LITERARY CRITICISM A BRIEF SURVEY

Criticism is an overall term for studies concerning with defining,

analyzing, interpreting and evaluating works of literature. Theoretical criticism

speaks of literary theory. Some such theoretical critics have been Aristotle,

Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Sainte-Beuve, Goethe, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold,

Poe, Emerson, Richards, Burke and Frye.

Practical criticism or applied criticism concerns with particular works

and writers. Here the theoretical principles are implicit, not explicit. The

literary essays of Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Richards, Eliot,

Woolf, Leavis, Trilling and Brooks are good examples. The types of traditional

critical theories and of applied criticism are as follows: mimetic criticism,

pragmatic criticism, expressive criticism, objective criticism, and the like.

Criticism of any type and nature aims at establishing a valid text for a literary

work. These types bear upon literature various areas of knowledge.

Accordingly we have historical criticism, biographical criticism, sociological

criticism, psychological criticism, and myth criticism.

The following is a critical analysis of the history of literary criticism in

the West which will facilitate an easier understanding of D.H. Lawrences

creative criticism.

Plato: The great Greek civilization had reached the height of progress at

least around 500 BC. The Greeks lived the best kind of life even compared to

the Indus valley civilization, and of course, the Mesopotamian culture. The

Greeks were cultured people. They lived and cultivated arts. They talked about

poetry.

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 Plato was one of the oldest critics who spoke of poetry. Here poetry

refers to literature. However, Plato considered art as dangerous to mans morals

and his Athens needed discipline and reason. It is said, For morality and

ethics, the citizen had better go almost anywhere rather than to the poets1 For

Greeks, fiction seemed suicidal. Plato exiles the poet from his Republic.

Aristotle: However, Aristotle clears the doubts Plato raised about

literature. Aristotle sees that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry,

and music are alike in that they all imitate. They differ in the medium, objects,

and manner of imitation. He says tragedy is superior even to epic, and comedy.

According to him, poetry has two reasons for existence: 1) first man is an

imitative being and takes pleasure in it, then 2) harmony and rhythm. Aristotle

defines tragedy as

a representation of a serious, complete action which has

magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements

separately in the various parts of the play, represented by

people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means

of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.2

Aristotle says poetry is more universal than philosophy. We find, then

that Aristotle in the Poetics takes it for granted that a work of art, whether it be

a picture or a poem, is a thing of beauty, and that it affords pleasure appropriate

to its own kind. The legacy of Aristotles aesthetics, like that of his philosophy

as a whole, is a distinctly classical one. R. A. Scott James observes, Mimesis,

then, or imitation is, in Aristotles view, the essential in a fine art. It is that

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which distinguishes creative or fine art from all other products of the human

mind.3 Poetics may be called acromatic, so that one can understand it with the

help of other larger works. Wimsatt Jr. and Cleanth Brooks observe, The

difference between Aristotle and Plato on poetry is a fulfillment of their

difference on ideas or universals, and their rhetoric and poetics are parts of a

larger answer to Plato.4

Horace: Horace lived in Augustus Rome. His Art of Poetry is a

handbook for aristocratic literature of good sense. He prefers old wine and

Greek literature. He insists on aesthetics and the middle path. He speaks of the

importance of literary traditions. He seems to say either stick to tradition, or see

that your inventions be consistent. Horace insists on the smooth functioning of

literature. Horace focused on the craft of verse. He says,

People like to ask whether a good poem comes natural or is

produced by craft. So far as I can see, neither book-learning

without a lot of inspiration nor unimproved genius can get

very far. The two things work together and need each other.5

Longinus: Thus we read in Plotinus essay On the Beautiful where it is

said: The soul, ranking as she does with what is nobler in the order of realities,

must needs by her very nature thrill with joy if she sees something even

remotely akin to her own spirit, and will draw it to her, becoming aware alike

of herself and of that which is her own.6 And in Longinus we read :

It was no mean or low-born creature which Nature chose

when she brought man into the mighty assemblage of life and

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 all the order of the Universe, and ordained us to be spectators

of the cosmic show and most eager competitors; from the first

she poured into our souls a deathless longing for all that is

great and diviner than ourselves.7

The two speak the same : that of Plotinus the body becomes beautiful,

by participating in the Reason that flows from the Divine, and Longinus

judgment, that all the greatest writers are above what is mortalSublimity

lifts them near the great mindedness of God.

Longinus was an important critic. Wordsworth wrote, Longinus treats

of animated, impassioned, energetic, or if you will, elevated writing.8

Longinus likes the literature that provides pleasure. He defines sublimity by

showing that it consists of a certain distinction and excellence in expression,

and that it is from no other source than this that the greatest poets and writers

have derived their eminence and gained an immortality of renown. The effect

of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. At every

time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us,

prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions

we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and

irresistible might to bear, and reign over every hearer. Similarly, we see skill in

invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won

result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition,

whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before

it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its

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plentitude. He is worried about writers craze for novelity. He insists on

tradition and experience. According to Longinus, sublimity is the echo of a

great soul. As an example of the sublimity that comes from great ideas, he

quotes, The legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man, as writing, God said, -

what? Let there be light, and there was light; let there be land, and there was

land. In this section, which is of extreme interest, he compares the Odyssey

and the Iliad. He then quotes a great poem of Sappho and preserves it for

posterity.9

Longinuss preoccupation with the sublime might be seen as a call for

spiritual reorientation, a movement away from rationality and merely technical

competence, itself a reflex of materialist and pragmatic thinking, toward

acknowledgment of a profounder and more authentic strain in human nature.

Longinus concludes his treatise by wondering whether Greek literature

went out with democracy and whether freedom alone is able to foster

intellectual genius and to fill it with high hopes.

Dante: Dante comes from the Middle Ages. He either wasted mans

time or affected his morals. Dante is known for his Divine Comedy. He calls it

comedy because it begins horribly in hell and ends pleasingly with heaven. His

Comedy fulfills the Horatian prescription to teach and delight as the Middle

Ages understood it.

Dante speaks of an ideal language for literature. He chooses Hebrew,

and some Romance for writing. He insists that literature should be written in a

formal language, rather than in dialects. The language should be illustrious,

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cardinal and courtly. In Scott Jamess word such language must be an

Illustrious Vernacular. Dante defines the vernacular as natural speech,

acquired when we are children through the practice of imitation without

following any rules. Dante defines grammar as a secondary speech, which

arises from the first. Unlike the first, natural speech, grammar is acquired only

by a few persons through assiduous study and much expenditure of time. What

is interesting are the reasons that Dante gives for the invention of grammar. He

observes that no human language can be lasting and continuous.10 In his book

On the Vulgar Tongue, Dante says literature may be written on Venus and

Virtue (love and virtue). He prefers lyric, when it comes to genre. Critics

complain that Dante was not well read in classical literature, but he was the

first modern critic.

Boccaccio: Boccaccio (1313-1375) in his Life of Dante speaks of

religion as poetry. He calls the Bible, a literature work. There is, for example,

the story of Nebuchadnezzars vision. Since theology is the poetry of God

poetry is theology. His work Geneology of the Gentile Gods speaks of the

ancient myths, upholding imaginative literature. It is said of his criticism,

Poetry has strong enemies. First, of course, are the completely carnal men

whose minds never rise above the pleasures of the table and the brothel. Why

waste your time with poetry when you can love, sleep, and drink? they ask.

Second are those with a smattering of philosophy who, without ever having

come nearer to learning than popular digests, fancy themselves great

theologians and scorn the poets as being mere triflers. The third class is

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composed of the real philistines of this time, the lawyers. They have learning,

to be sure, but their learning is entirely for the purpose of gaining money.11

The fourth class contains the most dangerous enemies of poetry, the narrow-

minded theologians. Among them are certain affairs and others who make a

parade of learning to impress the masses. They contend that poems are false,

obscure, lewd, and replete with absurd and silly tales of pagan gods. They

shout that poets are nothing but seducers of men, prompters to crime.

Boccaccio thinks poetry is noble, and it cauterizes the common man.

Good literature is inspiration plus learning. His most important point is the

same one he made in his Life of Dante: The ancient poets are teachers. The

truths they write about are written in allegorical form in the same manner as the

stories in the Bible. The world needs what the Greeks and Romans can

teach.12

Baccaccio anticipates many of the Romantics in stating that poet prefers

lonely haunts that are favorable to contemplation, especially contemplation of

God.

The Renaissance Critics (16th century): The medieval critics worried

about language. Already Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio had written in

vernaculars though highbrows used Latin and Greek. Men like Leon Battista

Alberti argued that one should write in a language that all can understand

which, if it is not as polished as Latin, will become so if patriots give their

attention to it. Then Pierto Bembo, a famous Latinist himself, came over to the

side of Florentines and wrote in a vernacular so polished that the old objections

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could no longer be taken seriously. In a tract written in defense of the

vernacular, he argued that a modern language is actually superior to an ancient

one for the treatment of modern subjects. Other Florentines added to the

demand that the language they spoke be accepted as a literary instrument, and

they echoed Bembos argument that it was patriotic to write in it.

Vernon Hall observes,

In England and France the problem of the language was less

difficult. Both were unified monarchies, and there was no

question of strongly competing dialects. Both countries,

however, had the Latin tradition to overcome, and the writers

in both countries made good use of the arguments of their

Italian predecessors. The fighters for French and English had,

as their Italian fellows had not, the support of strong

Protestant movements. The publication of the Scriptures in

translation was probably the greatest single force in

establishing the victory of the vernacular.13

In both England and France, growing nationalism helped forward the

victory. The English were, if possible, even more patriotic.

The patriotic writers won the day. Mulcaster claimed that English was

the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin tongue remembering us of

our thralldom and bondage. Others urged that English be enriched by

borrowing and translation while inconsistently declaring that English was

superior to all other tongues.14

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 However, many of these medieval writers were greatly aristocratic,

against which the Romantic literature reacted later. Petrarch declared that the

praise of the mob is odious to the learned. Men like Ariosto and Tasso were

condemned because they were widely read and sung. Plato and Aristotle

thought the so called imitation is imitation of persons and things in nature,

while later writers, including the Renaissance writers, took it for imitation of

other writers. The writers more imitated the Roman writers than the Greek

because Rome provided them with sophistication. They studied form in

literature as in life. Genres and styles were used according to the classes of

people in society. Even the Greeks had told the functions of tragedy and

comedy are of different social classes.

Farce was meant for the low people. The Renaissance writers agued

about the use of language for different social classes. They believed in the

pedagogical theory of art. For them literature would teach delightfully. The

critics were classic in theory, but romantic in practice. It is said,

The great glory of the Renaissance critics remains. With all

their faults they set the standards for their own age and the

age that followed them. If their criticism was more restrictive

than inspirational, it must be recognized that their

contemporaries were more likely to err on the side of license

than that of restraint. But regardless of whether their

influence was good or bad they succeeded admirably in doing

one thing. They established literary criticism as an

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 independent form of literature. Henceforth the critic was

given an honorable place as a citizen in the republic of

letters.15

Milton: Milton (1608-74) was puritan, also interested in criticism.

Milton was a parliamentarian whose party closed the church, not because the

drama was vulgar, but it was royalist in cause. He condemned libidinous and

ignorant poetasters though advised that poetry was necessary to the spirit of

man.

William Davenant (1606-1668) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679),

both exiles with Charles II in France, wrote criticism from French prospective.

Their criticism marks a transition from Renaissance to Neoclassicism.

Something had gone out of life. With all their rule-making the

Renaissance critics never forgot that the poet is divine, that he is inspired. In

Davenant and Hobbes the fire is gone. Inspiration is replaced by reason and

imagination by fancy.

Davenant begins his letter by praising the ancient epic poets. When he

considers the moderns, however, he can find only two writers of heroic poems

who are worthy of notice: Tasso and Spenser. In Hobbes reply to Davenants

letter we discover the philosophical basis for the neoclassical attitude. For

Hobbes all is simple, all is clear. The universe is divided into three regions:

celestial, aerial and terrestrial; the world into three: court, city and country.

Hence, there are divisions of poetry: heroic, satiric, and pastoral.

Boileaus (1636-1711) Art of Poetry (1674) is a text of neo-classical

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literature. In his verse essay he writes:

Whateer you write of pleasant or sublime,

Always let sense accompany your rime;

Falsely they seem each other to oppose,

Rime must be made with reasons laws to close;

And when to conquer her you bend your force,

The mind will triumph in the noble course;

To reasons yoke she quickly will incline,

Which, far from hurting, renders her divine;

But if neglected, will as easily stray,

And master reason, which she should obey,

Love reason then, and let whateer you write

Borrow from her its beauty, force and light.16

Boileau thinks sublime a metaphysical affectation of nicety. It is said,

Boileaus main point in his classic Preface was that the

sublime so well described by Longinus resided not in nicety

of terms but in grandeur of conception-a grandeur which had

to be expressed, not preciously, but strongly, and which was

capable of being expressed in only a few simple words.17

Boileau asks for the study of (human) nature. He not only tells that

ancient poets are the best to imitate, but gives rules for pastoral, elegy, sonnet,

epigram, ode, satire, and drama. The rules Bioleau gives remind us of the

precept of the Resaissance critics. There is, however, a difference and it is an

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important one. The Renaissance critics said do thus and so because common

sense and reason demand it. Like Popes Essay on Criticism, Boileaus Art of

Poetry embodies some of the vast intellectual and political changes that were

already beginning to sweep over Europe.

Baccaccio anticipates many of the Romantics in stating that poets prefer

lonely haunts that are favorable to contemplation, especially contemplation of

God.

It is said,

The neo-classic theory of general truth was an attempt to say

what kind of reality is given in art, an attempt to relate and

even to identify the real and the ideal. Yet the human ideal

must be always in some sense fictitious. And fiction stretches

out to embrace fable. Art, in the classic tradition, professed to

render reality through a trick of presenting something either

better or more significant than reality. But the trick obviously

and quite often involved the unreal. Four antitheses: realism

vs. fantasy, history vs. fiction, particular vs. universal, real vs.

ideal, were subsumed in a medley of ways by the classic

tradition under the basic antithesis nature vs. art.18

Dryden: Scott James thinks Dryden had not only read and digested

Sophocles and Euripides, Theocritus and Virgil; he had also read and digested

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher. He found them worth reading.

Dryden (1631-1700) is Boileaus contemporary. His major critical work

An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668, revised in 1684) is in the form of a

dialogue. The speakers are Neander (Drydem himself), Crites (Sir Robert

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Howard), Lisideius (Sir Chalres Sedley), and Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst). By

using the dialogue form Dryden is able to present the various critical points of

view that agitated literary circles at this time. Rather than giving a series of

dogmatic statements, as Boileau did, he has Eugenius contend that the plays of

the last age were better than theirs, Crites, upheld the ancient drama, Lisideius

argued that French playwrights were better than the English, and Neander

defended the English.

Dryden speaks of his Defence of the Essay thus :

Hirtheto I have proceeded by demonstration;having laid

down, that Nature is to be imitated, and that propostion

proving the next, that then there are means which conduce to

the imitating of Nature, I dare proceed no further positively;

but have only laid down some opinions of the Ancients and

Moderns, and of my ownwhich I thought probable.19

Dryden critically appreciates the Elizabethan dramatists, and his great

words I admire Jonson, but I love Shakespeare sounds pleasant. Dryden who

imitated and used properly the French heroic rhyme, believes that rhyme is

nearest to nature.

Pope: By the time Pope (1688-1744) published his Essay on Criticism

in 1711, the neoclassical movement had become firmly established in England.

The great figure of Shakespeare had for the moment receded into the past, and

Pope cold allow himself to be much more rigorously French and neoclassical

than Drydens feeling for the poetry of the previous age had allowed him to be.

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He starts out with the statement that good taste is as necessary to the critic as

genius is to the poet, but that both demand to be restrained:

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit.

And wisely curbed proud mans pretending wit.20

By the word judge, Pope refers the critic, drawing on the meaning of

the ancient Greek word krites. Pope sees the endeavor of criticism as a noble

one, provided it abides by Horaces advice for the poet:

But you who seek to give and merit frame,

And justly bear a Critics noble Name,

Be sure your self and your own Reach to know,

How far your Genius, Taste, and Learning go;

Launch not beyond your Depth

(II. 46-50)21

The rules of poetry are to Pope, as to Boileau, natural and reasonable.

Excess and enthusiasm in poetry must be restrained by the rules. Pope insists

on following the tradition which is well organized. He thinks criticism and

poetry are like physics. They need to be polite and polished. They need to be

learned, well-bred and sincere.

Samuel Johnson: It is said,

English neoclassical criticism has Dryden at the beginning,

Pope in the middle, and Samuel Johnson at the end. Of the

three, Pope is the strictest. Dryden at the beginning and

Johnson at the end of the period are subject to influences

which make the dogmatism of Popes Essay on Criticism less

essay for them to embrace.22

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 Johnson was a Tory, and against new tastes. In his Rasselas (1759), he

says, The province of poetry is to describe nature and passion. He must divert

himself of the prejudices of his age and country; he must consider right and

wrong in their abstraced and invariable states; he must disregard present laws

and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always

be the same. With such principles Johnson became an excellent practical critic

for those poets who were of his own school. His Lives of the Poets could not be

bettered in the sections where he deals with Dryden and Pope, whose poetry is

exactly what Johnson thinks poetry should be. Johnson would say If Pope be

not a poet, where is poetry to be found. But, as might be excepted, Johnson is

less happy in writing about poets whose view of poetry is different. So Johnson

did not like Grays Romantic poetry, nor Miltons modern taste. Yet Johnson

can show an independent judgment that reminds us of Dryden. What saved

Dryden from being a Boileau, we remember, was Shakespeare, whose very

existence could make even Pope at times forget his rules. So it is not surprising

that it is in Johnsons Preface to his Shakespeare (1765) that we find his most

liberal critical utterances, though admittedly they exist side by side with some

of his narrowest criticism.

Wordsworth (1770-1856) and Coleridge: If Johnson wrote of man in

as certain class of society, Wordsworth wrote of man as himself, after the

French Revolution shattered the old way of life. He writes in Lyrical Ballads

The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to

choose incidents and situations from common life, and to

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 relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a

selection of language really used by men, and, at the same

time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination,

whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in

an unusual aspect, and, further, and above all, to make these

incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly

though no ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.23

This view of poetry as a meditated craft is elaborated in Wordsworths

other renowned comment in the Preface concerning poetic composition. After

repeating his original statement that

poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, he

adds that poetry, takes its origin from emotion recollected in

tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of

re-action, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an

emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of

contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually

exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition

generally begins.24

F.W. Bateson observes,

The issue of poetic diction had been growing upon the

English literary consciousness steadily since about the time of

Chaucer, that is, since the beginning of Renaissance English

literature, and with special intensity since the time of Spenser.

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 A new linguistic consciousness, the new linguistic

expansiveness of the Renaissance nation, promoted the

learned enrichment of vernacular expression and produced a

plethora of words.25

Dante insisted on the use of polished language, but Wordsworth used the

common mans language. He does not believe in the ways of the city folk. Man

in nature is better than man in the city. Wordsworth puts stress on the

individualism of the poet. And what is the purpose of poetry? To teach, said

Horace, Scaliger, and Boileau. No, says Wordsworth. The only restriction the

poet writes under is the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human

being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a

lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a

man. Poetry for Wordsworth is not merely another social or intellectual

activity. It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned

expression which is in the countenance of all science.

His friend and collaborator Coleridge (1770-1856) takes the trouble to

examine and correct Wordsworths views on language and meter. He does it

seventeen years later in his Biographia Literaria. Coleridge acutely remarks

that Wordsworths own theory of language is based on a selection of the

language of rustics. Now, Coleridge says, if you remove the provincial terms of

speech from a peasants language you no longer have rustic language at all.

You have the language that any man speaks. Thus he denies Wordsworths

main assertion that a special virtue is in the speech of those in close

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communication with nature. Yet though he will not accept Wordsworths

theory, he is in complete agreement with him as to the falseness and artificiality

of much of the verse of the preceding generation. Writing later than

Wordsworth, at a time when the Romantic movement has more partisans, he

can be more reasonable and less polemical than Wordsworth. Coleridges ideas

about fancy and imagination, and his Shakespeare criticism are much useful for

us.

Coleridge writes of his ideas of imagination and fancy;

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or

secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the

living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and

as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation

in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of

the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as

identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and

differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It

dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where

this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it

struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even

as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play

with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other

than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time

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 and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical

phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word

CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory must receive

all its materials ready made from the laws of association.26

Murray Budny observes,

During the 17th century the terms imagination and fancy had

often enough been used in a vaguely synonymous way to

refer to the realm of fairy tale or make-believe. Yet here and

there (as in the opening of Hobbess Leviathan) the term

imagination had tended to distinguish itself from fancy

and settle toward a meaning centered in the sober literalism of

sense impressions and the survival of these in memory. This

was in accord with medieval and Renaissance tradition, where

imagination and phantasia had all along been fairly close

together, but where, so far as a distinction of this kind had

been made, it was phantasia which meant the lighter and less

responsible kind of imaging.27

Hugo: Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a fine Romantic poet and critic. In

the preface to his play Cromwell (1827), he thinks that Romantic view of life is

much substantially meant for societys welfare.

Goethe: Goethe (1749-1832) began his literary career in the Strum and

Drang (Storm and Stress) times, and he spoke of romanticism. Yet he outgrew

it. His poetry, fiction and drama speak of his critical theories. His

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Conversations as recorded by his disciple Eckermann evidences this. He thinks

poetry is a universal possession. Goethe calls classic literature strong, fresh,

joyous and healthy, while Romantic literature as weak, morbid and sickly. Yet

he feels that the Romantic literature opened the way for the variety of later

literature.

Now Goethe is perhaps a little more disposed to emphaasize the

stubbornness of the material in which an artist works. His mind turns more

readily to questions of technique. He never forgets that the artist has to deal

with the hard facts of life, and that life is reluctant to lend itself to the plans of

the poet. Fact must give the motive, he says, the points that require

expression the particular kernel. Nonetheless, to make a beautiful enlivened

whole, that is the business of the poet.28 The plot is the first thing, said

Aristotle. We must have unity arising from a predominant passion, said

Coleridge. Goethe is as direct as the Greek. In one of his conversations with

Eckermann he speaks of the great importance of motives, which no one will

understand.

Walt Whitman: Whitmans (1819-1892) Preface to Leaves of Grass

(1855) is the American equivalent of Hugos preface to Cromwell. The same

energy, the same sense of newness and freedom animate both. Yet, if anything,

Whitman out-Hugos Hugo. If the poet is a world-shaking genius to Hugo, he

is a god, or better than a god, to Whitman. Both Walt Whitmans poetry and his

criticism are filled with his sense of uniqueness. He is an American and a

democrat a new species of bard. No one like him has existed before. As he

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looks across to the old countries he finds their writers, tainted with ideas of

caste and status. Shakespeare is against the common people, who are the life

blood of democracy. His plays are incarnated, uncompromising feudalism in

literature. Scotts novels are anti-democratic, and Tennysons poems are full

of non-democracy.29 Whitman thinks the whole Europe lived an

undemocratic life, and America is democratic. So the future belongs to

America. America itself is a great poem. American poetry is all-embracing as

America itself.

The American poet, dealing with American subject matters in new,

American forms, is fortunate because he has a fit language in which to write.

All of theses things, which will make the new poet and the new poetry, are

born of freedom. No great poetry is possible without the idea of liberty. The

poets are libertys own voice. For Whitman, acceptance is good, rejection is

evil. Poetry should be inclusive, not exclusive. Whitman has the courage to use

the license he demands for the poet. His poems in Leaves of Grass are concrete

examples of his doctrines. No subject matter is unworthy. The factories, the

docks, the plains, the mountains are listed along with every type of man and

woman: the workers, the magistrates, the prostitutes. He uses a free-flowing

rhythm that usually has neither rhyme nor meter in the old sense. Nor does he

hesitate to use the diction that is spoken on the streets as well as that used in the

courts.

Sainte Beuve: Sainte Beuve (1804-1869) was totally a different critic.

He rejected any restraints in literature. So he offers us the science of genius. He

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thinks criticism is an art and criticism should be an artist. Literature and the

production of literature are most complex matters. So Sainte-Beuve asks more

of the critic than any of his predecessors have done. He demands that the critic

make the author come to life. As he says in an article on Corneille,

It seems to me that, as regards the literary critic, there is not

reading more recreative, more delectable, and at the same

time more fruitful in all kinds of information than well-made

biographies of great men. To get inside ones author, to

establish oneself there, to exhibit him from all points of view;

to make him live, move and speak as he must have done, to

follow him as far as possible into his inner life and private

manners; to tie him on all sides to this earth, this real

existence, these daily habits which are as much a part of great

men as the rest of us.30

In a lecture given at the Ecole Normale on April 12, 1858, Sainte-Beuve

states the position he has arrived at later in his life. He was wearied of the

Romantic enthusiasm of his youth and now prefered classic literature. He

followed Goethes view by classic I understand sound and by romantic

sickly. He defines literature as comprising all literature in a healthy and

happily flourishing condition, literatures in full accord and in harmony with

their period, with their social surroundings, with the principles and powers

which direct society, satisfied with themselvesthese literatures which are and

feel themselves to be at home, in their proper road, not out of their proper class,

55
not agitating, not having for their principle discomfort, which has never been a

principle of beauty. Romantic literature on the other hand springs from ages

which are in a perpetual instability of public affairs.31 Since the writers of a

romantic age find it difficult to believe in literary immorality, they permit

themselves every license.

Scott James thinks, St. Beuve starts from the hypothesis that to

understand a work it is necessary to understand its author. Therefore the first

task that confronts the critic appears to him to be a biographical one.32

Taine: Hippolyte Adophe Taine, (1828-1893) unlike St. Beuve desired

a sort of fixed conditions for cultivating literature. In his introduction to his

History of English Literature (1864), Taine explains his new, scientific

approach to literature. It was perceived that a literary work is not a mere

individual play of imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, a

certain kind of mind. It was concluded that we might recover, from the

monuments of literature, a knowledge of the manner in which men thought and

felt centuries ago. The attempt was made, and it succeeded.33 Determined to

be scientific, Taine decides to approach literature in much the same way as the

biologist approaches his specimen.

Arnold: Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) looked around at mid-nineteenth-

century England and did not like what he saw. Industrial progress there was,

but moral grandeur was lacking. From a cultural point of view most of the

aristocrats were barbarians, the middle-class Philistines, and the people a

brutalized populace. So, although one of the key words in his criticism is

56
disinterestedness, he does not mean by it an art-for-arts-sake attitude. The

critic must be disinterested, not because he has no social functions, but because

he has one. He thinks true criticism must be independent of critics need to

adopt an objective approach for appreciation of poetry. It is said,

We have seen many noble things claimed for poetry by

critics in the past, but Arnold claims more than any of them.

The battle for mens minds that is being waged by science

and religion will be won by neither. Religion and philosophy,

the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge, will

be replaced by poetry. Science itself will be complete by it.

As Wordsworth said poetry will be the breath and finer spirit

of all knowledge.34

Scott James thinks the function of Arnolds critic in the broadest sense

of the term is to promote culture ; his function as literary critic is to promote

that part of culture which depends upon knowledge of letters. Wimsatt Jr and

Cleanth Brooks believe that Arnold was not only a cultural critic but also a poet

and an educator.

Arnold defined poetry (in fact, all literature) as a criticism of life.

Arnolds didacticism reaches its mature and accurate formulation in the

sentence so often quoted from the opening of the 1880 essay:

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn

to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most

57
 of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will

be replaced by poetry.35

Howells: No greater contrast to Arnold could be imagined than the

American William Dean Howells (1837-1920). Arnold loves the past, is a

student of the classics; Howells is the encourager of the new, the defender of

Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. Reality takes away from

art, according to Arnold; reality is the test of art, according to Howells.

Howells joins hands with his fellow countryman Whitman in rejecting much of

the old literature because it lacks a democratic spirit. Howells thinks the

traditional literature does not depict democratic life. No critic is an authority.

No author was ever an authority except in those moments when he held his ear

close to natures lips and caught its very accent. The best art is the art which is

most realistic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Romanticism fought

with effete classicism. At the end of the nineteenth century, realism is waging

the same battle with effete Romanticism.

Howells defines realism as nothing more and nothing less than the

truthful treatment of material36 Applying this standard to the English

novelist, only Jane Austen measures up completely. The history of the English

novel from Jane Austen through Scott, Dickens, Charlotte Bront, and

Thackeray is the history of a decline, a decline attributable to the false and

perverted taste of English, a taste for which the critics have not little

responsibility. In America the situation is different. America has been built

upon the affirmation that all men are equal in their rights and their duties. The

58
American novelists should be as Americans as they unconsciously can.

Howells is a humanitarian and a socialist.

Howells theory of realism is democratic in several senses. As seen

above, he takes from Burke the democratic notion that all people have the

potential for aesthetic judgment.37

Though Henry James was an American novelist, he saw the word

American as embracing a certain cultural openness, or in his words, a fusion

and synthesis of the various national tendencies of the world.

Zola: Emile Zola (1840-1902) is convinced that the experimental

method will triumph everywhere, not only in the novel but in history, criticism,

drama, and even poetry, since literature depends not only upon the author but

upon nature. He thinks literature is something like science.

France: Anatole France (1844-1924), on the other hand, looked at

everything with skepticism. Against both the naturalism of Zola and all

relativism in literary criticism stood Ferdinand Brunetire. A defender of the

Catholic church in religion and of conservatism in politics, he was

temperamentally in favor of authority in literature. For him criticism that

expressed the personality of the critic could not even be considered criticism.

Nor could he accept the popular idea that literature was a form of sociology. In

his book Evolution of Genres (1890) he says that literary genres are like

biological genres in that all are born, develop, and die like living beings.

Darwinism and Literature: Brunetires use of the catchword

evolution reminds us that various theories of evolution influenced most

59
thinkers of the nineteenth century, literary critics included. Yet, no literary

critic quite dared to become a complete neo-Darwinist since to become one

would have meant supporting the proposition that literature became better as

the race progressed. Still Darwin influenced the 19th century literature.

Tennyson felt dejected of Darwinism. Arnold thought Darwinism destroyed

religion. Whereas Swinburne found a promise in this. Butlers The Way

of All Flesh was of note in another way, too. Butler not only accepted Darwin

but improved on him by introducing the Lamarckian concept of inherited

memory. As might be exected, George Bernard Shaw followed Butler.

Darwinism in the later nineteenth century fused with cosmic pessimism

to help produce the naturalistic novel. One has only to read the novels of

Thomas Hardy to see how Tennysons vision of the future has changed. It

may be that the most long-lasting influence of Darwinism will be in the realm

of science fiction.

In Europe the impact was less great. French rationalism and German

Biblical scholarship had long since destroyed the kind of complacency that

England still possessed in Darwins time. In America, on the other hand, the

shock was as great as in England. However, most American literary men in

spite of all evidence to the contrary remained determinedly optimistic.

Tolstoy: The moral objection to art, or at least some art, which Plato

began and which was continued by censors in and out of the churches found its

most persuasive spokesman in Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). When he published

What is Art? in 1898, he not only turned his back on most of modern art but

60
even repudiated his own great novels. For this, a modern lady novelist has

called him the greatest betrayer since Judas. Yet Tolstoy himself felt that he

was giving art a greater and truer importance than others were willing to grant

it.

In the first pages of What is Art? Tolstoy expresses his shock at the

immense sums of money and the enormous number of hours of labor spent for

art, art which stunts human lives and transgresses against human love.

Thousands upon thousands of people labor and pay taxes for the production of

art from which they not only receive no benefit but which is usually harmful.

How can the defenders of art justify its social cost? What, in other words, is

art?

Art is activity that produces beauty, says one aesthetician. Very well,

says Tolstoy, but what then is beauty? If one turns to the writers on aesthetics,

one finds nothing but confusion. Definitions of beauty there are, but usually in

such confused language as to be incomprehensible.

Then Tolstoy gives a definition that deliberately omits both beauty and

pleasure.Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously

by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived

through, so that others are infected by these feelings and also experience

them.38

Like Kant, Hegel sees art and beauty as a realm that belongs to sense,

feeling intuition, imagination. Its sphere is essentially different from that of

thought, and it is precisely the freedom of production and configurations that

61
we enjoy in the beauty of artit seems as if we escape from every fetter of rule

and regularitythe source of works of art is the free activity of fancy which in

its imaginations is itself more free than nature is. The concept of the beautiful,

he says, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have

been mentioned, because it unites metaphysical universality with the precision

of real particularity.

What is the aim of art? This is the question to which Hegel now

proceeds. He rejects the centuries-old notion that the aim of art is imitation,

that art awakens or purifies ones feelings and passions.39

Art, he says, synthesizes two elements into a reconciled totality: the

content of art is the Idea, while its form is a configuration of sensuous

material. Given that the content of art is spiritual and the form is sensuous, the

first requirement is that the content itself must be worthy of artistic

representation.

Marxism and Literature: The world-shaking economic and social

theories of Karl Marx could not help but influence literary criticism. Marx

insisted that literature, like every other cultural phenomenon, was a reflection

of the basic economic structure of society. An epic, a poem, and a play are

produced by the same forces that produce social classes and cannot be fully

understood without reference to these forces.

Marx knew that cultural forms develop unevenly. The rapid spread of

Marxist politics throughout the world introduced Marxs literary theories to all

countries. Marxism helped create a social perspective that influenced much

62
literary scholarship. Many writers like Edward Wilson, Newton Arvin, F.O.

Mathiessen, and Granville Hicks followed Marx.

In Soviet Russia, particularly during the black years of Stalin, Platos

suggestions were followed to the letter. The party line on literature came from

Kremlin, and every pressure was exerted on poets and novelists to see that they

wrote what was wanted.

Karl Marx could not have envisioned the extremes to which the Soviet

totalitarians would put his literary theories. We know, for instance, that his

collegue Frederick Engels wrote the following in a letter to an early proletarian

novelist who asked for Engels help in popularizing his novel: Look at your

heroine, with her dialectical materialist eyes and her economic determinist nose

and her surplus value mouth. You take her in your arms and you kiss her. I

know I wouldnt want to.40

Bergson: Bergson (1859-1941) offers a philosophy which claims

that it is the artist, not the scientist, who penetrates to reality. The scientist is

artificial. For, as Bergson sees it, life is a continuous process indefinitely

pursued, and indivisible process, on which each visible organism rides during

the short interval of time given it to live.41

True reality is the lan vital, the vital impulse that creates, that makes

for continuous evolution. Matter is that which it struggles against. The lan

vital strives toward creativity and individuality against matter, which would

drag it down to inertness, to death. It is the artist who by his intuition is able to

penetrate through matter to reality.

63
 Croce (1866-1952) is one of the most influential modern critics. In his

article Aesthetics he speaks of art. Wimsatt Jr and Cleanth Brooks think

Croce'
s theory grows out of an initial preoccupation with the historico-social

thinking which we have seen to be intrinsic to one sort of 19thcentury didactic

theory.

It is pure intuition and is the first form of knowledge. It is distinguished

from the second form of knowledge, which is logic. Note that Croce does not

say that intuition is a step in the production of art. It is art. When the artist has

created a form in all its completeness in his mind the proper activity of art has

ceased. Art is always a form of self-expression and is always internal. Art is an

ideal activity.

It is said, Marx attempted systematically to seek the structural causes

behind what he saw as system of capitalist exploitation and degradation, and to

offer solutions in the spheres of economics and politics.42

Freudianism and Literature: Around 1907 Freuds interests in the

implications of psychoanalysis began to exert over the entire domain of culture.

He sought to apply psychoanalytic principles to study of art, religion, and

primitive cultures. In his studies of religion, Freud viewed obsessional neurosis

as a distorted private religion and religion itself as a universal obsessional

neurosis. In studies such as Totem and Taboo (1912-1913) Freud explored

taboos or prohibitions in primitive cultures, and analogized the various

postulates of primitive beliefs with neurosis. In works such as Civilization and

its Discontents (1930) Freud suggested the extension of the analysis of neurosis

64
in individuals to the examination of the imaginative and cultural creations of

social groups and peoples. Some Freuds disciples, such as Ernest Jones and

Otto Rank, followed through the implications of psychoanalytic theory in the

realms of literary analysis, mythology, and symbol. All in all, Freud hoped that

psychoanalysis, while yet underdeveloped, might offer valuable contributions

in the most varied regions of knowledge.

Sigmund Freud says that writing is a form of psychological theraphy. To

phrase it another way, writers seem to have fewer inhibitions than the rest of

men. For example, Freud discovered in Stendhals Henri Brulard the following

amazing passage:

In loving [my mother], I had exactly the same character as

when later I love Alberthe de Rubempr with real

passionsince then my way of seeking happiness has

changed little, with the single exception that in what

constitutes the physical side of love I was then what Caesar

would be, if he came back to earth with regard to the use of

cannon and small arms. I should soon have learned, and it

would have changed nothing in my tactics. I wanted to cover

my mother with kisses, and for her to have no clothes on. She

loved me passionately and kissed me often. I returned her

kisses, with such ardor that she was sometimes obliged to run

away. I abhorred my father when he came to interrupt our

kisses. I always wanted to kiss her bosom.43

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 The most famous example of this is Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, so

famous that Freud borrowed the name of Sphocles king for the fundamental

complex of all men. In the Oedipus legend, the hero kills his father and sleeps

with his mother but does this in ignorance of their true identities. This, said

Freud, was a poetic presentation of the fact that the adult is no longer conscious

of his Oedipal experience. In the same fashion the prediction of the oracle that

Oedipus will do what he does symbolized the inevitability of the fate which

requires us all to live through this experience. Even the self-blinding of

Oedipus can be considered as a poetic form of self-castration. Freud says

literature moves us by presenting in symbolic form our own most fundamental

desires.

As might be imagined, the various schools of psychoanalysis that come

after Freud have, in changing his doctrines, changed psychoanalytic literary

criticism. For example, the followers of Adler substituted the inferiority and

superiority complexes as the key to literary character analysis. Those who held

to the teachings of Jung preferred to emphasize the collective unconscious of

the race as revealed in the character, an unconscious which contained mystic

elements. The tendency in more recent psychoanalytical criticism is to borrow

concepts from all these schools, an eclecticism that parallels the eclecticism of

many practicing psychoanalysts.

I. A. Richards, in his Principles of Literary Criticism comes to the

conclusion that it is possible on the basis of modern knowledge to construct a

psychological theory of value that will enable us to compare the worth of

66
experiences, literary or otherwise. He observes that no one with a knowledge of

the data supplied by anthropology could think that peoples of different habits,

races, and civilizations hold to the same conceptions of good. Certain peoples

look upon the public consumption of food as highly indecent; others consider

forgiveness of ones enemies to be immoral.

T. S. Eliot has described himself as a classicist in literature, a royalist in

politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. Equalitarianism, progress, and

liberalism are detested by him. He is, in more than the theological sense of the

word, dogmatic. He understands that his beliefs in politics, religion and

literature form a whole.

In 1917 he wrote an essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, which

is still valuable as an introduction to his thought. It was written to combat the

idea that a poet should be praised in proportion to his originality. No poet or

artist of any sort can be understood solely in terms of himself. Often the most

valuable parts of the poets work are those in which the dead poets, his

ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. All the existing

monuments of literature compose an order, and ideal form. Each new work

alters, even if but slightly, the whole order. Thus it is that each new piece of

work must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. The poet must

know the main current of literature. He must have the historical senses, which

we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet

beyond his twenty-fifth year. There is a mind outside of his own, the mind of

Europe, of his own country. The conscious present is an awareness of the past.

67
 Eliot speaks of impersonality theory, or objective correlativity. He

thinks the progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual

extinction of personality.

Hulmess training as a student of philosophy enabled him to provide a

rather systematic account of the new classic reaction. By contrast, Ezra

Pounds most vigorous and most influential criticism is ad hoc and occasional.

It has often taken the form of practical advice to other writers. Pound has not

aspired to system-building; he has rather been concerned to discover a new

author; to help him find his appropriate idiom; to preside over the formation of

taste (one of his books bears the characteristic title, The ABC of Reading); to

assist in the final revision of particular poems.

The New Criticism: The tremendous prestige of Eliot as a poet gave

such weight to his critical opinions that the appearance of his collection of

critical essays The Sacred Wood (1920) initiated a trend in modern aesthetics

now known as the New Criticism. Though the term was used earlier by J. E.

Spingarn, and though Paul Valry had previously been polishing the same

critical instruments in France, Eliot undoubtedly can be considered the father of

this new school, particularly since the major practitioners have been either

American or English.

As a descriptive term, New Criticism is completely meaningless, since

all criticism is new when it first appears. Further, if one takes it as applying to

all modern critics, one soon discovers that they differ so much among

themselves that any simple definition of the school will exclude a number of

68
important critics. One critic will emphasize close reading, another symbols,

another morality, another psychology, another sociology, and till another the

mythical. New critics think that literature is the most important of human

activities. They speak of text as autonomous for appreciation. No vulgar

biography is allowed there.

69
References:

1. Plato, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, The

Modern Press, London, 1970, p.3.

2. Aristotle, Poetics, rept in The Norton Anthology of Theory and

Criticism, ed by V. B. Leitch, W. W. Norton and Co, New York, 2001,

p. 95.

3. R. A. Scott James, The Making of English Literature, Surjeet

Publications, New Delhi, 1950, p. 44.

4. Wimsatt Jr and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism, OUP, New Delhi,

1964, pp. 21-22.

5. Horace, qt by Wimsatt Jr, and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 93.

6. Plotinus, qt by R. A. Scott James, The Making of English Literature, p.

73.

7. Longinus, qt by R. A. Scott James, The Making of English Literature, p.

73.

8. William Wordsworth, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p.16.

9. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 19.

10. Dante, De Vulgari, Tongue, trans A. G. F. Howell, Greenwood Press,

New York, 1904, p. 27.

11. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 29.

12. Boccaccio, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p.

29.

70
13. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p.33.

14. Mulcaster, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism,

p.34.

15. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 48.

16. Boileau, qt by Vernon Hall, Literary Criticism, p. 61.

17. Wimsatt Jr and Cleanth Brooks, Literary History, p. 285.

18. Wimsatt Jr and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 334.

19. John Dryden, qt by Wimsatt Jr,. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary History,

p.193.

20. Alexander Pope, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p. 70.

21. Pope, qt by M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory,

p. 293.

22. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 74.

23. Willaim Wordsworth, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p. 79.

24. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, rept in The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed by V. B. Leitch, W. W. Norton

and Co, New York, 2001, p. 661.

25. F.W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language, OUP, Oxford,

1834, p. 340.

26. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch 13, rept in The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed by V. B. Leitch, pp. 676-677.

71
27. Murray Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval

Thought, Univ. of Illinois Studies in Languages and Literature, XII,

May-August, 1927, Nos. 2-3, p. 266.

28. Goethe, qt by R. A. Scott James, The Making of English Literature, p.

232.

29. Whitman, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p.

95.

30. St Beuve, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, pp.

100-101.

31. St Beuve, A Literary Tradition 1858, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History

of Literary Criticism, pp. 104-5.

32. R. A. Scott James, The Making of English Literature, p. 239.

33. Hippolyte Adophe Taine, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of

Literary Criticism, pp. 104-5.

34. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 109.

35. Arnold, qt by Wimsatt Jr and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 448.

36. W. D. Howells, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p. 114.

37. M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory, p. 483.

38. Leo Tolstoy, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p.

134.

39. Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, qt by Habib, A History of Literary

Criticism and Theory, p. 400.

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40. Frederick Engels, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p. 145.

41. Bergson, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, pp.

152-153.

42. M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory, p. 528.

43. Sigmund Freud, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary

Criticism, p. 157.

73