NEW WORLDS

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 15

NEW WORLDS

~ THE APPROACH TO LITERATURE (MICHLW WJtiTTIK »0a TUB I'SISS.) [By M. IX. HOLCROFT.] "The progress which the understanding makes through a book," gaid Doctor Johnson, "has more ' pain than pleasure with it." To separate one of the Doctor's pronouncements from its context and background is scarcely fair. There are other sentences that $M%£ or shade his opinions and give them a roundness of utterance that in its turn should not be divorced from its occasion. Wc must sit with Johnson and hear him out, and although we may not agree with all that he is saying, we are too full of the background and the talking—the dramatic movement of the dialogue—to be more than mildly critical. "The old Doctor!" we mutter, shaking our heads—and reading on. In this particular case it is possible to feel a little of his temperamental inertia. There is in his statement the groan of weariness as he opens his eyes upon another day that he feels might escape him down the pleasant ways of idleness; he is aware of unread , volumes up there in his dusty library, and would hasten to them if his body were kinder to his spirit, jnd if reading were not always such an act of concentration. As with most of us, his trouble was really jn making a beginning. I think everyone who has escaped from the light reading of contemporaries must confess to the difficulties of literature. In some moods, and with some authors, everything is easy ; but we all know books that entice us into hours of puzzlement, luring us on with a promise of something vital and necessary hidden away in the weary undulations of archaic prose or in unfamiliar terminology. There is sometimes a reward of apperception, and the involved pages are forgotten in the light of a sudden clarity. But the long attention is remembered. Change of Tempo. Our own authors are not remote from us. Their writing has the imprint of our age and environment, and when we try to penetrate it for essential values we do not have to strain against the prejudice or ■ forgotten fears of some other day. It is natural to vis that the characters of a novel should go about their affairs at a nervous speed, and with queer, staccato utterances. Haste is an influence in all that is written, not only the rapid transits that move people from place to place without helping them to do anything of importance when they are set down in their new, artificial leisure, , but the geared, controlled movements that are in the fibre of our <ajA*f r •••» that are in our machinery iptr, wk reflected back into our minds from the screens of theatres. There will be someone, perhaps, who Will gather into his mind all that is vital in the method of the Cinema, and add to literature a single great book : single because it will be followed inevitably by imitations!—or by the work of those lesser writers who respond to the set of the current but arrive too late for original achievement—and great because it should catch a vivid impression of all the hurry and blind effort, the bigness and littleness of our twentieth-century world. But in the end a book must be judged by its content, and cleverness or topical method of projection can do nothing to preserve writing that is empty of thought. That is why the greatest books stand near to one another in a universal simplicity of style. But when we turn back from our , own time and read in pages written long ago, it seems that we must • separate ourselves from all that is familiar and normal in the backgrounds and procedures of life. We must feel again the old political excitement; we must extract from the embers of religious controversy some small flame of enthusiasm. London loses ungainly dimensions and shrinks into a comely town with growing river environs ; the English countryside escapes from the detonations and harsh echoes of petrol-driven traffic and sinks backs into old dreams of spaciousness. It would seem that a cleansing of this kind must be necessary before we can make any real contact with the writers of other centuries. And yet there are moments of insight in which all that is cumbrous and external is burned away, not as in the slow flames of kindled fires, but as in the sudden white heat of a furnace fed by chemicals. The old manners and the slow speech are suddenly our own ; we are not strange to the world that spreads away below us. It is a man who is speaking: a man of feeling rather than the citizen of a faded state, a thinker of deep thoughts rather than the party advocate or the special Pleader, the lover of beauty rather than the turner of artificial periods. This discovery of essentials is one of the joys of literature, announcing for each of us in our turn the kinships of mind that are secure from the changes of history. Introduction to Dante. , The experience varies. Sometimes we reach an author in the flfst lines of his book. He starts up Before us so clearly that we know Mm at once for one who writes from himself, and has beliefs that we can understand and share. At other times our approach is hesitating, and Ml of delays. I found, for instance, «Wt Dante is not to be encountered boldly, or without preparation. It J snot easy to surrender to him. In "*■ subterraneous darkness of his tormented rather than , relieved by its sudden wild lights, 'Me is a weight of suffering that "sars heavily on poetry ; he sweeps u Pon us with an elemental force against which we instinctively brace ourselves, as if against some bleak *|id, announcing the spring. I XJti the need of some episode of Jl *e as we know it on earth, from *wch I could return over the rough "Od dangerous ground in search of understanding. And then * came to those lines at the beginning of Canto Six of the Purgatorio, the swaggering exit of a Wccessful gamester. The scene iiS? 68 up as if from the canvas of a "esush master, all details limned •!*«nst a subdued interior light. A *™VUe crew follow the man and his ■lyings; they wait upon him with r™fluious smiles and do not ret0 * his high, imperious manner. : *rf* ess is in'his blood; the gold l; £2* * ie snugly in his purse, and swe is need of an affected non-

chalance as he wards off importunate beggars. And behind him. stretched slackly in a corner, sits he who has-lost. The weariness that comes so quickly after the excitement of gaming is in the droop of his shoulders ; his fingers are toying with the unfriendly dice, as if he sought to know where he had failed in the- tricksy game ; and all the time it is clear that his mind can hold nothing more than the pressure of his immediate loss, its ramifying thoughts of unpaid debts and dubious stratagem. There may be little in this to choose for a central impression of Dante ; but for me it brings forward in the right colouring his wonderful power of portraiture, his observing mind yielded up to creativeness and separated from the darker passions that project their fume into the Inferno: I have found his strong humanity, and henceforth am not afraid of his darkness. The Dark Garden. Sometimes we are helped from outside. I remember that I had been reading Bishop Butler some time before I found a note describing his habit of walking in his garden in the darkest nights of the year, following his thoughts. Imagination lies quiescent while reason is at work ; but at the lightest, encouragement it starts into activity. usurping the place of control and providing pictures instead of concepts. I pause to see the Bishop in his. dark garden: a strange place: that must always be shaped i' l shadow—unvisited by the sun. Perhaps there is a companion, eager to hear the spoken thought ; but fo.the most part he is alone, and the precious words are lost in the moonless dark. To read the " Analogy of Religion" is to be allowed a share in those nights of meditation. If there is an attribute of darkness in much of his writing, it is not so much an obscurity as a smoothness and close-knit texture of thought. For darkness is a mystery, and through it the current of an idea must flow near unknown margins. And if there is a promise of light—a gleaming through the prose—it j is not a preserved ray of the moon, shining over the trees or breaking | free from a mid-heaven escort of cloud, but a movement of the mind claiming its own clearness of expression. In this way I followButler through the first part of lus book, and am the companion of a philosopher. But in the second part he is no longer in the garden. The door of his study is closed, and I cannot reach him. The sympathy that springs up between an author and his reader can be regarded as a purification, absolving the one from his small sins of writing and delivering the other from false interpreters. It is an act of separation from all hasty and unjust judgments of the world. A poet is no longer the creature of his deeds and unwise words, bulging out of all symmetry with rumours, with the whisperings of enemies and the unbalanced praise of admirers. In the moment of mistdispelling insight he is safe from those critics who imagine that a discovered tendency must be a coordinating force, and who work backwards through unimportant details to an unholy joy of dissection. What does it matter if our author had various wives, and was unhappy with all of them ? Do we care if he loved wine better than his creditors ? These things melt away from us in moments of discovery. Our fellowship is like the flame of old Iranian sacrifices, burning on altars open to the sky, so that the sacred fire ca.i have uninterrupted commerce with its source. We are in touch witn him, and know the quality of his mind. He has used words that arc a spell binding us to him. The thoughts that have struck an excitement along our nerves are not the thoughts of an evil man ; honesty and clearness of vision arc: not attributes of the unclean, and one who can lift us so quickly and so securely towards higher levels of mind has some inner strength and purity that must be accepted as the ireal and immortal part of him,! worthy of survival. Beyond. But there is another kind of contact that is quite independent of biographical details, and requires a sympathy or fortunate texture of mood : a fortuitous arrangement of I time and place, and of physical and mental states. The mellow sunlight of late afternoon, the soft tides of a! garden, the stillness of a night in which one appears to be alone with the shadow of earth and the light of heaven : these exterior influences can become a movement of one's inner life, prompting the mind to unexpected mutations. The poem that hitherto has been a mine of beautiful words, combining rhythmically, is now the repository of a sleeping dream; the philosophy that has brought to us faint echoes of vanished Athens even as it delighted us with its wisdom returns suddenly to newness, and has the power of a thought spoken for the first time in this world. Perhaps (I have thought) an experience of this kind is after all but the involuntary and admiring acknowledgment of greatness. For the inmost values of great writing are among the living and pure forces of the universe; and when Boswell yields himself up to a mind greater than his own he is performing an act of religion, as sincere as the subjective moods of Wordsworth walking abroad in Cumberland. And sometimes the inmost force of literature can be apprehended as if directly, and without intermediaries. It is a force that has worked through all the materials of all the cultures : in the men who are known to us by name and by their actions and writings; in the unknown editors and commentators, bringing their offerings of service; in the singers of ages now fulfilled, whose words are gone, like the particles of meteors that burn themselves out in their long spatial journeyings, but whose efforts of spirit have mysteriously outlived their crumbled cities; and in the dim literatures surviving in fragments and finding new nuclei as the cycles turn. The stir of all this creative force of the world comes dimly upon our spirits as we read in solitude and attunement. But these are moments that pass quickly, and are lost in the returning shades of earth : as with some tall mountain, snow-covered, that has held the sunlight for the last long moment of day, and now stands darkly in the dusk —all the darker for the memory of gold that trembles above it in the skies.

In modern verse, according to Mr Cecil Roberts, rhyme, rhythm, and reason appear to be completely out of fashion. The evidence of a disorderly mind now seems the first claim to consideration as a poet.

Shan F. Bullock, the Ulster novelist has succeeded to the seat in the' Irish Academy of Letters left vacant by the death of George Moore.

Mr Richard Strachey remarks that the key to modern fiction is the subordination of plot to pattern.