Studying the Successful

I shall almost always take the poems that I admire, and write with pleasure about their merits; you might say that, from the scientific point of view, this is a self-indulgence, and that as much is to be learnt from saying why bad poems are bad. This would be true if the field was of a known size; if you knew the ways in which a poem might be good, there would be a chance of seeing why it had failed. But, in fact, you must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good; if it fails you cannot know its object; and it would be trivial to explain why it had failed at something it had not been trying to achieve. Of course, it may succeed in something that you understand and hate, and you may then explain your hatred; but all you can explain about the poem is its success. And even then, you can only have understood the poem by a stirring of the imagination, by something like an enjoyment of it from which you afterwards revolt in your own mind. It is more self-centred, therefore, and so less reliable, to write about the poems you have thought bad than about the poems you have thought good.

Empson, (introducing) Seven Types of Ambiguity

‘There are two kinds of writings’

There are two kinds of writings. The first kind comprises what are properly called the arts; the second, those writings which are the appendages of the arts. The arts are included in philosophy: they have, that is, some definitive and established part of philosophy for their subject matter — as do grammar, dialectic and others of this sort. The appendages of the arts, however, are only tangential to philosophy. What they treat is some extra-philosophical matter. Occasionally, it is true, they touch in a scattered and confused fashion upon some topics lifted out of the arts, or, if their narrative presentation is simple, they prepare the way for philosophy. Of this sort are all the songs of the poets — tragedies, comedies, satires, heroic verse and lyric, iambics, certain didactic poems, fables and histories, and also the writings of those fellows whom today we commonly call ‘philosophers’ and who are always taking some small matter and dragging it out through long verbal detours, obscuring a simple meaning in confused discourses — who, lumping even dissimilar things together, make, as it were, a single ‘picture’ from a multitude of ‘colors’ and forms. Keep in mind the two things I have distinguished for you — the arts and the appendages of the arts.

Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon (translated by Jerome Taylor)

‘portatif and persaunt as the point of a nedle’

For Truthe telleth that love is triacle of hevene:
May no synne be on hym seene that that spice useth.
And alle his werkes he wroughte with love as hym liste,
And lered it Moyses for the leveste thyng and moost lik to hevene,
And also the plante of pees, moost precious of vertues:
For hevene myghte nat holden it, so was it hevy of hymself,
Til it hadde of the erthe eten his fille.
And whan it hadde of this fold flessh and blood taken,
Was nevere leef upon lynde lighter therafter,
And portatif and persaunt as the point of a nedle,
That myghte noon armure it lette ne none heighe walles.

William Langland, Piers Plowman (from Schmidt’s Everyman edition of the B-Text; glosses are almost entirely Schmidt’s)

‘The more morality is rational, the further removed it is from the sacred’

Morality is a product of those societies in which the sacred fades out and tends to disappear. It is a weak substitute for that which had been radical, ultimate, and established beyond dispute.  The more morality is rational, the further removed it is from the sacred, and the weaker it is. Anyone participating in the order of the sacred feels so completely righteous that he can have no remorse. If, on the other hand, he disobeys, it isn’t a question of the ‘evil’ he may have done, of sin, of remorse. It is, rather, a question of being struck down by the group. Once he has put himself in opposition to the sacred order, he cannot survive. It isn’t just a matter of the group’s having been contaminated by the impure, or infiltrated by the forces of evil. It is, rather, that the order which man had established for himself must be total if it is to be an order.

Jacques Ellul, The New Demons (translated by C. Edward Hopkin)

Hindsight

At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

Winston Churchill, speech in the Commons after the death of Neville Chamberlain

Bradshaw’s Practice

There some weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted; others, inspired by Heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir William to his face a damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously, life itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung over the mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite twelve thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has given no such bounty. He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And perhaps, after all, there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own? But there they were mistaken. Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed, he had to support him police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relations of his victims.

But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did not like that man.

Woolf describing Sir William Bradshaw’s medical practice in Mrs Dalloway

‘the impermeability of English society’

[I]n this respect the [democratic] American self can be taken to be a microcosm of American society, which has notably lacked the solidity and intractability of English society; it is little likely to be felt by its members as being palpably  there. The testimony on this score is one of the classic elements of nineteenth-century American cultural history. James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Henry James, all in one way or another said that American society was, in James’s phrase, ‘thinly composed’, lacking the thick, coarse actuality which the novelist, as he existed in their day, needed for the practice of his craft. It did not offer him the palpable material, the stuff, out of which novels were made. What came as a revelation to American visitors to England was exactly the impermeability of English society, the solidness of the composition, the thick, indubitable thereness which enforced upon its members a sort of primary sincerity—the free acknowledgement that in one respect, at least, they were not free, that their existences were bound by their society, determined by its peculiarities. About their being social rather than transcendent beings the English told the truth to themselves and the world.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

‘For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle’

For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle; it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive, all determining transcendental base; it can sometimes accelerate the rhythm of life, can carry something that was hidden or neglected to a utopian end which was always immanent within it, but it can never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth, the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically given. Any attempt at a properly utopian epic must fail because it is bound, subjectively or objectively, to transcend the empirical and spill over into the lyrical or dramatic; and such overlapping can never be fruitful in the epic.

There have been times, perhaps—certain fairy-tales still retain fragments of these lost worlds—when what today can only be reached through a utopian view was really present to the visionary eye; epic poets in those times did not have to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendent reality as the only existing one, they could be simple narrators of events, just as the Assyrians who drew winged beasts doubtless regarded themselves, and rightly, as naturalists. Already in Homer’s time, however, the transcendent was inextricably interwoven with earthly existence, and Homer is inimitable precisely because, in him, this becoming-immanent was so completely successful.

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature

‘there is no great quarrel about the epic’

In the disputable and usually futile task of classifying the forms of poetry there is no great quarrel about the epic. An epic poem is by common consent a narrative of some length and deals with events which have a certain grandeur and importance and come from a life of action, especially of violent action such as war. It gives a special pleasure because its events and persons enhance our belief in the worth of human achievement and in the dignity and nobility of man.

C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton

‘There can be no comic hero’

The Greeks were under no illusion about the actuality of the hero. Aristotle makes this plain in his comparison of tragedy and comedy: it is only in the genre of tragedy that the hero exists, for tragedy shows men as better than they really are, which is to say, nobler, more impressive, more dignified. The whole import of tragedy depends upon the ‘elevation’ of the hero, to which every external element of the drama—language, gesture, costume—must contribute. There can be no comic hero, for comedy shows men as worse than they really are, which is to say more ignoble, less impressive, less dignified. We are puzzled to know, when we meet the famous definitions for the first time, why this philosopher, who thought of so much, never thought of a literary genre which would show men as they really are, neither better nor worse.

It is sometimes supposed that the comic is a response to the tragic, that in its essence it is an adverse comment on the heroic. But it is just as possible to say that the germ of the heroic idea is to be found in the comic itself, that at the moment at which men think of themselves as funny they have conceived of the idea of their dignity. As soon as they joke about their natural functions, about the absurdity of defecation and copulation and the oddness of the shapes their bodies grow into, they are on the way to contriving to appear nobler than they really are. How else do men recognise their ignobility than by imagining their potential nobility?—a state of being which in time will come to burden and bore them and arouse their mockery.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity