The Thinking Corner

Literary Leaps

I have been busy the last half hour at the game of turning the pages of a bookseller's catalogue and letting the titles serve my mind as leaping-boards. Some have landed me in memories, others in speculations. Here is an announcement that Dostoievsky is being republished in a uniform edition. The first two novels brought out are Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazhov. How well I remember reading the former! Night after night I read it, just before dropping asleep, and its picture of a murderer's mind was so overwhelmingly vivid that I would get a most uneasy sensation of being myself the culprit. As a rule, the villain of a story is not the chief character: in Crime and Punishment the villain is the hero and dominates the story so that the reader's conscious-ness is helpless under his spell. The reader always tends to get identified with the hero of a tale - the most thrilling enjoyment of a book derives from this strange temporary blending of characters. And when a genius of almost occult comprehension and intensity like Feodor Dostoievsky depicts a villain-hero, the result is almost "possession" in the case of the reader. Yes, what a genius! - I have seldom come across a more gripping narrative. The sense of form on the whole is not perfect, but the semi-chaos which Dostoievsky creates is so full of astounding harmonies of terribly poignant, dreadfully pathetic, darkly splendid soul-subtleties that one eagerly excuses all shortcomings, all absence of French finish. To be able to manifest a conception which is such a beautiful monster is a miracle far beyond the patient rounding-off practised by less inspired, less elementally creative spirits.

I went through Tolstoy's Anna Karenina immediately after Dostoievsky: Tolstoy is indeed a master in his own field, even a fine hand at arousing the moods of pity and terror, but how weak and watery seemed the sorrowful vicissitudes and emotional crises which he described, in comparison to the

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ghastly grandeur of Dostoievsky's tale of murder, harlotry and drunkenness! Crime and Punishment is no mere shocker; nor is it just a Zolaesque compilation of ugly details - it is an interfusion of the squalor and distortion of physical poverty with the power and mystery and nameless horror of some occult region. But across all this night there wanders a beauty that can nearly be named mystical: just as the oppressive phantasmagoria of Dostoievsky's epileptic genius is unearthly, so too the relieving features are tense with a light surpassing that of earth's loveliness. There are incidents in the book which simply take your breath away with their sudden glow of significance. I say "sudden" because it is out of a perspective of gloom and perversity and anguish of lost souls that by a peculiar pressure on extreme points he draws his momentary apocalypses.

Middleton Murry thinks the Brothers Karamazhov is Dostoievsky's masterpiece. I am going to take a plunge into it and set right the lacuna that has long been glaring in my education. But I have a premonition that, no matter how much wider its canvas or more explicit its mystical element, it will not be so quintessential a surprise in making us ask again and again: "What fire is here whose heat is hell but whose light heaven?"

Among other continental authors listed in my catalogue I am held a while by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. There is an essay by Olive Gordon: Rilke's Symbolism. Rilke is not altogether unknown to me, though I can't say I speak on him with authority. I have dipped into his work, but as he was a German I could only contact him through a translation just like Dostoievsky. The translation had much force and subtlety, yet the sheer poetic revelation was often lacking save in scattered moments of pregnant imagery. Hence his meaning seemed to me a little strained on the whole as if he were not quite in possession of his own depths: the words pursued and caught at the vision, getting intuitively lit up here and there without serving continuously as faithful mirrors of the mystical. I doubt whether the term mystical is applicable: it

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would be better to say Rilke has the sense of a Mystery and an Ideality behind phenomena in general, and in particular behind those of his own artistic inspiration. In his earlier work he strives to express that sense through vaguely profound moods which pass after shadowing forth a strange moving half-realised picture in the midst of many interesting ideas. In his later compositions he projects on several occasions a striking symbol and displays an admirable grip on its contours - a moulded strength is evident then and the poetry is finer than elsewhere: only, it might have been finer still if that grip had been less and the symbol had been felt emerging by its own intensity. Rilke has a keen brooding eye, a many-sided, dextrous, penetrating mind, not lucidly so in the French way in spite of his long association with France, but with a denser and more packed Teutonic movement. Behind the eye and the mind are a passionate inspired idealism and a perception of hidden realities. He lived with a strong and poignant subjectivity which sought ever to carve itself out and fill objective forms, almost to get identified with them, its self-disclosure being solely through their line and colour and attitude. He was aware of an evolving process in himself, quickening his daily experience to a poetic elan towards heights and depths by a powerfully focussed looking at and into concrete things: this concentration on "things" was one of the art-secrets he derived from Rodin the sculptor. I don't believe Rilke rose to the authentic spiritual or plunged to the pure mystical. All the same, he must be a fascinating and vista-opening if somewhat difficult and mazy poet in the original because of the glowing sensitiveness which tried in him to feel its way inward through a fusion of natural sight and symbolic suggestion. Even in an English rendering he is worth taking in one's cultural stride.

Of course I am writing all this rather off-hand, with no relevant quotations to bear me out. Possibly I have missed the precise nature of Rilke's genius. So don't get too impressed with my impression - he may have more to lay bare to

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others than to me on the mystical and spiritual level, or less on the idealistic and introspective.

Funnily, the only complete quotation from Rilke I can drag out of my mind is just a curiosity, bringing in an unusual simile which many perhaps would consider disgusting in the context where it occurs. Lament for Jonathan is a delicately emotional expression of David's famous grief, but the aching softness of the mood is suddenly broken by the words:

For here and there in my most timid places

Have you been plucked out from me like the hair

That grows inside the arm-pits.

In a way, the simile is not out of tune with the atmosphere of sensitive intimacy pervading the poem. Yet some failure of taste is perceived and though one is struck by the ingenuity one is unsure about the poetic appeal. It is not that a simile should be drawn from great things in order to be adequate to a great situation: even the odd and the grotesque can be suitable, but a true poetic touch has to come through them. Otherwise we have fancy instead of imagination - a difference which, I hope, is made clear by Leslie Mitchell's book advertised in my catalogue, The Poet's Mind.

In my opinion, what is lacking in fancy and brimful in imagination is feeling and seriousness and harmonious vision. The expression of fancy is from the clever mind that constructs and connects: there is not enough heart-stir, sense of importance and movement of integration. A poetry which is a cross-breed between fancy and imagination is a type much indulged in by the so-called metaphysical school of the seventeenth century in England - a type of inspired "conceit", in which highly incongruous elements stand together and are forced into mutual service without perfect integration but with sufficient feeling and seriousness behind the ingenuity. I remember Crashaw writing somewhere about Christ on the Cross, that the purple in which he was clothed

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came from the wardrobe opened in his side. Christ, according to the Bible, was wounded by a spear in the ribs by one of the Roman soldiers and blood flowed out and covered him. Crashaw's version of this is very fanciful, with a good deal of incongruousness, yet somehow he pulls the effect through and his manner and rhythm have an intensity and lift and vision-grip that affine fancy to imagination. Absolute poetry is not there; still, the poetic quality is undeniable. The absolute kind has no discord of central conception: it can be full of surprises, the most unfamiliar similes and metaphors may be at play, yet the vision is harmoniously integrated at the core. The elders sitting and talking on the battlements of Troy Homer compares to grasshoppers because of their thin legs and screechy voices. Though one receives a sort of shock, it is a shock wholly assimilable into the poetic passion of the narrative; it is not the intrusion of the clever mind endeavouring to produce a startling effect; rather is it a leap of the imagination itself to a certain extremism. Neither Crashaw nor Homer are plumbing any notable depth in the instances I have cited, but Homer easily achieves poetry that is perfect of the surface-kind, Crashaw in spite of his rich point is touch-and-go, precariously poised on the edge of perfection.

Inspired "conceit" has mostly that slight falling short of the absolute. Even Donne who has an extraordinary gift for aligning disparate elements does not poetically go home with utter finality when he is "conceited". His ideas and his emotions are very valuable, they at once arrest us by their depth: what keeps them from transforming themselves into absolute poetry is a certain over-fantasy of wit. Different, however, from Homer's unstrained novelty in the grasshopper-image and also from Donne's or Crashaw's self-conscious out-of-the-wayness is the wit of lyricism like Lovelace's in his celebrated farewell to his mistress:

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,

That from the nunnery

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Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

To wars and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,

The first foe in the field,

And with a larger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more.

It is impossible not to notice how clever the whole conception and the individual figures are. Lovelace has pictured fighting as the search for a new mistress, making him unfaithful to his sweetheart, and in contrasting the two loves he has discovered points which by a paradox turn them one, his duty to his king and country proving in him precisely that nobleness which alone would render his attachment to his beloved so worthy of the beloved's beautiful self. Then look at that image of a nunnery - an image quite incongruous if taken in a literal sense, for a nunnery is the very place where love between man and woman cannot happen; but the vision impinges on us as right because of certain words used -"chaste breast", "quiet mind" - and because of the hell-let-loose of war which stands opposed to the peacetime pursuits of love, the violences of Mars which make the excitements of Eros seem in comparison an almost conventlike calm occupation. Any metaphysical poet would have envied the many-faceted ingeniousness of this lyric, but what is present in Lovelace is rarely theirs in their ingenious moods. Absolute poetry of a deep enough variety is created here by the fancy getting immersed in and subdued to a heart-stir, a sense of importance and a movement of integration. The clever features do not stick out with a brainy brilliance: they are caught into the inner being's light and harmony, they become an aristocracy of wit, a sort of born paradoxicality and natural curiousness instead of the thrusting parvenu sort

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that belongs to the outer being. Of course, the conceits of the metaphysicals are not complete upstarts: they often show blue blood, but the blue is not sheer.

Something upstart also spoils a deal of Elizabethan poetry, as it does in another fashion much of modernist verse. Together with a certain explosiveness and want of control, it makes Chapman's translation of the Iliad not only inadequate Homer but even inadequate first-class inspiration of a non-Homeric species. I expect James Lloyd's The Poetry and Philosophy of the Iliad, which my catalogue announces as soon-to-be-published, will distinguish perfectly balanced strength from jerky boldness as well as imaginative surprise from fanciful extravagance. I expect too that the author will discuss how imaginative philosophy differs from intellectual and that he will touch on the diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work. Neither does Homer pause at scattered points to impress on us directly his vision of broad basic issues. Nor does he consciously give us — like the above-mentioned poets when they are not imaginatively arguing in a continuity or by fits and starts - vision-masses concretising various aspects of his attitude towards ultimate reality. Homer has many wise generalisations on conduct, uttered by the numerous characters in his epic, but they do not constitute an explicitly consistent outlook on the nature of the world. What can be called the philosophy of the Iliad, the Homeric position vis-a-vis broad basic issues, is not anything particular we can put our finger on in the poem: it is a significant aroma sent forth by the whole, a suggestive atmosphere which we feel when the poem is absorbed in toto. When I try to render explicit what is implicit in the Iliad, I find three main elements interplaying in its philosophy. First, a tragic sense of all

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things on the earth - love crumbling into dust, beauty losing its proud radiance, laughter pierced through at the end of each moment. Then there is the courage that faces all with a gusto and a glow of warrior energy wearing its wounds like a garland and feeling at the heart of things a burning red even when all is grey and ashen. The final element is an admiring awe confronting the unknown power that strikes and breaks us down and brings our purposes to nought: a perception that this power is an Immensity which transcends the standards of moral judgment we apply to whatever frustrates us, a faith that a grandeur, a mighty loveliness is before us, whose working we cannot condemn even while again and again with twisted mouths of suffering we ask why the light of day should fall like a whip across our bodies... Perhaps I have put in too romantic a language the vision and attitude of a classical poet, but the vital substance of them is, I think, not misrepresented.

It would be interesting to observe how far they recur in other epics. C. M. Bowra's study, From Virgil to Milton, might be helpful. The table of contents reproduced in my catalogue from his book prompts me to - but no! I won't say to what it prompts me. Enough of these leaps: I must draw myself back from making out of them a round-the-world tour.

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