The Common Pursuit (26 page)

is is not the place for discussing; anyone who wants hints for the

THE COMMON PURSUIT

analysis will find all that can be asked in D. A. Traverses book. It is enough here to remind the reader of the way in which the personal drama is made to move upon a complexity of larger rhythms—birth, maturity, death, birth ('Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born'); Spring, Summer, Autumn . ..

Sir, the year growing ancient. Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter . . .

—so that the pastoral scene is something very much other than a charming superfluity. The power and subtlety of the organization—and this is a striking instance of Shakespeare's ability to transmute for serious ends what might have seemed irremediably romantic effects—are equal to absorbing into the profoundly symbolic significance of the whole even the coup de theatre with which Pauline justifies her sixteen years of double-living and funereal exhortation.

As Fr. Stephenson points out, there is no such organization in Cymbeline. The romantic theme remains merely romantic. The reunions, resurrections and reconciliations of the close belong to the order of imagination in which 'they all lived happily ever after'. 1 Cloten and the Queen are the wicked characters, stepmother and son, of the fairy-tale: they don't strike us as the expression of an adult intuition of evil. Posthumus's jealousy, on the other hand (if I may supplement Fr. Stephenson's observation: *the "evil" characters, in particular, do not receive full imaginative realization'), is real enough in its nastiness, but has no significance in relation to any radical theme, or total effect, of the play. And here there is opportunity for a brief aside in illustration

1 * A cc moment parut dona Luz, Fair timidc. (Des qu'il Taper^ut, le g£ne*ral la prit par k main.)

"Ma niece, lui-dit-il, le visage joyeux, tu peux aimer sans crainte Cceur-Loyal, il est vraiment mon fils. Dieu a pennis que je le retrouve au moment oil j'avais renonc^ a jamais au bonheur !'*

La jeune fille poussa un cri de joie et abandonna sa main a Rafael, qui tomba a ses pieds. En mSme temps le g&ie"ral s'approcha de sa femme et dans la reunion qui suivit on oublia tous les malheurs du passe" en songeant a Tavenir qui promettait tant de joie-*

Les Trappeurs de T'Arkansas, Gustave Aimard.

of the variety of Shakespeare's dramatic modes. Jealousy is a theme common to The Winter s Tale, Othello and Cymbeline. In The Winters Tale there is no psychological interest; we don't ask (so long as we are concerning ourselves with Shakespeare): What elements in Leontes' make-up, working in what way, explain this storm ? The question is irrelevant to the mode of the play. Othello, on the other hand, it would not be misleading to describe as a character-study. The explosive elements have been generated between the very specifically characterized Othello and his situation, and lago merely touches them off. Posthumus's case actually answers to the conventional account of Othello's: the noble hero, by nature far from jealous, is worked on and betrayed by devilish Italian cunning—lachimo is, quite simply, the efficient cause that lago, in the sentimentalized misreading of Othello, is seen as being. Posthumus suffers remorse for his murderous revulsion, but we are not to consider him degraded by his jealousy, or seriously blamable. Simply, he is a victim. He falls in with a villain who, out of pure malice, deceives him about Imogen, and, after strange vicissitudes, fairy-tale fortune brings the lovers together again to enjoy a life of hapiness. Shakespeare, that is, has taken over a romantic convention and has done little to give it anything other than a romantic significance. 1

Why then should two such intelligent critics as those in question not settle down in the obvious judgment that the play challenges ? I have already suggested that the answer should be sought in terms of a reaction against what may be called the Bradley-Archer 2 approach to Shakespeare. In the case of Cymbeline the assumption that a profound intended significance must be discovered in explanation of the peculiarities of the play is fostered by the presence of varied and impressive evidence of the Shakespearean genius.

Strength could be adduced in a wealth of illustration. I myself have long carried mental note of a number of passages from Cymbeline that seemed to me memorable instances of Shake-

1 In Pericles lie took over a romantic play, and the three acts that are clearly his are remarkable for the potency of the transmuting 'significance'.

2 See The Old Drama and the New by William Archer. T. S. Eliot comments interestingly on the book in the essay called 'Four Elizabethan Dramatists' (Selected Essays).

speare's imagery and versification. Two in particulat I will mention. One is Posthumus's description of the battle [V. iii, lines 14 to 51], It is a remarkable piece of vigorous dramatic felicity. The precisely right tone, a blend of breathless excitement, the professional soldier's dryness, and contempt (towards the Lord addressed), is perfectly got. There are some fine examples 01 Shakespearean compression and ellipsis; and here, surely, is strength in imagery:

and now our cowards, Like fragments in hard voyages, became The life of the need: having found the back-door open Of the unguarded hearts, heavens, how they wound!

In 'like fragments in hard voyages' and the 'back-door' we have, in imagery, the business-like and intense matter-of-factness, at once contemptuous and, in its ironical dryness, expressive both of professional habit and of controlled excitement, that gives the speech its highly specific and dramatically appropriate tone. The other passage is Posthumus's prison speech in the next scene [V, iv, 3-29], so different in tone and movement:

Most welcome, bondage! for thou art a way,

I think, to liberty: yet am I better

Than one that's sick of the gout; since he had rather

Groan so in perpetuity than be cured

By the sure physician, death, who is the key

To unbar these locks.

This doesn't belong to 'romantic comedy', nor does the dialogue with the gaoler at the end of the scene. And here, and in the many vigorously realized passages, we have the excuse for the attempt, in spite of'the inequalities, the incongruities, the discontinuity, the sense of different planes', to vindicate the play (for that, paradoxically, is Fr. Stephenson's aim as well as Tinkler's) in terms of a profound significance. But surely there should be no difficulty in recognizing that, wrestling with a job undertaken in the course or his exigent profession, Shakespeare might, while failing to find in his material a unifying significance such as might organize it into a profound work of art, still show from place to pkce, when prompted and incited congenially, his characteristic realizing genius ?

Cymbeline, then, is not like The Winter's Tale a masterpiece. The Tempest is by more general agreement a masterpiece than The Winter's Tale, but it is a very different kind of thing (to complete briefly die hint of comparison I threw out above). Lytton Strachey in his essay on * Shakespeare's Final Period * (see Books and Characters), gives us an opening: ' There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare's prime are present here in still greater degree. In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis/ Lytton Strachey's 'unreality', strongly derogatory in intention, has to be understood, of course, in relation to the Bradley-Archer assumptions of his approach. Actually, it seems to me that The Tempest differs from The Winter's Tale in being much closer to the 'reality' we commonly expect of the novelist. The 'unreality', instead of penetrating and transmuting everything as in The Winter's Tale, is in The Tempest confined to Prospero's imagery and its agents. Prospero himself, the Neapolitan and Milanese nobility and gentry, Stephano and Trinculo, the ship's crew—all these belong as much to the 'reality' of the realistic novelist as the play of Othello does. Prospero manages the wreck, lands the parties and directs their footsteps about the island to the final convergence, but they strike us, in their behaviour and conversation, as people of the ordinary everyday world. The courtiers are Elizabethan quality, and Gonzalo's attempt to distract the king and raise the tone of the conversation with a piece of advanced thought from Montaigne is all in keeping. Even Caliban (though sired by the devil on a witch) leads the modern commentator, quite appropriately, to discuss Shakespeare's interest in the world of new discovery and in the impact of civilization on the native.

The 'unreality' functions in Ariel and in the power (as it were a daydream actualized) that enables Prospero to stage the scene of repentance and restitution. But the nature of this power as a licence of imagination stands proclaimed in the essential symbolism of the play; and not only does Prospero finally renounce magic, break his staff and drown his book, but the daydream has never been allowed to falsify human and moral realities. That Alonso should, without the assistance of magic, suffer pangs of conscience is not in the least incredible; on the other hand, we note that the sinister

pair, Sebastian and Antonio, remain wiiat they were. They maybe fairly set over against Ferdinand and Miranda, and they represent a potent element in that world to which the lovers are returning, and in which, unprotected by magic, they are to spend their lives,

O brave new world, That has such people in't!

—that is both unironical and ironical. Shakespeare's power to present acceptably and movingly the unironical vision (for us given in Miranda and Ferdinand) goes with his power to contemplate the irony at the same time.

Rightly, then, is The Tempest accounted a masterpiece; but I am not sure that it deserves the relative valuation it commonly enjoys. The judgment that The Winter's Tale is a masterpiece would not, I think, in general be as readily concurred in; and it is true that The Tempest has nothing in it to trouble in the same way the reader who finds difficulty in arriving at an unqualified acceptance of the statue business as part of a total unromantic response. But the perfection (or something like it) of The Tempest is achieved within limits much narrower than those of The Winters Tale ; and the achievement by which, in The Tempest, the time-gap of The Winter's Tale is eliminated ought not to be allowed to count improperly in the comparative valuation. With the absence of the time-gap goes also an absence of that depth and richness of significance given, in The Winter's Tale, by the concrete presence of time in its rhythmic processes, and by the association of human growth, decay and rebirth with the vital rhythms of nature at large. The range, the depth, the effect that I have described as both generalizing and intensifying, for which The Winter's Tale is remarkable, are missing in The Tempest. Not that while reading The Tempest we are at all inclined to judge that this inspired poetry and this consummate art reveal any falling-off in the poet's creative vigour; yet we may perhaps associate the mood expressed in Prosperous farewell to his art and in the 'insubstantial pageant* speech (the mood in which Shakespeare can in the symbolic working of the drama itself so consciously separate his art from the life it arranges and presents—life that is "such stuff as dreams are made on*)—perhaps we may associate this mood with

an absence of that effect as of the sap rising from the root which The Winter's Tale gives us. No doubt it might as truly be said of Florizel and Perdita as it has been of Ferdinand and Miranda, that they are lovers seen by one who is himself beyond the age of love, but Florizel and Perdita are not merely two individual lovers; they are organic elements in the poetry and symbolism of the pastoral scene, and the pastoral scene is an organic part of the whole play.

TWO or three years back, or at any time in the Marxizing decade, having been invited to discourse on * Literature and Society', I should have known what was expected of me—and what to expect. I should have been expected to discuss, or to give opportunities for discussing, the duty of the writer to identify himself with the working-class, the duty of the critic to evaluate works of literature in terms of the degree in which they seemed calculated to further (or otherwise) die proper and pre-destined outcome of the class-struggle, and the duty of the literary historian to explain literary history as the reflection of changing economic and material realities (the third adjective, 'social', which I almost ^added here, would be otiose)* I should have been braced for such challenges as the proposition that D. H. Lawrence, though he

was unquestionably aware of and tried to describe the outside forces that were undermining the bourgeois society into which he made his way... saw those forces from a bourgeois viewpoint, as destroyers to be combated. Consequently he misrepresented reality. 2

What was wrong with his work was that he 'shared the life of a social class which has passed its prime'.

I assume that the expectation I should have had to address myself to in those not so very remote days isn't entertained at all generally on the present occasion, and I assume it gladly. But that does leave me with a large undirected formula on my hands: 'Literature and Society' might, in fact, seem to be daunting and embarrassing in the wealth of possibilities it covers. However, " certain major interests of my own respond to it quite comfortably and I had no difficulty in concluding that I should be expected to do what, in accordance with those interests, it would suit me to do: that is, to try and define on what grounds and in what ways

1 This is the substance of an address given to the Students' Union of the London School of Economics and Politics.

2 The Mind in Chains, edited by C. Day Lewis.

the study of literature—literature as it concerns me, who am avowedly in the first place a literary critic—should, I think, be seen as intimately relevant to what may be presumed to be the major interest of students at the London School of Economics. For if the Marxist approach to literature seems to me unprofitable, that is not because I think of literature as a matter of isolated works of art, belonging to a realm of pure literary values (whatever they might be); works regarding the production of which it is enough to say that individuals of specific creative gifts were born and created them. No one interested in literature who began to read and think immediately after the 1914 war—at a time, that is, co-incident with the early critical work of T, S. Eliot—can fail to have taken stock, for conscious rejection, of the