NEW PAPERBACKS
Birth of a Science
BY RONALD BR YDEN
EVENTUALLY, I'm afraid, they will have to call it Culturology. It won't fit under anthro- pology, for its subject is literate, evolved societies, too complex and self-conscious to yield generalisations of the kind with which the study of tribes bolsters its claim to be the science of man. Sociology must eject it, for it deals in im- measurables—beliefs, attitudes, legends and symbolisrns impossible to render down in ques- tionnaires or statistics. At present, it houses uncomfortably with English Studies, on whose field it trespasses most obviously (its best-known exponents, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, still practise officially as English dons); but while its primary evidence comes from literature, its concerns embrace all the arts, archi- tecture, entertainment and the activities huddled together under the euphemism 'communications.' It is interested in Vico and pop-singers, Cruik- shank and cereal packages, Rousseau, Dreyfus and Lady Chatterley's Daughter. The simplest name for it would be the one Matthew Arnold used—criticism, just that; but I suppose that's too simple to hope for. We've narrowed Arnold's splendid, free meaning of the word (to him it was no more than the rational man's knowledge of the culture he lived in, an educated receptivity which assumed appraisal) to signify not only judgment but expertise. The new systematisers of what Arnold, Carlyle and Ruskin used to per- form by brilliant intuition are unlikely to wel- come the implication that this is a game any number can play.
Fortunately, the publishers have thrown it open. The paperback revolution, you could almost, say has been the rise of Culturology. It's in paperback that Hoggart and Williams have made their impact, it's in paperback that the lonely crowds of the waist-high-cul- tivated have learned their dooms from Riesmann and Vance Packard. Criticism— literary, social, social-literary—has stepped out of the universities into the market-place. Every- where new series proliferate. It was predictable that the university presses might seek a new student public for cheap reprints of their aca- demic stand-bys. It was to be hoped that Bowes and Bowes would realise that (like Wayland Young's lady who forsook her lathe for the streets) they were sitting on a. fortune, and would reissue that extraordinary little 'Modern European Literature and Thought' series in which Roy Campbell wrote on Lorca, Iris Mur- doch on Sartre and. Arturo Barea on Unamuno. But it's something else again when the great Penguin machine decides that there's a mass Public for its 'Peregrines': not just Pelicanesque primers to general subjects, but such uncom- promisingly academic classics as Leavis's The Common Pursuit (7s. 6d.), Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (7s. 6d.) and Martin Turnell's The Novel in France (10s. 6d.).
How did it come about? Where did Cul- turology come from, and this interest which, obviously, is a realisation that the study of literature is the study of the way we live? Oddly enough, it is paperbacks, too, which are begin- ning to provide a bibliography of the process —particularly American paperbacks. It is vaguely assumed that the relation between literature and society is somehow attributable to Dr. Leavis, and certainly Messrs. Hoggart and Williams owe a particular debt to that inescapable influence. But in fact the evolution of the study of cul- tures through literature owes little to the Doctor, who has always disavowed concern—profession- ally, at least—with the historical background or intellectual context of the literary product. Its growth, in fact, has been a predominantly, Ameri- can phenomenon, scarcely noticed in this coun- try. Various reasons can be offered for our
neglect of it—the war, the subsequent sterling crises which cut us off for years from American scholarship—but the chief one has clearly been a difference of opinion between English and American critics on one particular period of literary history. The heart of the matter has been two differing estimates of the Romantic Move- ment.
It is a curious academic story, which goes back forty years—to the publication in 1919 of Spengler's Decline of the West and of Irving Babbitt's brilliant, partial onslaught on the whole Romantic mentality, Rousseau and Romanticism (Meridian, 12s.). In England, Babbitt's scath- ing evaluation was taken up a year later by T. S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood, a book heavily in- debted to the New Humanism of Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; and it was Eliot's judgment of the Romantic poets which laid down the
lines of Leavis's treatment of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats in Revaluations. To this day, their reputations in England stand more or less where Leavis left them—the early nineteenth century is the elephant-trap, a hole lightly brushed over, of university English. In America, on the contrary, Babbitt's attack provoked a response which led to one of the richest develop- ments in modern scholarship: that exploration of the huge complex of Romantic beliefs and attitudes which finally outgrew English studies to become the history of ideas.
No amount of research into the intellectual 'background' of a poem, Dr. Leavis has always maintained, can be relevant to the decision whether it is good or bad. Part of the answer to this was given by John Livingstone Lowes in his great study of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan,' The Road to Xanadu (Vintage, 13s. 6d.). To study Coleridge's reading, Professor Lowes showed, is to discover an enormous range of reference compressed into the poems, a new complexity and richness of allusion. In M. H. Abrams's anthology of critical essays, The Eng- lish Romantic Poets (Galaxy, 13s. 6d.), other American critics challenge similarly Leavis's dis- missal of Shelley: a knowledge of his ideas, they demonstrate, shows the `vapourousness' so dis- liked by Leavis as an expression of Shelley's excited recognition that the universe is a fluid series of transformations of energy. It is point- less to demand 'concreteness' of him, as it is to complain of his ecstatic identification of him- self with all the processes of nature. The vital centre of Romanticism was the conviction that all creation—nature, plants, winds, beasts, men and their minds—are inextricably joined in an evolving unity.
The classic study of this notion occurred in A. 0. Lovejoy's brilliant The Great Chain of Being (Harper Torchbooks, 15s.), which traced the process by which the Aristotelian notion of a ladder of creation developed into the nine- teenth-century theory of evolution. This superb piece of scholarship, still scarcely known here twenty-five years after its American publication, created a whole method and discipleship of scholars following up hints Lovejoy had thrown it. It was the model for Samuel H. Monk's fine study of how the notion of man's harmony with nature created a new aesthetic in the eighteenth century—The Sublime (University of Michigan, 12s. 6d.); for Hoxie N. Fairchild's history of eighteenth-century primitivism, The Noble Savage, and W. J. Bate's excellent From Classic to Romantic (Harper Torchbooks, 10s. 6d.). All these have revolutionised the criticism of Roman- tic literature across the Atlantic, but they have had a more important effect. By showing how inextricable are all the strands of culture in the Romantic period—literature, art, music, land- scape-gardening, science, philosophy—they indi- cated the value of a similar, total study of cultures in all periods—particularly our own.
Of course, the whole story isn't exclusively American. We did produce during the Thirties L. C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (Penguin, 8s. 6d.), Basil Willey's Seventeenth Century Background (Penguin, 8s. 6d.), with its sequels, and that masterpiece of intellectual history, G. M. Young's Victorian England (O.U.P., Gs.). There were Orwell and Tom Patterson, working from another direction; and, of course, in spite of all denials that history might be relevant to literature, there was the immense influence of Leavis, insisting that literature cannot be judged apart from its rele- vance to life. But it seems part of our general Americanisation that it is no longer conceivable that we should limit our cultural criticism to books and art. We know now that it is just as important to consider films, journalism, adver- tising, clothes, the way people talk and eat and amuse themselves at weekends. Culture, we have learned, is indivisible; Culturology, I'm afraid, is inevitable.
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