Works of Art Must Be Judged by Tod~y's Critic in Relation to Other Times as Well as to Our Own

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC*

By F. O. MATTHIEssEN

y deliberately grave title is in the instigated, if one may use such a violent tradition from Matthew Arnold, word as revolution in the field of the arts, M.. my first critical enthusiasm as an where all victories fortunately are blood­ undergraduate thirty years ago. But at that less, and where what was overthrown re­ very time a new critical movement was ris­ mains undestroyed and capable of being ing, the critical movement in which we are rediscovered at the next turn of the wheel living today. T. S. Eliot's first important es­ of taste. When Eliot was growing up, the say, Tradition and the Indi'Uidual Talent, tastes and standards of Arnold were still was written in 1917, when he was twenty­ prevailing; and Eliot found himself wholly nine; and 1. A. Richards' first independent dissatisfied with Arnold's preoccupation and most influential book, The Principles of with the spirit of poetry rather than with Literary Criticism, came out in 1924, when its form. The form of Eliot's own first he was in his early thirties. The talents and poems was deceptively radical, since he was principles of those two then young men have really rejecting the easily flowing forms been the most pervasive forces upon the of the romantics and the Elizabethans for criticism of the past quarter-century. the more intricately weighted forms of the We know now what a revolution they symbolists and the metaphysicals. When Richards, as a psychologist who Throughout his whole career FllANCIS OTro MAT­ THIESSEN has been a teacher and critic, and his repu­ believed in the basic importance of the tation in his chosen field led to his being selected to words with which men try to fathom their give the annual Hopwood Lecture on May z6, 1949. meanings, began to read Eliot's poems, he The accompanying article is his address to the student writers on that occasion. Professor Matthiessen was encountered the kind of language that graduated from Yale University in 19Z3, and after proved most compelling to readers just two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he took up after the First World War. The immense graduate studies at Harvard, receivine- his doctorate in 19Z7. Two years' teaching at Yale were followed loosening of speech that had accompanied by a returl'l to Harvard, where he is now Professor of the rapid expansions in mass education and History and Literature. The liberal views evidenced in mass communication had reached the point his article are also indicated by his membership on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties where, if the artist was again to communi­ Union and his activity in the Harvard Teachers Union. cate the richness and denseness of real He iJ also a senior fellow of the Kenyon School of Eng­ experience, he must use a language that lish. Professor Matthiessen has written a number of books, including critical essays on T. S. Eliot, Emerson, compelled the reader to slow down, to be Whitman, Russell Cheney, and several on Henry James. concerned once more with the trip rather His most recent book is entitled From th~ Hearl of than with the arrival. As the young English Europe, a travel journal of the six months he spent abroad, mainly at Salzburg and Prague, in 1947. He critic T. E. Hulme had been arguing, is now editing the Oxford Book of Amer;can Verse and writing a critical biography of Theodore Dreiser for * Copyright 1949 Board of Regents of the Univer­ the new "American Men of Letters Series." sity of Michigan. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW before he was killed in battle in 1915, poetry As a result both teachers and students are must always endeavor thus "to arrest you more capable of close analysis and lively ... to make you continuously see a physical appreciation than they were a generation thing, to prevent you gliding through an ago. abstract process." But by now we have reached the stage What resulted from the joint influence where revolt has begotten its own set of of Eliot and Richards was a criticism that conventions, to use the terms of one of aimed to give the closest possible attention Harvard's great former teachers, John to the text at hand, to both the structure Livingston Lowes. As we watch our own and texture of the language. You are all generation producing whole anthologies of familiar with the names of its practitioners criticism devoted to single contemporary who, if we confine ourselves to America authors and more and more detailed books alone, have already produced a more seri­ of criticism of criticism, we should realize ous and exacting body of work than we that we have come to the unnatural point had previously witnessed in this country. where textual analysis seems to be an end To be sure, Richards' most gifted follower in itself. The so-called little magazines was one of his own students at Cambridge, have been essential and valiant outposts England. William Empson, in his preco­ of revolt in our time when the magazines cious Seven Types of Ambiguity (1929), of wide circulation, in decline from their begun when he was still an undergraduate, standards in the nineteenth century, have pushed to its subtle extreme Richards' kind abandoned serious discussion of literature of linguistic analysis. Empson in turn has almost entirely. had a particular vogue here among the But the little magazines seem now to be critics whom we now associate with the giving rise to the conventions and vocabu­ newly founded Kenyon School of Criticism, lary of a new scholasticism and to be not most notably with John Crowe Ransom, always distinguishable from the philologi­ Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. cal journals which they abhor. The names Others whose names are linked with that of the authors may be modern, but the school, Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, smell is old. The trouble is that the terms Allen Tate, Austin Warren, and Yvor of the new criticism, its devices and strate­ Winters, however divergent their methods gies and semantic exercises, can become as and emphases, reveal throughout their pedantic as any other set of terms if they work how they have had to reckon with are not handled as the means to fresh dis­ Eliot and Richards, whether in concord or coveries but as counters in a stale game. belligerence. In too many recent articles literature seems to be regarded merely as a puzzle to be HE EFFECT of this new movement solved. T upon the study of literature in our This is not to underestimate the great universities has been by now considerable. and continuing service performed by the Although opposed by both the old guards few quarterlies devoted to criticism, or by of philologists and literary historians, most those even littler magazines that often last of the critics I have mentioned now hold only long enough to introduce one or two academic appointments, which mayor may new talents in poetry or fiction. The im­ not have been good for their work. But portant experimental work of our time has their work has thereby become instrumental again and again been able to secure its first in the revolt against concentrating exclu­ publication only through their pages. This sively on the past, and against concentrating is one of the consequences of what on literary history instead of on literature. F. R. Leavis, the editor of Scrutiny, has THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC called the split between "mass civilization" between past and present: that the past is and "minority culture." But to recognize not what is dead, but what is already living; that phenomenon in our democracy should and that the present is continually modify­ only be to combat it. ing the past, as the past conditions the There is potentially a much greater audi­ present. If one avails himself of the full ence in America for the art of literature resources latent in that preception, one is than the blurb-writers, who often pass for aware that it is not possible to be a good reviewers in the Sunday supplements, would critic of Goethe today without knowing seem to suspect. The effectiveness of the Mann, or of Stendhal or Balzac without critics in the little magazines in having by knowing Proust, or of Donne or Dryden now prepared a wider public for, say, Joyce without knowing Eliot. or Kafka or Eliot, amply testifies to that. The converse is equally true, if less But the dilemma for the serious critic in necessary to be argued in the academy. But our dangerously split society is that, feeling once outside, particularly in the rapid and isolated, he will become serious in the rootless life of our cities, the tendency wrong sense, aloof and finally taking an even for practitioners in the arts is to be inverted superiority in his isolation. At immersed wholly in the immediate. This is that point criticism becomes a kind of not what James foresaw, since he took for closed garden. granted the constant meeting-point between what was already known and what was still y VIEWS are based on the conviction to be known. But today we can take no M that the land beyond the garden's tradition for granted, we must keep repos­ walls is more fertile, and that the responsi­ sessing the past for ourselves if we are not bilities of the critic lie in making renewed to lose it altogether. The value in this contact with that soil. William James used urgency is that what we manage to retain to insist that the first duty of any thinker will really belong to us, and not on au­ is to know as much as possible about life in thority at second hand. The proper balance, his own time. Such an exhortation may seem even for the critic who considers his field too general to be of much use, but it can be to be the present, is to bring to the elucida­ grasped more concretely if we envisage the tion of that field as much of the art of the particular responsibilities of the critic in a past as he can command. whole series of awarenesses. These aware­ nesses may encompass some of the breadth RECENTLY dead critic, Paul Rosenfeld, and comprehensiveness which James as­ A was a heartening example of this bal­ sumed to be the thinker's goal, and some of ance. Prolonging in this country the rich the feeling of being drenched with actual cultural life of his German-Jewish fore­ life, which he believed to be the thinker's bears, he moved naturally among the arts, best reward. Much of the ground that we and it would never have occurred to him will traverse was also implied to be within that a critic of contemporary music would the critic's scope by the early work of Eliot try to speak without having all the great and Richards, though some of it has been composers of the past at his finger tips. But lost sight of by their followers. he regarded the work of the present, es­ The first awareness for the critic should pecially in America, as his particular prov­ be of the works of art of our own time. ince, and often said that if OUr younger This applies even if he is not primarily a composers were to have a sense of possess­ critic of modern literature. One of Eliot's ing any audience, someone must make it observations which has proved most salu­ his function to listen to them all. In com­ tary is that of the inescapable interplay plete modesty and selflessness he took that 286 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW task upon himself. As his friends knew, fads don't often outrun facts. But as one Paul Rosenfeld gave himself away to his instance of valuable cross-fertilization be­ generation, a very unusual act in our fierce­ tween fields there is cultural anthropology. ly competitive world, where even our in­ Utilizing the disciplines of history and soci­ tellectual life seems so often to become ology, it has proved a particularly stimulat­ poisoned by the habits of our business ing ally to the study of literature in a civilization. period when literature itself, in the hands I have cited Rosenfeld because his gen­ of Joyce and Mann, has been rediscovering erous openness to all the arts and his de­ the vitality of primitive myth. Through our voted impressions of what he found now renewed awareness of folk patterns we now seem so foreign to the grimly thin-lipped realize that the fertility rites which solem­ disciples of a more rigorous analysis. In­ nize the death and rebirth of the year are deed, one of them, writing currently in equally germane to our understanding of The Hudson Re'View, has declared that the The Waste Land or The Winter's Tale or recent volume of tribute by Rosenfeld's The Peace of Aristophanes or the Bacchae contemporaries from the twenties and of Euripides. thirties praised him for a "thoroughly de­ graded function." Such total lack of com­ A NOTHER awareness which our split so­ prehension is a devastating illustration of n ciety makes it hard for us to keep what Auden meant by saying that one of in the right proportion is that of the popu­ the worst symptoms of sterility in our lar arts of our technological age. The con­ present culture is that of "intellectuals sequences for all our lives of the mass without love." media of communication become ever more No incapacity could be less fruitful in insistent, so that we must either channel the presence of the arts. Its recent fre­ them to socially valuable ends or be en­ quency may be another unhappy by-product gulfed by them. The first results of our of the sort of specialization that leaves the new discoveries are often as discouraging as student knowing only his own field. Such when Thoreau scorned the transatlantic self-enclosed knowledge may often mean cable on the grounds that the initial news that he really knows nothing at all. At least that would "leak through into the broad, it is hard to conceive of a good critic of lit­ flapping American ear" would be that the erature who does not have an alert curiosity Princess Adelaide had the whooping about other fields and techniques. Anyone cough. understands his own subject and discipline The first results of television would ap­ better if he is aware of some other subject pear to be that it has made conversation and discipline. To what extent this aware­ impossible in one of its few remaining ness should lead to mastery will vary great­ American strongholds, the barroom, and is ly with individual aptitude. It does not debauching the customers with entertain­ seem profitable to insist that any given ment that is a long throwback to the juve­ critic should also be expert in linguistic nile days of the penny arcade. But then theory or mathematical logic or Marx or one recalls how the radio, despite its in­ Freud, but I can hardly think of a critic tolerable deal of soap, has during the past today being indifferent to the access of twenty-five years built up a taste for the power his mind could gain from a close best symphony music among millions of study of one or more of these. listeners who would not otherwise have This does not mean that the misapplica­ ever heard it. The chief art form of our tion of theory from one field to another is age, the moving picture, is the compelling not as big a pitfall as it always was, or that reminder of our immense potentialities THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC and continual corruptions. Even now The most flagrant recent case of national when, in its postwar doldrums, Hollywood importance has nothing to do with the issue seems again to have forgotten that stand­ of communism, and thus furnishes a con­ ardization through mass production is more crete demonstration of how, once official suitable for soup than for art, the great new opinion embarks on the course of stamping Italian films are demonstrating the im­ out dangerous views, every shade of dissent portant access of social truth that the art becomes dangerous. Olivet College, as you of the film can gain by utilizing some of all here know, was founded in the great the solid techniques of the documentary. pioneering period of our education, when I have mentioned these disparate ex­ Americans were expanding the frontiers of i amples of good and bad as a way of en­ their thought as well as of their territory. " forcing my conviction that we in the uni­ Its recent career, particularly in the period . versities cannot afford to turn our backs between two world wars, added a notable I upon them or upon the world from which chapter to our experiments with education I they come. The proper place for the by tutorial work and group discussion. I thinker, as William James conceived it, When members of its faculty of such na- I was at the central point where a battle is tional distinction as a Pulitzer prize win- I being fought. It is impossible for us to take ner for biography and the candidate for I that metaphor with the lightness that he vice-president on the Socialist ticket are I could. Everywhere we turn in these few dismissed, none of us can stand aloof or fateful years since the first atom bomb feel that we are not implicated. r dropped on Hiroshima we seem menaced I by such vast forces that we may well feel F WHAT I have just been saying seems an I that we advance at our peril. But even I unwarranted digression from the re­ I greater peril would threaten us if those sponsibilities of the critic of the arts, I want I whose prime responsibility as critics is to to correct that impression. The series of keep open the life-giving communications awarenesses which I believe the critic must between art and society should waver in possess lead ineluctably from literature to I their obligations to provide ever fresh life, and I do not see how the responsible thought for our own society. intellectual in our time can avoid being In using metaphors of battle here and concerned with politics. It is at this point now, I am not thinking in an academic that my divergence becomes most complete void. Ifwe believe that freedom of thought from the formalists who have followed in and of speech are the distinguishing fea­ the wake of Eliot, as well as from Eliot tures of the culture of a true democracy, himself, whose reverence for the institutions we must realize by what a thin margin they of monarchy and aristocracy seems virtually now survive in this country. Within the meaningless for life in America. past year there have been the most serious I would like to recall the atmosphere of I violations of academic freedom, caused, the early nineteen-thirties, of the first years iranically, by officials who are determined of the last depression, when the critical to prove that the United States is so much pendulum had swung to the opposite pole, ' better than any other country that it is from the formalists to the Marxists. I am . above criticism. We must recognize the full not a Marxist myself but a Christian, and gravity of these casualties of the cold war, I have no desire to repeat the absurdities for they are a product of the very kind of of the moment when literary men, quite blind suppression that their instigators de­ oblivious theretofore of economics, were clare exists only behind what they denounce finding sudden salvation in a dogma that as "the iron curtain." became more rigid the less they had 288 THE QU.-\RTERLY REVIEW assimilated it. But I believe the instinct of in concrete works of art. But a concern with that moment was right, as our greatest re­ economics can surely quicken and enlarge cent cultural historian, Vernon Parrington's the questions that a critic asks about the instinct was right, in insisting upon the pri­ content of any new work of art with which macy of economic factors in society. Most he is faced, about the fullness to which it artists and students of literature remain measures and reveals the forces that have amateurs in the field of economics, but that produced both it and its author. Walt Whit­ does not prevent them from utilizing some man might have said, in Democratic of the basic and elementary truths which Vistas: "Man becomes free, not by real­ economists have made available for our izing himself in opposition to society, but culture. by realizing himself through society." That Emerson held that a principle is an eye sentence was actually written by Christopher to see with, and despite all the excesses and Caudwell, a young English Marxist who exaggerated claims of the Marxists of the was killed fighting for the Loyalists in thirties, I still believe that the principles of Spain. His book Illusion and Reality, pub­ Marxism--so much under fire now--ean lished in 1937, has recently been reissued, have an immense value in helping us to see and is having a renewed vogue now with and comprehend our literature. Marx and younger writers and students. Their enthu­ Engels were revolutionary in many senses siasm for it, I gather, springs from the fact of that word. They were pioneers in grasp­ that Caudwell, despite the sweeping im­ ing the fact that the industrial revolution maturity of many of his judgments, keeps had brought about-and would continue asking the big questions about man in to bring about-revolutionary changes in society that the school of close textual the whole structure of society. By cutting analysis has tended to ignore. through political assumptions to economic I do not mean for a moment to under­ realities, they revolutionized the way in estimate the value of that school. It has which thinking men regarded the modem taught us in particular how to read poetry state. By their rigorous insistence upon the with an alertness and resilience of attention economic foundations underlying any that were in danger of being altogether cultural superstructure, they drove, and lost through the habits set up by an age of still drive, home the fact that unless the quick:: journalism. All I would suggest is problems rising from the economic inequal­ that analysis itself can run to seed unless ities in our own modem industrialized the analyzing mind is also absorbed in a society are better solved, we cannot continue wider context than the text before it. to build democracy. Thus the principles of Marxism remain at the base of much of the ENTION of Caudwell's name has best social and cultural thought of our M brought me to the last of the aware­ century. No educated American can afford nesses that I would urge upon the critic: to be ignorant of them, or to be delinquent that of the wide gap which still exists be­ in realizing that there is much common tween America and Europe. Henry James ground between these principles and any discovered long ago his leading theme in healthily dynamic America. the contrast between American innocence This is not to say that Marxism gives and European experience. Although the what I consider an adequate view of the world that he contemplatea. has been al­ nature of man, or that it or any other tered beyond recognition, that theme is still economic theory can provide a substitute for peculiarly urgent when we are faced with the critic's essential painstaking discipline the difference between a Europe which in the interplay between form and content has undergone fascism and destructive war THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC at first hand and an American which has French writers are now giving to the novels come out of the war richer and more of Faulkner. At a period when the French powerful than ever before. Stephen Spen­ have felt a debilitation in their own tradi­ der has noticed the difference in reading tion, they have turned to the new world Randall Jarrell's book of poems called for an access of vitality. But what has Losses. For the American, as Spender ob­ seemed to them most real in America is not serves, even when the losses are those of our surface of optimism, but the terrible our own fliers, they are something that underlying violence that has possessed the happens far away on distant continents, imaginations of nearly all our naturalistic they are not yet immediately overhead and novelists. It may seem a strange paradox inescapable. Allen Tate has described the that America, spared so far the worst vio­ kind of false superiority that can be engen­ lences of fascism and war, has imagined dered by such special isolation: violence in a way that impresses men who have experienced the savage brutality of The American people fully armed With assurance policies, righteous and harmed, both. Battle the world of which they're not at all. But as we look back at America through French eyes, we become more conscious of How do Americans become part of that what the preponderantly genteel reviewers greater world? Not by pretending to be for our organs of mass circulation have something they are not, nor by being either done their best to obscure: that Faulkner proud or ashamed of their vast special for­ is not a writer of meaningless sensational­ tune. It does no good, for example, to ism but one who has seized upon basic adopt the vocabulary of the Paris existen­ forces in our history, particularly upon tialists in order to emulate the crisis of the tensions resulting from our initial in­ occupation which we have not passed justice to the Negro. Faulkner may often through. The ironic lines of Tate's "Sonnet overwrite and use some of the cheap devices at Christmas" suggest a more mature way of melodrama, but we should not allow of meeting experience. None of us can es­ these to deflect us from the truth of his cape what we are, but by recognizing our record. If we prefer a more smiling version limitations, and comprehending them, we of ourselves, we are liable to the peculiarly can transcend them by the span of that American dilemma of passing from inno­ knowledge. cence to corruption without ever having Here is the area where breadth of con­ grasped maturity. By which I mean the cern becomes most rewarding for the critic. maturity that comes from the knowledge By perceiving what his country is and is of both good and evil. not in comparison with other countries, he can help contribute,in this time of fierce N PROPOSING an ever widening range of national tensions, to the international un­ I interests for the ideal critic, I have derstanding without which civilization will moved from his central responsibility to not survive. He will also find that he has the text before him out to an awareness come to know his own country better. of some of the world-wide struggles of The art of a country always becomes our age. We must come back to where we richer by being open to stimulus from out­ started, to the critic's primary function. He side, and criticism can find a particularly must judge the work of art as work of art. fertile field in observing the results of that But knowing form and content to be insepa­ interchange. For one fascinating instance, rable, he will recognize his duty to both. how much we can learn about both Europe Judgment of art is unavoidably both an fUld America from the high estimation that aesthetic and a social act, and the critic's THE QUARTERLY REVIEW sense of social responsibility gives him a was so fecund and robust that it would deeper thirst for meaning. compel him to launch forth, in his mid­ This is not a narrow question of the fifties, upon the new territory indicated by wrong right or right left politics. The his explicitly philosophical title. He was locus classicus on this matter was furnished also making his own response to the vast by Marx's judgment of Balzac, who as a disequilibrium that every sensitive mind monarchist and Catholic reactionary sup­ had to feel at the pit of the depression. He ported the very forces to which Marx was had come to recognize that "a violent order most opposed. Yet Marx could perceive is disorder." Or, as Horace Gregory put that, no matter what this novelist's views, it more explicitly, Stevens' new poems were his vision of the deep corruption of French demonstrating that he was not merely a society by money made him the most connoisseur of nuances, but-not unlike searching historian of his time. Engels pro­ Henry James-a shrewdly trained observer ceeded to evolve the principle inherent in of "the decadence that follows upon the this judgment: rapid acquisition of wealth and power." The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, and the father of comedy, Aristophanes, were both very TEVENS' kind of symbolist poetry never clearly poets with a thesis..•• But I believe that S makes the explicit approach. So far the thesis must inhere in the situation and the as he has any political or social views, they action, without being explicitly formulated; and would appear to be conservative. Yet in it is not the poet's duty to supply the reader in "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," the second advance with the future historical solution of the poem in Ideas of Order, he gave to a then conflict he describes. young radical like myself a sudden clarifica­ A poet describes many other things be­ tion of the clouded time in which we are sides conflict, yet without some sense of living. It is this kind of "momentary stay conflict there is no drama to engage us. against confusion," as Robert Frost has The way in which the artist implies social said, that a poem is designed to give, and judgments and entices the critic to meditate that becomes one of the measures of its upon them may be elucidated by a pair of authenticity. examples. Wallace Stevens' second book, In listening to almost any poem by Ste­ Ideas of Order, appeared in 1935. Until vens, the first thing that strikes you is his then he had been known by his richly musi­ past-masterly command of rhetoric, a re­ cal Harmonium, by what he himself had minder that, unlike the poets of the imagist called "the essential gaudiness of poetry." movement, he is still rooted in the older The besetting weakness of criticism, when tradition that le~ds from Bridges back to faced with a new writer, is to define his work Milton. In this poem his rhetoric is formed too narrowly, and then to keep applying into three-lined unrhymed stanzas of a that definition like a label. Stevens had basically iambic pentameter pattern, but been bracketed as "a dandy of poetry," as with many irregular line lengths which an epicurean relisher of "sea surfaces full quicken but do not break that pattern. The of clouds," as one who had found his role conflict that constitutes his theme is be­ in discovering "thirteen ways of looking at tween an age that is dying and a hazardous a blackbird," as identical with his own Cris­ potential new birth. He adumbrates this pin in his relish of "good, fat, guzzly by offsetting a character whom he calls fruit." Hoon, a lover of solitude like Thoreau, He was, to be sure, all these enchanting against the rising masses of men in a still things. But no one seemed to have been formless society. But his controlling sym­ prepared for the fact that his imagination bols are more oblique, they are "waltzes" THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC and "shadows." Music that has become out to us. This sense is never limited to played out seems to its listeners to be our own place or time. What makes the art "empty of shadows," and by a very effec­ of the past still so full of undiscovered tive repetition of the phrase, "Too many wealth is that each age inevitably turns to waltzes have ended," Stevens sets up his the past for what it most wants, and thereby counterpoise for a new, more dynamic tends to remake the past in its own image. music that will again be full of shadows: The cardinal example is Shakespeare. 'What The truth is that there comes a time the nineteenth century saw in Hamlet was When we can mourn no more over mUSIC what Coleridge saw, the figure of a tran­ That is so much motionless sound. scendental philosopher absorbed in himself. What we see is a man inextricably involved There comes a time when the waltz with his own society, as may be suggested Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode in brief by one of the scenes which nine­ Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows. teenth-century producers usually cut. This is the scene in the fourth act where Hamlet, Too many waltzes have ended. And then on his way to England, encounters a Cap­ There's that mountain-minded Hoon, tain from Fortinbras' army. The Captain For whom desire was never that of the waltz, is bitter at what his orders are compelling Who found all form and order in solitude, him to do: For whom the shapes were never the figures Truly to speak, and with no addition, of men. We go to gain a little patch of ground Now, for him, his forms have vanished. That hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it. There is order in neither sea nor sun. The shapes have lost their glistening. The effect of this speech upon Hamlet is There are these sudden mobs of men, to heighten his awareness of the difference between the Captain's situation and his own, These sudden clouds of faces and arms, of how he, Hamlet, has every reason for An immense suppression, freed, action and yet cannot bring himself to act: These voices crying without knowing for what, Examples gross as earth exhort me; Witness this army of such mass and charge Except to be happy, without knowing how, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Imposing forms they' cannot describe, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Requiring order beyond their speech. Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, For which the voices cry, these, too, may be Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire. Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw Too many waltzes-The epic of disbelief When honour's at the stake. How stand I then, Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant. That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see Will unite these figures of men and their shapes The imminent death of twenty thousand men, Will glisten again with motion, the music That for a fantasy and trick of fame Will be motion and full of shadows.* Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

HE extension of our sense of living by • Reprinted from ItUas of Order by Wallace Stevens, T compelling us to contemplate a broader by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1935. world is the chief gift that literature holds 1936 by Wallace Stevens. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, good critic becomes fully equipped for his Which is not tomb enough and continent task by as wide a range of interests as he To hide the slain? can master. The great temptation for the As John Gielgud speaks these lines, we young writer at the present moment is to feel what Shakespeare meant his audience think that because the age is bad, the artist to feel, the necessity for Hamlet's revenge. should escape from it and, as a superior But we also bring to the passage our own being, become a law simply to himself. sense of vast insecurity, our need of being Some memorable romantic poetry has been engaged in the public issues of our menaced written on that assumption, but not the time, and yet the need of making sure that great forms of drama or epic, nor the com­ the seeming issues are the true issues, that parable great forms in prose. However, the we are not betrayed into engagements that critic should freely grant that the artist are merely "th'imposthume of much wealth writes as he must. But for his own work and peace." the critic has to be both involved in his age There is a basic distinction between and detached from it. This double quality bringing everything in your life to what of experiencing our own time to the full you read and reading into a play of the and yet being able to weigh it in relation past issues that are not there. All I am to other times is what the critic must suggesting is the extent to which our strive for, if he is to be able to discern and awareness of ourselves as social beings is demand the works of art that we need most. summoned by the greatest art. That is the The most mature function of the critic lies root of my reason for believing that the finally in that demand.