Every Force Evolves a Form by Davenport Guy;

Author:Davenport, Guy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

The Critic as Artist

A sentence from Henry James’ preface to The Awkward Age:

The truth is that what a happy thought has to give depends immensely on the general turn of the mind capable of it, and on the fact that its loyal entertainer, cultivating fondly its possible relations and extensions, the bright efflorescence latent in it, but having to take other things in their order too, is terribly at the mercy of his mind.

For “happy thought” read “text.” What it has to give—in exchange for attention—is its meaning. We as readers are the loyal entertainer and fond cultivator of its possible relations and extensions. But we are, in the modern period, uncomfortably aware that whereas a text used to operate in a traditional boundary, that boundary is now gone. When Milton wanted a name to have allusive force, he put it in italics. These italicized words—Eden, Oreb, Sinai, and Chaos are the ones that occur through line 10 of Book I of Paradise Lost—are in effect invisible footnotes, or cross-references to other texts. Sacred geography was at Milton’s readers’ fingertips; chaos—though it appears in some translations instead of “the great gulf” of Luke 16:26—would need asking about.

In the main, however, Milton’s references to other texts, like those of Shakespeare and Spenser, were bounded by a fairly severe definition. They were, in any case, what the literate knew, or could easily find out. Two full streams of culture flowed from the Bible and from the Classics.

When a density of learning began to appear in English literature, there came with it the understanding that the author would teach us what we needed to know as we read along. Thus Scott is as clear and orderly a teacher of history as Shakespeare. Browning began to require a bit more attention than readers were used to. But he still feels the responsibility to teach. In such seemingly ungiving texts as “Balaustion’s Adventure” and “Aristophanes’ Apology,” we have something like a bargain: education in exchange for close attention and patience. The reader cannot be wholly ignorant of classical literature, and yet it doesn’t do him a great deal of good to be thoroughly familiar with Browning’s matter—the careers of Euripides and Aristophanes, the history of their time, their theories of tragedy and comedy—for Browning is transmuting it all, and making us see it as we’ve never seen it before.

In moving outside the frame provided by a normal education, “Sordello” is thereby the first modern poem. It created a scandal, and many jokes about readers who thought they had lost their minds. It baffled Tennyson. It was the poem the young Pound set out to emulate when he began The Cantos—a text which now has a quarterly journal to explicate it, a text that was (ironically) not as obscure fifty years ago as it is now. A residuum of tolerance (and delight) remained from the Browning societies. Pound’s way of seeing the Middle Ages was Browningesque.

From The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, where the difficulty is in subtlety of technique rather than in subject matter.

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