.
These books are not products of vulgar envy and the desire to be startling,. Hough, like Win- ters, believes that the consequences of not going seriously into the questions he raises may be disastrous; he cares for the common reader, who cannot get on with 'centripetal' art and who likes to think of poetry as having to do with matters of which he himself has some experience. But neither critic supposes that we can ever quite return to the times when nobody ever thought of calling poetry a kind of linguistic algebra. If there is a restoration of that old regime its constitution will have to be modified by new experience. On the other hand, both agree that 'the men of 1914,' as Wyndham Lewis called them, should not for much longer dominate our literature and our criticism. Perhaps we are approaching one of those critical phases thought by Arnold to be essential preliminaries to great creative epochs. Reason may return, and the common reader. But the revolutionary ideals are firmly entrenched. Not even Mr. Hough could hope to defy the habits and pleasures of years and act as a man who has rid himself entirely of a crippling delu- sion; and it seems improbable that even the very young could immediately resist the pressure of what is now conventional opinion. In the nature of things the change will come. But the days when Ulysses and The Waste Land will be re- garded as curiosities for scholars, mon iments to dead ideas, are presumably (and on the whole one confesses to being glad of it) some way ahead.
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