I am speaking on literary criticism, and in the world
in which we are actually living that is almost as unpromising as speaking about
peace. This is not a peaceful age, and it is not a critical age. In the Europe
of the last ten years literary criticism of the older kind — criticism that is
really judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded, treating a work of art as a thing of
value in itself — has been next door to impossible.
If we look back at the English literature of the last
ten years not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude,
the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic.
Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books
written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic
writers of the time, people like Auden and Spender and MacNeice, have been
didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more
interested in subject-matter than in technique. And the most lively
criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers, people like Christopher Caudwell and Philip Henderson and
Edward Upward, who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are
far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than
in its literary qualities in the narrow sense.
This is all the more striking because it makes a very
sharp and sudden contrast with the period immediately before it. The characteristic writers of the nineteen-twenties — T.
S. Eliot, for instance, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf — were writers who put the
main emphasis on technique. They had their beliefs and prejudices, of course,
but they were far more interested in technical innovations than in any moral or
meaning or political implication that their work might contain. The best of
them all, James Joyce, was a technician and very little else, about as near to
being a ‘pure’ artist as a writer can be.
Even D. H. Lawrence, though he was more of a ‘writer with a purpose’ than most
of the others of his time, had not much of what we should now call social
consciousness. And though I have narrowed this down to the
nineteen-twenties, it had really been the same from about 1890 onwards.
Throughout the whole of that period, the notion that form is more important
than subject-matter, the notion of ‘art for art's sake’,
had been taken for granted. There were writers who disagreed, of course — Bernard Shaw was one — but that was the prevailing
outlook. The most important critic of the period, George
Saintsbury, was a very old man in the nineteen-twenties, but he had a
powerful influence up to about 1930, and Saintsbury had always firmly upheld
the technical attitude to art. He claimed that he himself could and did judge
any book solely on its execution, its manner, and was very nearly indifferent
to the author's opinions.
Now, how is one to account for this very sudden
change of outlook? About the end of the nineteen-twenties you get a book like Edith Sitwell's book on Pope, with a completely
frivolous emphasis on technique, treating literature as a sort of embroidery, almost as though words did
not have meanings: and only a few years later you get a Marxist critic
like Edward Upward asserting that books can be
‘good’ only when they are Marxist in tendency. In a sense both Edith Sitwell
and Edward Upward were representative of their period. The question is why
should their outlook be so different?
I think one has got to look for the reason in
external circumstances. Both the aesthetic and the political attitude to
literature were produced, or at any rate conditioned by the social atmosphere
of a certain period. And now that another period has ended — for Hitler's
attack on Poland in 1939 ended one epoch as surely as the great slump of 1931
ended another — one can link back and see more clearly than was possible a few
years ago the way in which literary attitudes are affected by external events.
A thing that strikes anyone who looks back over the last hundred years is that
literary criticism worth bothering about, and the critical attitude towards
literature, barely existed in England between roughly 1830 and 1890. It is not
that good books were not produced in that period. Several of the writers of
that time, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollop and others, will probably be remembered
longer than any that have come after them. But there are not literary figures
in Victorian England corresponding to Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier and a host
of others. What now appears to us as aesthetic scrupulousness hardly existed.
To a mid-Victorian English writer, a book was partly something that brought him
money and partly a vehicle for preaching sermons. England was changing very
rapidly, a new moneyed class had come up on the ruins of the old aristocracy,
contact with Europe had been severed, and a long artistic tradition had been
broken. The mid-nineteenth-century English writers were barbarians, even when
they happened to be gifted artists, like Dickens.
But in the later part of the century contact with
Europe was re-established through Matthew Arnold, Pater, Oscar Wilde and
various others, and the respect for form and technique in literature came back.
It is from then that the notion of ‘art for art's sake’ — a phrase very much
out of fashion, but still, I think, the best available — really dates. And the
reason why it could flourish so long, and be so much taken for granted, was
that the whole period between 1890 and 1930 was one of exceptional comfort and
security. It was what we might call the golden afternoon of the capitalist age.
Even the Great War did not really disturb it. The Great War killed ten million
men, but it did not shake the world as this war will shake it and has shaken it
already. Almost every European between 1890 and 1930 lived in the tacit belief
that civilization would last forever. You might be individually fortunate or
unfortunate, but you had inside you the feeling that nothing would ever
fundamentally change. And in that kind of atmosphere intellectual detachment,
and also dilettantism, are possible. It is that feeling of continuity, of
security, that could make it possible for a critic like Saintsbury, a real old
crusted Tory and High Churchman, to be scrupulously fair to books written by
men whose political and moral outlook he detested.
But since 1930 that sense of security has never
existed. Hitler and the slump shattered it as the Great War and even the
Russian Revolution had failed to shatter it. The writers who have come up since
1930 have been living in a world in which not only one's life but one's whole
scheme of values is constantly menaced. In such circumstances detachment is not
possible. You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are
dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut
your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one
another, any thinking person had to take sides, and his feelings had to find
their way not only into his writing but into his judgements on literature.
Literature had to become political, because anything else would have entailed
mental dishonesty. One's attachments and hatreds were too near the surface of
consciousness to be ignored. What books were about seemed so urgently important
that the way they were written seemed almost insignificant.
And this period of ten years
or so in which literature, even poetry, was mixed up with pamphleteering, did a
great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure
aestheticism. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every
book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose — a political, social
and religious purpose — that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by
our prejudices and beliefs. It debunked art for art's sake. But is also led for the time
being into a blind alley, because it caused countless young writers to try to
tie their minds to a political discipline which, if they had stuck to it, would
have made mental honesty impossible. The only system of thought open to them at
that time was official Marxism, which demanded a nationalistic loyalty towards
Russia and forced the writer who called himself a Marxist to be mixed up in the
dishonesties of power politics. And even if that was desirable, the assumptions
that these writers built upon were suddenly shattered by the Russo-German Pact.
Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be
detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering
that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a
political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer. Aesthetic
scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either. The
events of the last ten years have left us rather in the air, they have left
England for the time being without any discoverable literary trend, but they
have helped us to define, better than was possible before, the frontiers of art
and propaganda.
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