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So
with my interpretations of words like “forward,” “restless,” “climb,”
etc. Mr. Bush finds me choosing each time the more sinister implication
and avoiding the normal and obvious meanings of the words—as if I were
suggesting that the more sinister implication were the sole or dominant
element rather than a qualifying element. But Mr. Bush himself cannot
always accept the “common and normal sense” of certain words. For example,
“Though Justice against Fate complain/And plead the ancient Rights in
vain” would, if we want to take the common and natural sense of the
words justice and rights make Cromwell guilty of an attack on justice
and an infringement of Charles’s rights. And in the same way, the statement
that it was the execution of Charles “Which first assur’d the forced
Pow’r” would seem a plain statement that Cromwell had acted as a usurper.
But nothing is more boring to the reader than such a point-by-point
refutation. I hope that the interested reader will go back over my essay
in the light of Mr. Bush’s observations. I hope most of all that Mr.
Bush will go back over that essay on the assumption that through a fault
of my writing or his reading, he has misunderstood my interpretation
of Marvell’s poem. I can assure him that I find in the “Ode” genuine
admiration of Cromwell. I wrote: “Cromwell is the truly kingly man who
is not king, whose very virtues conduce to kingly power and almost force
kingly power upon him , . . Cromwell is the Caesar who must refuse the
crown whose glory it is that he is willing to refuse the crown—but who
cannot enjoy the reward and the security that a crown affords.” I suspect
that Mr. Bush and I, are much more nearly in agreement about the genuineness
of the speaker’s admiration for Cromwell than his reading of my essay
has led him to believe.
But Mr. Bush is
stalking bigger game. He has not written his reply merely to argue over
a few niceties of interpretation of a poem—important as that poem is.
Mr. Bush means to vindicate the biographer and the historian against
the mere critic and to show that “historical conditioning has a corrective
as well as a positive value.” On these points our differences are considerable
and will require more detailed discussion.
In the first place, there is the matter of my own place in history with
its accompanying bias. Mr. Bush accounts for my interpretation of the
poem by assuming that I am a “good modern liberal.” (He
refers to the bias of a modern liberal four times in his essay, and
concludes by writing “the result, if not the aim, of Mr. Brooks’s inquiry
is, in large measure, to turn a seventeenth cenlury liberal into
a modern one.”) But the title liberal, alas, is one that I am scarcely
entitled to claim: I am more often called a reactionary, and I have
been called a proto-fascist. For instance, Mr. Robert Gotham Davis,
in order to account for a bias which he thought he discerned, once read
my history rather differently: I had taught at a university closely
related to the late Huey Long—? perhaps I had been brought there as
window-dressing?—but in any case my close-up view of a modern dictatorship
had qualified and complicated my attitudes
toward dictatorship and political power. This ingenious theory—I could
demonstrate it is merely that—might yield particularly interesting results
if applied to my account of the “Horatian Ode.” But would it account
for fl~e bias that Mr. Bush wants to account for?
The historical method has its own temptations among them, to explore,
with insufficient “history,” the biases of one’s oppunent. At any rate,
I find it amusing that my attitudes turn out to be quite different from
those which Mr. Bush infers that I hold, including my sympathy for Toynbee
and my acceptance of an orthodox Christian posltion, This is not to
claim, of course, that I am necessarily consistent in my beliefs or
that m’ beliefs guarantee my being right about the “Hotltian Ode” but
Mr. Bush s guesses as to the biases which make me, in his opinion, “wrench”
the meaning of Marvell’s poem, just happen to be wrong.
In the Second place, what do the relevant historical facts tell us about
Marvel!’s attitude? I am surprised that Mr. Bush has chosen this of
all poems to vindicate his general thesis, for the evidence from history
points several ways, but in so far as it supports either interpretation,
seems to support mine. Mr. Bush cites Marvell’s poem on “The First Annlversary
of the Government under O[liver] Cromwell,” 1655, and his “Poem on the
Death of O.C.,” 1658. But what of Marvell’s poems written within a year
of the “Horatian Ode”? I can do no better here than to repeat my summary
of the situation:
Hard upon his
composition of the “Ode” in 1650, Marvell had published in 1649 a poem
“To his Noble Friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace,” and a poem “Upon the Death
of the Lord Hastings.” Both Margoliouth and Lcgouis find these poems
rather proRoyalist in sentiment, and certainly it is difficult to read
them otherwise. If we add to these poems the “Elegy upon the Death of
My Lord Francis Villiers,” a Cavalier who was killed fighting for the
‘King in 1649, the Royalist bias becomes perfectly explicit. As Margoliouth
puts it: “If the ‘Elegy on Villiers is Marvell’s, it is his one uneqnivocal
royalist utterance; it throws into strong relief the transitional character
of An Horatian Ode where royalist principles and admiration for Cromwell
the Great Man exist side by side .... “
A transition in
views there must have been, but the transition certainly cannot be graphed
as a steadily rising curve when we take into account Marvell’s next
poem, “Tom May’s Death.” May died in November 1650. Thus we have the
“Horatian Ode,” which was almost certainly written in the summer of
165o, preceding by only a few months a poem in which Marvell seems to
slur at the Commander of the Parliamentary armies—either Essex or Fairfax—as
“Spartacus,” and to reprehend May himself as a renegade poet who has
prostituted the mystery of the true poets.
I might add that the two new bits of evidence that I brought forward
in my essay both point to Royalist associations for Marvell. I recur
to them here, not because I think that they “prove” very much, but because
I want to emphasize the fact that my position involves no disparagement
of history. The purpose of my essay was conciliatory. I had hoped that
the act of finding and bringing forward new evidence—however meager
it turned out to be—might be the best way of indicating my concern for
history and its claims.
I reiterate that concern and I say again that the literary historian
and the critic need to work together and that the ideal case is that
in which both functions are united in one and the same man. But historical
evidence does not solve critical problems. In the first place, it is
often inadequate or problematical. In the second place, the objective
facts that can be pegged down and verified do not in themselves yield
a judgment: the “historian” finds himself working with probabilities
and subjective evaluations almost as much as the “critic.” If the critic
does well to remind himself how heavily he leans upon history, the historian
does well to remind himself how often he is making a critical evaluation.
The basic difference between Mr. Bush and me lies in this area of critical
theory.
It is evident that my conception of what a poem is is rather different
from Mr. Bush’s. For example, I have not been content to see Marvell
pay some fine compliments to Cromwell and then adjust the balance by
paying some compliments to King Charles, but have asked for a meaningful
and responsible relation between the elements which he finds praiseworthy
in both men. Mr. Bush writes: “Mr. Brooks sees the poem as expressing
a ‘unified total attitude’ though a very complex one, yet it would be
hard to merge his findings into any total unity unless Maryell is snore
or less lifted out of his age into ours.” I am not concerned to lift
Marvell out of his age into ours; I am concerened with what transcends
his age. I am concerned with what is universal in the poem, and that
means that I am concerned with more than seeing the “Horatian Ode” as
merely a document of its age. If we unify the poem as document merely
by saying that it reflects the uncertainties and contradictions of a
man who was uncertain and self-contradictory and sometimes foolish,
as the men of any age are, then we may have a useful historical document,
but I am not at all sure that we have a poem. That is why I have attempted
something that may well be desperate: namely, to try to find a justification
in terms of the poem for the two stanzas beginning “And now the Irish
are ashamed.” The stanzas apparently do not trouble Mr. Bush, who writes
“We really must accept the unpalatable fact that [Marvell] wrote as
an Englishman of 1650.” Perhaps we must, and I have tried to allow for
that fact by saying that the appeal here “is not to what Marvell the
Englishman must have thought, or even to what Marvell the author must
have intended, but rather to the full context of the poem itself.” Certainly
I should agree with Mr. Bush that the poem “did not get itself written
by some agency outside of Marvell,” But I had hoped that Marvell here
had written perhaps better than he knew and that the praise accorded
to Cromwell in the poem as a whole was one which would allow in the
perspective of the entire poem for a sardonic reading of the lines which
made them something other than merely a statement, probably even in
1650 rather silly, and in any case wishful thinking. That defense may
or may not be convincing, but I think that the fact that I fell it necessary
to make such a defense (or else to concede that the passage is a blemish
in an otherwise fine poem) and that Professor Bush sees no reason to
make a defense is a sufficient indication of how different our aims
are.
In this connection I should like to allude briefly to Leslie Fiedler’s
“Archetype and Signature” (Spring, 1952) and to the Editorial in the
Autumn (1952) number of this review. In his able statement of policy,
the Editor wrote: “The point has been made, the lesson learned, and
we have plenty of critics able to do good formal analysis. We need now,
in addition, a consciously impure criticism which . . . will interpret
literature in relation to the rest of man’s concerns .... “ With this
call to a wider series of applications, I am in hearty agreement, just
as I am in agreement with Mr. Fiedler’s concern for a means of binding
together our “fractured world.” But I do not think that the lesson has
been learned—not, for instance, if Mr. Fiedler really thinks that a
basic contention of formalist criticism is that a poem is “nothing but
‘words,’” and not if Mr. Bush can write “One may not quite understand
these several possibilities, since the poem did not get itself written
by some agency outside of Marvell.” Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Fiedler’s reasons
for defending a biographical interest are amusingly at loggerheads,
and I can imagine Mr. Bush’s feeling that Mr. Fiedler conceives of the
poem as a kind of handy pincushion into which an engaging ambiguity
can be thrust; and on the other hand, I can imagine that Mr. Fiedler
might feel that Mr. Busk’s indifference to the dark side of the poet’s
mind and to the depth psychologists, Jung and Freud, represents a hopelessly
truncated view of the poet’s personality.
Mr. Fiedler provides a neat, almost jaunty survey of recent literary
history. If I may fill in some names, Mr. Fiedler might presumably see
Mr. Bush as the thesis (the old fashioned historical scholarship), me
as the antithesis (the doctrinaire antibiographer), and himself as the
triumphant synthesis. And perhaps he is right. But, at the least, his
“generations” are positions in a dialectic and not really flesh-and-blood
generations.
I should like to view the formalist critics in a somewhat different
perspective. In their concern for the break-up of tile modern world,
Mr. Bush, Mr. Fiediet and a laost Of other scholars anti critics are
anxious to see !iteratnre put to work to save the situation. The insistence
upon definitions—warnings against the intentional fallacy, attempts
to distinguish between poem and historical document—all seem petty and
niggling in view of a culture threatened with collapse, and so the temptation
is to find in literature a support for religion or perhaps a surrogate
for religion. Mr. Bush’s recent MLA address took the one course; Mr.
Fieldler, in his article, takes the other. As he puts it, “We cannot
get back into the primal Garden of the unfallen archetypes, but we can
yield ourselves to the dreams and images that mean paradise regained.”
We can still, through anthropology and depth psychology, have the value
of the myths even though as modern men we see through them.
I suggest that the shadow of Matthew Arnold still rests heavily upon
our era, and that it is the formalist critics who make the fullest rejection
of Arnold. They do so because they are aware of the implications. Mr.
Fiedler, on the other hand, can see the future of criticism as immense
for the same reason that Arnold saw the future of poetry as immense.
I cannot speak for the other formalist critics--I cannot even claim
to know certainly who they are—but I shall hazard one or two concluding
observations. In the first place. though poetry has a very important
role in any culture, to ask that poetry save us is to impose a burden
upon poetry that it cannot sustain. The danger is that we shall merely
get an ersatz religion and an ersatz poetry. In the second place, I
think it no accident that so many of the formalist critics either hold,
or are sympathetic to, an orthodox Christian faith. In the third place,
I think it significant that those critics who hold such a position have
beem precisely those critics who have been anxious to distinguish between
aesthetic judgment and ethical judgment, and who have tried to find
a role for poetry which would make it more than a handmaiden for religion
or a substitute for religion.
It is precisely because I agree with the editor that “all our problems,
from literature to politics, are ultimately religious” that I think
that we should distinguish literature from religion: otherwise“ the
intellectual lion and the clerical lamb”--or is it the clerical lion
and the intellectual lamb?—will lie down, not together, but perhaps
with one inside the other.
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