The Thinking Corner

"That Vulgar Squashy Word"

It was the word "loveliness" recurring in a book of poems by Yeats that drew from a modernist reviewer this sneering phrase. To talk of loveliness seemed a sign of utter "low brow", a display of backboneless gush. We must be cerebral, cynical, psychoanalytic: we must not run after outmoded things like beauty. Ingenuity and scepticism and an itch in the genitals mark the truly advanced mind. Of course, vulgar and squashy things still interest people, but these people are relics of a regrettable past and stand pretty near the bottom in the modernist scale. The developed intelligence is bored by idealism, the search for a divine spirit shining through vestures of decay strikes it as fatuous, romantic reveries are to it a camouflage for the sexual appetite.

I dare say we have had too much misty idealism, and desire of the moth for the star, and delicate dreaming of the beloved. I can appreciate the point of the story in which a young man on a ship's deck at night tells the strange girl next to him, "Look at the elusive dance of moonbeams on the water at the horizon" and the girl shuts him up with "Oh chuck it! My cabin number is 26." I can sympathise with the chap who rebelled against the cloying consolations offered him on his mother's death and blurted out: "Stop all this gabble of my mother passing on and passing over and going before; mother did none of these things: she just died." I can congratulate Douglas Goldring on his mockery of Ethel Manin when once she slipped into writing treacly stuff about beauty in a popular magazine: great artists do not prate in a sissified voice about beauty, they sturdily create it in obedience to some master-urge within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living.

But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither

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facile nor cheap, weak nor watery. They are not avoiding clear and keen thought, they are not letting themselves go soft and wet all over. It is their clearest and keenest thinking that leads them to perceive a perfection behind all phenomenal forms and breaking through these forms to the mind's eye. It is their disciplined and uncorrupted heart that feels the ecstatic touch of a light beyond the least fault or fading. To discover loveliness and transmit the marvel of the discovery - either by directly speaking of it in profound tones or by presenting a concrete revelation of the lovely - this may be called the one and sole function of the artist. All supreme artists have declared loveliness to be a reality and a reality distinct from the vulgar and squashy. Homer did it when he made Helen come to the battlements of Troy and walk before the elders who had just been bitterly bewailing the loss of so much life for a mere woman. As soon as they caught sight of the daughter of Leda, they forgot their lamentation and slapped their thin thighs and cried out that it was surely worth the travail and the carnage. There was here no mawkish sentimentalism nor camouflaged sex: it was an immediate vision of the Perfect irradiating the mortal. And when the early Yeats spoke of seeing

In all poor broken things that live a day

Eternal Beauty wandering on her way

and the later Yeats, in spite of forsaking Celtic wizardries and incantations and taking to athletic hardness of thought and style, could still bring in the old and much-used word "loveliness" with all its half-romantic half-mystic associations, he exhibited no shopgirl sloppiness spreading a pseudo-holy haze around a purely animal hunger. He meant a glorious presence which the deep heart and the subtle mind could not help recognising, no matter what might be said by a clever and blase reviewer with Herr Freud's theory sitting like an incubus on the top of his "high brow".

The modernist critic, objecting to Yeats's "loveliness",

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registered a malady which is peculiar to our age and which may be called deliberate absorption in infra-vitality. Such absorption disdains, on the one hand, all uplook to an Ideal and, on the other, all proportion and harmony. It must be distinguished from the cast of mind created by vitality pure and simple. Vitality is not totally crude - it has a groping nisus towards greater and greater intensity of consciousness and it has an urge towards shapeliness and symmetry, though the symmetry and shapeliness it achieves are not always illuminated but are often "dreadful" like the tiger's as visioned in Blake's poem. What is really crude is infra-vitality -the chaotic impulses and influences that surge from the Freudian "unconscious" below the observable life-manifestations. It is these impulses and influences that the modernist is preoccupied with. Not that he gets wholly submerged in it; he does not give up the intellect - no, he has an intellect sharp enough, but it is not synthetic and constructive; it just analyses and aggregates and it is bent all the time on examining and enjoying the processes of infra-vitality instead of intensifying with an idealistic trend the vague uplook of the life-force and instead of straining towards some super-mind as well as super-life in which all things half-formed, distorted, jumbled here find their fulfilment and archetype, their flawless proportion and concord. It subserves in diverse ways the call of amorphous excitement - not indeed amorphous in the sense that there are no concrete points to fix upon but in the sense that these points are not so organised as to produce any significant and luminous pattern.

Now, amorphous excitement, no matter if accompanied by the analytic intellect, cannot yield art of any value. Art does have overtones and undertones, haloes and penumbras -in short, mysterious and immeasurable suggestions beyond what is actually said. But it is not amorphous: there is a crystallised centre radiating definite meaning, though the lines of clear light may go dimming and fading into infinity. The mysterious and the immeasurable surround something that can be seized as a design of emotion and imagination as

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well as of word and rhythm. And there is also that quality, of being felt as a whole, which the Greeks considered the sine qua non of art. No work of art can be haphazard, inconclusive, issueless. The modernist is not content to break the old metrical form and set up in its Stead a jarring free verse without any basic unity of subtly recurrent rhythm. He wallows in discords of substance on top of discords of form. Nor do these discords consist of sublime or exquisite fragments of emotion and imagination thrown helter-skelter into a jagged heap. The details that make up the chaotic ensemble are themselves mostly caught from the chaos of the infra-vital and come as disgusting grotesques: they drip with obscenities, they exude suggestions of psychological and physical slime. When they are not chunks of shapeless sensation or of vague velleity and disintegrated glimpses piled together, they are bits of misshapen clarity accumulated into an elaborate confusion. Then their main feature is an intentional mingling of bathos and dirt. The grandeur of spirit which distinguishes the older poetry is replaced by an insistent pettiness and oddity, the beauty of vision which past poets sought gives way to a clever delight in the debased or the diseased. Thus "the multidinous seas" of Shakespeare are said to "yap like a Pekinese". "Epileptic larks", extremely unShelleyan, fill the sky. And the nightingales which, from Greek times onward, have inspired singers to their most sensitive apprehension of the strange magic that is mixed with common clay, exhibit to the eye of the modernist poet no mystery beyond their "droppings".

Associated with the turning away from all things "rich and strange" is the purposive fall in quality of language. The term "loveliness" is representative of a whole series of terms which have been known as poetic. The modernist hears in such terms a facile falsetto - a refusal to use language with individual freshness, a slipping into empty decoration. He is not quite wrong from a certain standpoint: his revolt is justified if made against a limited hothouse vocabulary brought forth again and again. Great poets have never let

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themselves be ruled by a finicky elegance. Not only the artificial diction which was in vogue during the eighteenth century in England but also the rainbow-tinted phraseology which had no room for common turns is regarded by the great poet as an enemy of the genuine inspired style. The modernist would be on the right track if he shared this attitude: he, however, runs to the other extreme and would have nothing rainbow-tinted, nothing even touched with any splendour or delicacy. Everything must be to him of the earth earthy if not of the muck mucky and everything must be free of turns suggestive of the sublime or the exquisite. There must be no wingedness in the words, no gleam on them from sun or moon or star. What a silly old ranter Shakespeare seems to him when he makes Antony declare to Cleopatra about their days of love:

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven.

It is not just the mood that is idiotic here for the modernist: the way of speech is so unreal and fantastically high-faluting. How much more truth-gripping and home-reaching both in mood and manner are lines like:

Nero and his sycophants

Are violating their uncles and aunts.

Of course all modernist poetry does not disdain the winged word, nor is its penchant for ordinary locutions invariably a path to the vapid and the passionless or else the feverish and the disjointed. There is an affinity in certain quarters to the style of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals - a complexity of what Eliot calls sensuous thought: the poet feels his curious thought instead of lumping it upon feeling, his idea and his image are one vital intricacy, as in Hume's

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky

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or in Auden's

Soon through the dykes of our content

The crumpling flood will force a rent

or in MacNeice's

The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy

Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

These are instances of a cleverness that is not cold and barren, a speech that reflects an amalgamation of different modes of experiencing and therefore employs common and even colloquial terms as an integral and living part of its message. But here our own time is not rebelling against anything truly poetic: it is merely adapting to itself a style which is no less poetic for not being purple and which has had a creative past not in the seventeenth century alone but also among the Elizabethans and on rare occasions in so solemn and majestic a bard as Milton, not to mention the more lyrical Blake and the more dramatic Browning. This style is perfectly defensible so long as it does not put on exclusive airs and parade as the sole poetic medium or, worse still, the highest. It would scarcely merit castigation as a lifeless sham. Nor does it lie exposed to the charge of shutting out words instinct with the delicate or the splendid: it has no prejudice against the Yeatsian cry. In fact, Yeats himself is a practitioner of it in portions of his later period. The real foe to be fought is the manner of the analytic infra-vitalist who, with his curious mixture of the "highbrow" and the spasmodic "Unconscious", pretends to write poetry while pushing away in experience as well as utterance the very source and stuff of poetic inspiration: loveliness.

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