Literatura y crítica
Roland Barthes - Fragments de regards 1915-1980
Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse
From A Short History of English Literature (1907), by George Saintsbury (The Augustan Ages, ch. 5).
Divisions of eighteenth-century verse — Pope: his life — His work — His character — His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His phrase — His subjects — Garth — Blackmore —Congreve, etc. — Prior —His metrical imporatance — Young — Parnell — Lady Winchilsea
Divisions of eighteenth-century verse
THE poetry of the eighteenth century can be classified with a completeness and a convenience uncommon in literary periods. In the first division we see the complete triumph of the "classical" and "correct," or conventional, ideal at once exemplified and achieved in the work of Pope. This is followed by a rather longer period, in which the dominant poetry—the kind of verse admired and praised by almost all the vulgar and a few of the elect—is imitation of Pope, tempered more or less by that of Dryden. But side by side with both these (and even at the very earliest represented by Lady Winchilsea and one or two others) there is a party of mostly unintentional revolt which first, as represented by Thomson, reverts to nature in observation, but generalises still in expression; then, as presented by Gray, while not neglecting nature, changes all the sources of its literary inspiration, seeking them always farther back and wider. In respect of form the two first schools are almost wholly busied, except in light and occasional verse, with the couplet; while the third, in its endeavour not to be conventional, takes refuge in blank verse and stanza-form. In the present chapter we shall have to do with the first, and one or two belated or precocious members of the third. The second and the main body of the third will occupy us in the next Book.
Pope: his life.
NOTE 1. The standard library edition of Pope is that of Elwin and Courthope, with an exhaustive Life by the latter, 11 vols., London, 1870-89. The "Globe" edition of the Poems, by A W. Ward, is exceptionally valuable.
Alexander Pope (NOTE 1) —within certain narrow but impregnable limits one of the greatest masters of poetic form that the world has ever seen, and a considerable, though sometimes over-rated, satirist—was born in London in 1688, of a respectable tradesman’s family. His parents were Roman Catholics, and Pope was rather badly educated in his early youth. From the time when his father moved to Binfield, on the outskirts of Windsor Forest, he seems to have educated himself. The bad health and physical deformity which marred his later life, and to which the disagreeable parts of his character have been traced, with a mixture of reason and charity, are said not to have been congenital. He wrote verse very early; but his extreme untruthfulness makes it very uncertain how much before the date of publication any particular piece was composed. Still, the dates of the Pastorals (1709), when he was twenty-one, of the Essay on Criticism, two years later, and of Windsor Forest, two years later still, establish beyond all question his early command of versification and expression. Even before the earliest of these dates Pope had been introduced to Wycherley and to Walsh, and through them he became acquainted with the rising prose lights of literature—Addison, Steele, and, above all, Swift. These (at least Swift) zealously furthered his scheme of translating the Iliad, which was started 1713, began to appear next year, and was finished in 1720. This, like the Odyssey, which followed, and a good deal of which was done by assistants (Fenton and Broome), was published by subscription, and the two brought Pope in not much less than £10,000, a sum which, at the rates of interest then prevailing, and with some paternal property, was enough to put him in affluence for the rest of his life. That life presents little history except a record of disease, publications, and quarrels. It was in 1718 that he established himself at Twickenham, which as headquarters he never afterwards left, and here he died in 1744.
His work.
The order of his later publications was as follows. The Rape of the Lock, published partially in 1712, reappeared during the time of his work on Homer in 1714. He produced an edition of Shakespeare, which could not well be good, in 1728. His satirical powers, which had already been exhibited in fragments, at last took the form of The Dunciad (1728-29) a violent attack on the minor writers of the day, with whom Pope fancied that he had the quarrel of Wit against Dulness, while he really had that of an exceedingly irritable poet against reviewers and, in some sense, rivals. Thereafter he fell into a course of half-moral, half-satirical writings—Epistle to Lord Burlington, Essay on Man, Imitations of Horace, Epistle to Arbuthnot, etc. (1730-1738), which, whether poetry or not, whether philosophy or not, are at any rate the most brilliant examples in English of one particular kind of verse and one particular kind of style. His last important work was an alteration and enlargement of The Dunciad (1742-43). Neither changes nor additions were by any means always improvements, but the finale of the complete poem is one of the very greatest things that Pope ever wrote, and one of his strongest titles to the name of poet.
His character.
That his claims to that name could be disputed probably never entered the head of any of his contemporaries save his personal foes, nor perhaps into the heart and conscience of any even of these. They were sufficiently numerous, and Pope amply deserved them. His faults, from their evident connection with a sort of childish weakness, invite, and have received, compassion; but to deny them is absurd. Nor were his virtues extremely conspicuous. He is credited with sincere affection for his friends. But there were no two men whom he loved and honoured more than Swift and Bolingbroke, and yet he could not resist playing upon both some underhand literary tricks to which he was more addicted than any great man of letters except his contemporary and analogue Voltaire. He lampooned Addison, who had perhaps given him a provocation of which a magnanimous person would have made nothing, while it very possibly had no existence except in his own morbid fancy; and though the lampoon, the "Character of Atticus," is magnificent literature and not quite unjust, it is all the baser ethically for its genius and its justice. He made violent and foolish love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and being, or thinking himself, snubbed, revenged the snub with vulgar insults which the pen of no gentleman could ever have allowed to flow from it at any time, except that of the literary bravos of his old friend Wycherley’s youth. Even his partisans have allowed a feeling of revolt at the venomous and snobbish delight with which he dwells at once on the poverty and the dinnerlessness of his Grub Street foes. He was stingy in entertaining (a very rare fault for his time); he had, with no motive to save, old tricks of writing on backs of letters and scraps of paper; he had many minor faults. Yet those of his friends with whom he did not quarrel never quarrelled with him, and it would be unfair to ask whether it was policy or generosity which made him invariably favourable to rising young men of letters—Thomson and Johnson are the great and sufficient, though by no means the only, examples who made their appearance in his time—provided only they did not join the real or imagined army of Diabolus in Grub Street. He was a very good son; his passion for Martha Blount—a passion which was not too well requited, though the object benefited by it most handsomely—seems to have been faithful and intense—and though troublesome to his inferiors and servants from his infirmities, he seems to have been liked by them.
His poetry.
But his character, save for its close connection with his work, matters very little; his literature matters very much. The greater jars of the conflict over the question "Was Pope a poet?" have mostly ceased. Hardly anybody now would dream of denying that he was a poet; very few would assert that he was one of the greatest kind. Some indeed have challenged for him the phrase "Return to nature" which has generally been applied to the revolters from him. The argument, which lacks neither ingenuity or plausibility, is that from the Elizabethan time to the Pindaric imitators of Cowley a non-natural exaggeration had been a curse, if not the curse, of English poetry, and that Pope finally abolished this. Unluckily, however, Cleveland had been dead for fifty years when Pope wrote; Dryden had "appealed to sense" long before he was born; and the prevalent faults of the time immediately preceding were not those of unnatural conceit. Even had it been otherwise, the nature to which he returned was, in all but one respect, a nature of prose, not of poetry. He did refine, to the utmost possible extent, one special kind of verse, and this—perhaps this only—establishes his claim to be a poet. Those who hold that though (to their sorrow) there may be verse without poetry, there cannot be poetry without verse, are not the least trusty guardians of Pope’s position. He may be open to attack on other sides; here the defence may laugh at any assault.
His couplet and paragraph.
Pope’s extraordinary mastery of a certain refinement on the Drydenian couplet, which, losing not a little strength and colour, and something of that portion of the poetic vague which Dryden retained, added an incomparable lightness and polish, seems to have been attained very early. In the Essay on Criticism it is nearly so advanced, if not quite as sure, as in the satires of thirty years later. The secret, so far as there is a single one, is the bold discarding of everything but the consideration of the couplet itself—triplets and Alexandrines, the enjambement which even Dryden sometimes permitted himself, and the structure of the paragraph by any other than sense-methods. This last is, of course, the important exception, and it speaks volumes for Pope’s skill that he can, by means of the sense merely, connect together strings of couplets of which, by no means infrequently, each is complete in itself in rhythm as in meaning. But he sacrifices every attraction of form to the couplet—light, bright, glittering, varied in a manner almost impossible to account for, tipped ever with the neatest, smartest, sharpest rhyme, and volleying on the dazzled, though at times at times at any rate satiated, reader a sort of salvo of feux-d’artifice, skipping, crackling, scattering colour and sound all round and about him. If we take a paragraph of Milton’s with one of Pope’s, and compare the apparent variety of the constitutent stones of the one building with the apparent monotony of those of the other, the difference may be at first sight quite bewildering. One of Dryden’s, between the two, will partly, though not entirely, solve the difficuty by showing how the law of the prose paragraph, that of meaning, is brought to supply the place of that of the pure poetic paragraph, the composition of sound and music.
His phrase.
Pope’s other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology, in which he displays the same exquisite, though limited, perfection. Here, again, of the remoter and rarer graces of style there are none. Pope suggests little; no conjunction of his words causes the "wild surprise" given by the phrase of Chaucer, and by those of an unbroken succession from Spenser to Dryden. So also (in this point inferior to his friends Addison and Swift) he has little humour. But his wit is of the finest, and everything that he wishes to say, everything that comes within his purview as proper to be said, is expressed with unequalled propriety. It is impossible to improve on Pope; to get something better you must change the kind. Nor can there be much doubt that, in the negative as in the positive sides of this perfection, he is indebted to that process of conscious or unconscious conventionalising which all his time adored and which he brought to its acme. The individual and particular graces of the literature before and after his century give a nobler gust, but it is hit or miss with them. Pope’s process—of extracting and representing the best thought within his compass in the best words that his own genius (still careful of the common) could achieve—is lower but surer. He cannot (or can but very rarely when transported by private passion, as in the the "Character of Atticus," or by the contagion of a greater genius, as in the conclusion of The Dunciad, which is Swift done into poetry) give the greatest things. But what he can give he gives quite unerringly; he is a secure and impeccable master of his own craft.
His subjects.
With so peculiar a genius as this (for it would be absurd to stint Pope to the word "talent," though some logical defense might be made for it) his subject could not but be of the greatest importance, while even his treatment of matters was necessarily conditioned by his knowledge. In the subjects of the Pastorals, of the Messiah, of Windsor Forest (NOTE 1) he was not really at home, and all these are in consequence mere pastiches—things immensely clever but no more. In the Essay on Criticism the subject itself was thoroughly congenial. Pope knew his own ideal of literature, could express that ideal critically as few could, and express it constructively as could no other man in the world. But he was a very bad judge of other styles and other ideals, and his knowledge of literary as of other history would have disgraced the meanest hack in his own fancied Grub Street. Consequently, here and wherever else he touches the subject, we get the most ridiculous statements of fact and the most absurd arguments based upon them, side by side with maxims and judgments worthy of almost any signature in sense, and expressed as no one but Pope could express them in form.
NOTE 1. Wordsworth, usually unjust to Pope, has been too generous to this poem. It gives literally nothing of the forest of the Thames Valley: a library and a poulterer’s shop would furnish all its material.
And this difference holds throughout. The Iliad, for instance, a wonderful tour de force of literature, has long become merely a curiosity, because if we want Homer we either go to himself or to a translator who has some sense of him. The Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard, again, are both marred, though not ruined, by the prevalence of conventionalism in reference to subjects which, above all others, refuse and defy convention. But the Rape of the Lock, artificial as it is, is a perfect triumph of artifice, a piece with which no fault can be found except the frequency of the gradus-epithet, and in which the gradus-epithet is is excused by its suitableness to the persons and the manners handled.
Yet it is in his later Essay, his Epistles, his Satires, his Dunciad, that Pope’s genius shows at its very greatest. They are no doubt mosaics—the "Atticus" passage was pretty certainly written twenty years before its insertion in the Epistle to Arbuthnot—but this is no defect in them. Their value for meaning varies accordingly as Pope was copying optimism from Bolingbroke, pessimism from Swift, and a very remarkable kind of orthodoxy from Warburton, or was giving expression to his own keen, though, alas! limited, observation of society, his personal feelings, and his narrow but clear theory of life and literature. Here he reigns triumphant. His philosophy may be always shallow and sometimes mere nonsense; his satire may lack the large Olympian sweep of Dryden; but he looked on society, and on humanity as that society happened for the time to express it, with an unclouded eye, and he expressed his views with a pen that never stumbled, never made slips of form, and always said the right thing in the right way, when we once accept scheme and time and man.
Pope, a young man at his beginnings but very precocious, began to be copied, or to be revolted from, with almost unexampled earliness; but the imitators and rebels may best be left for future treatment. We shall deal here with those of his contemporaries whom dates or other things excuse from the charge of being either, though some even of these may have felt his mighty influence. We have noted the poetical works of Swift and Addison under their names earlier; we may here take Garth, Blackmore, Prior, Congreve, Gay, Parnell, Young, a few minors, and—a friendly but, though she knew it not, deadly foe—Lady Winchilsea.
Garth.
Samuel Garth (NOTE 1), a strong Whig, but popular with both parties, and of very great repute as a physician, was born at Bolam in Durham as early as 1660, went to Cambridge (Peterhouse), where he remained till he took his M.D. in 1691, and spent the rest of his life practising in London. He was the friend, physician, and interrer of Dryden, was familiar with all the Queen Anne men, was knighted at George I.’s accesion, and died in 1718. Garth owes his place in English literature, which ought to be no mean one, to the fact that his poem The Dispensary was published in 1699, before Dryden’s death, and that its versification makes advances on Dryden’s own in Pope’s direction. Its subject, a doctors’ quarrel, does not give us much amusement now, though it has some interest in starting a long line of more or less similar poems on less or more unpromising subjects during the century. Garth followed it up many years later, after he had strengthened The Dispensary itself with some of its best parts, by a poem on Claremont, and translated some Ovid. But the help which he gave to the perfecting of the couplet in this form is his title to memory.
NOTE 1. Garth and Congreve, with all the writers that follow except Lady Winchilsea, are in Chalmers.
Blackmore.
The more notorious verse-writer, after Garth, of the interregnum between Pope and Dryden was the luckless Sir Richard Blackmore, one of the small and curious company who have been made immortal by their satirists. Born about 1650, at Corsham, in Wilts, he spent a long time at Oxford, and afterwards took his M. D. at Padua. He had a good practice, and the "Quack Maurus" of Dryden, whom he censured and who hit back, does not appear to have had any special justification. He seems to have begun to write verse to pass the time as he drove from patient to patient, and he published the long poems of Prince Arthur (1695), King Arthur (1697), Job (1700), Eliza (1705), and Creation (1712), besides essays, psalms, etc. He died in 1729, having been still more unmercifully ridiculed by the wits of the second generation. Creation (NOTE 2), however, was highly praised, not merely by Addison, to whom piety and Whiggery combined would have been an irresistible bribe, but by Johnson, to whom the second quality would have neutralised the first. It is difficult for a reader of the present day to share their admiration. Creation supplies (as, for the matter of that, do the other poems, so far as the present writer knows them) tolerable rhetoric in verse occasionally not bad. But this is a different thing from poetry. Blackmore’s couplets are often enjambed; and it seems (indeed he boasted of it) that he knew little of the popular poetry of his day.
NOTE 2. In Chalmers, vol. X.; the rest must be sought in the original.
Congreve, etc.
Congreve (NOTE 1) deserves such a niche as he has in purely poetical history as the producer of a few songs very much in the character of those mentioned earlier as the last product of the Cavalier muse, but with more of the order and neatness of the eighteenth century. He is sometimes impudent, but rarely, like the Dorsets and the Sedleys, merely coarse, and the note of the careless fine gentleman which he so much affected in his life does appear in his poems, especially by comparison with Prior, whom, though he falls far short of him in nature, tenderness, whimsical wit, and suspicion of higher and deeper feeling, he excels in that indescribable and sometimes denied, but quite real, quality called breeding. Ambrose Philips and Thomas Tickell were both friends of Addison and (whether of their own choice or as a result of Pope’s irritable vanity is uncertain) enemies of Pope. The former—to be carefully distinguished from John Philips (1676-1708), author of the admirable Miltonic burlesque of the Splendid Shilling and of a good poem, or at least verse-essay, on Cider— was born in Leicestershire in 1671, and died in London in 1749. His short sentimental verses to children gained him from Carey (the author of "Sally in our alley") the nickname of "Namby-Pamby," which has passed into the language as a common epithet. Tickell, a Cumberland man and a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford (1676-1740), is chiefly remembered for two splendid couplet-elegies on Addison (whose devoted friend he was) and on Marlborough’s lieutenant Cadogan. The majesty which this particular form could put on has seldom been better shown, except in the final lines of The Dunciad. But we must turn to men of more poetical substance.
Prior.
Matthew Prior (NOTE 1), the king of "verse of society" in English, was born near Wimborne in 1664, and was educated at Westminster, going thence to Cambridge, but to St. John’s, not, as usual with his schoolfellows, to Trinity. He took his degree in 1686, and obtained a Fellowship, which he kept through life, and which kept him at some times of it. He wrote a bad parody of The Hind and the Panther in conjunction with Montague, afterwards Halifax, but did nothing else till he was of middle of age, though he enjoyed to the full the copious if transient stream of patronage of men of letters, which his coadjutor did much to set running. He was even Ambassador to France; was deeply engaged in the still obscure intrigues which just failed to seat James III. on the throne of England at his sister’s death; is suspected of having turned king’s evidence, but was imprisoned for some years. He had published poems in 1709, and issued another collection in splendid form after his liberation in 1718. He did not long survive this, and died in 1721. He was, though an intimate, somewhat of a detached intimate of the literary society of his time, and is said frankly to have preferred less distinguished associates.
NOTE 1. In Chalmers, and common in editions from his own gorgeous folio downwards. Mr. Austin Dobson’s Selected Poems of Prior ("Parchment Library," London, 1889) contains most things of much value but not all, the change of manners sometimes making Prior difficult to reproduce nowadays.
The works of Prior are rather numerous than voluminous, and they are very curiously assorted. The only pieces of any bulk are Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, and Solomon, or The Vanity of the World. The first, divided into three cantos, is an extremely fantastic, though, according to most (not all) critics, somewhat tedious poem in Hudibrastic verse, and quite openly imitating Butler in style as well as in metre. Although, however, the guise is burlesque, the subject-matter is by no means wholly so; and Prior, the lightness of whose best-known work has perhaps rather obscured the fact that he was a scholar and a man of no small reading, has put a good deal of thought as well as of learning in an ill-chosen fashion. Solomon, which is also in three divisions (here called "books"), is in heroic couplets of a rather Drydenian than Popian cast, with frequent Alexandrines. Here too the poem is much better worth reading than is usually thought; but the author’s inability to be frankly serious again shows itself. His treatment of Vanity has neither the bitter quintessence of Swift, nor the solemn and sometimes really tragic declamation of Young, nor that intense conviction and ethical majesty which make Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes almost a great poem, and beyond all question a great piece of literature. His next most important works in point of bulk are a handful of tales after the manner of La Fontaine, for which the rigid Johnson himself made a famous excuse, but which, though they contain some of their author’s earliest and pleasantest writing, make their appearance not at all, or with considerable difficulty and adjustment, in modern volumes intended for general reading. Longer than these, indeed, are the Carmen Seculare, a dull Pindaric to William the Deliverer, and Henry and Emma, an ill-judged modernising of the exquisite Nut-brown Maid, but they form no part of Prior’s title to fame.
This, which is completely indefeasible, rests upon a cloud of bright trifles, or things pretty serious within but bright and trifling in appearance, heterogenous enough in subject and form, but all animated by the same dainty, whimsical touch in metre, phrase, and poetic style. He can be merely sentimental and achieve mere sentiment charmingly; impudently but triumphantly caricaturing, as in his parody of Boileau’s fustian on the taking of Namur; arch, in the best sense of that almost obsolete and long misused but really useful word, as in a hundred pieces of which "Cloe and Euphelia" stands perhaps first in order in his collected works; deliberately but exquisitely trivial, as in "The Secretary." Prior has never been approached in the ligher love-poem of a certain kind, such as "The Lover’s Anger," or "Dear Cloe, how blubbered is that pretty face!" For all his easy morality, no juster, shrewder, and more good-natured life-philosophy was ever put than in "An English Padlock." What may be more surprising to those who do not see from the first that Prior was no mere wit but a true humourist is that his gaiety can, with an imperceptible turn, admit a real and a most melancholy wisdom, as in the beautiful and justly famous "Lines written in the beginning of Mersaray’s History of France." In the mere epigram, such as those on Dr. Radcliffe, on Bibo, and others, where only wit is wanted, he is supreme; his verses to children, especially the famous "Child of Quality," defy competition; the "Epitaph on Jack and Joan" shows, like some things of his, how keen a knowledge of humanity underlay his apparently frivolous ways; and in "Down Hall," the narrative of a trip into Essex, he set an example of lighter narrative verse in easy anapaestics which has been regularly followed, and perhaps never improved upon, since.
His metrical importance.
This last brings us to one of Prior’s greatest historical merits. The tyranny of the couplet was severe enough in the eighteenth century as it was. But it would have been worse still if this poet, influential in position and friendships, attractive in subject, and of an exquisite skill in his art, had not evaded that tyranny by writing verse for lighter purposes in anapaestic measures, in the octosyllable, and in various lyric forms. The anapaestic tetrameter, in particular, may be said to have almost owed its matriculation in the list of permitted metres to Prior. Dryden had used it, but chiefly in compositions intended definitely for music, in which it was no novelty, having been used for ballads and songs time out of mind. But it had been regardee as a sort of "blind fiddler’s measure"—good enough for "Drolleries" and "Garlands" and so forth, but scarcely worthy of "The Muses." Prior accomplished its presentation to these punctilious divinities once for all. Henceforward the correctest poet felt that there was no crime in now and then deserting couplet for these freer measures; and as a matter of fact we find in them by far the larger part of the real poetry of the eighteenth century.
Gay.
Something of the same beneficient influence was exercised by John Gay (NOTE 1), who, though a far less exquisite and poet than Prior, had perhaps more special sympathy for the country, as opposed to the town, than "Dear Mat."
NOTE 1. Very popular in the eighteenth century; a little neglected in this. Amends, however, have recently been made in two very pretty editions, of the Fables by Mr. Austin Dobson (London, 1882), and of the whole Poems by Mr. Underhill (2 vols. London, 1893).
He was born in the same year (1688) with Pope, at Barnstaple, in the county which contains the most exquisite mixture of scenery in England, but he seems to have thought himself more at home
Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand
than on the banks of the Taw or in the hill-solitudes of its springs. His family was no ill one, but poor, and he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. From this unpromising occupation he passed to that of secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the "charming Annabel" of Dryden. In 1713 he published a poem on "Rural Sports," containing some description more vivid and direct than the age generally showed, and dedicated it to Pope. Introduction to the wits and the patrons followed, and Gay had a small share, and apparently might have had, but for laziness and indiscretion, a larger one, in the golden shower still falling on men of letters. The same qualities prevented him from making his fortune in the South Sea Bubble—for Craggs gave him stock, he would not sell during the craze, and lost everything—and perhaps contributed to defeat his expectations from George II. But he was one of those fortunate, helpless persons whom everybody helps, and the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took him into their household, managed his money for him (he made a good deal by the Beggar’s Opera), and prevented him from having any need of it. He died at the end of 1732, too lazy even to make a will. The traditional character of him as of a kind of human lapdog, without any vice except extreme self-indulgence, has been little disturbed.
His earliest poem, Wine, published some years before that above noticed, in 1708, belongs to the same class as John Philips’s pieces, clever enough Miltonic parody. In Rural Sports he shifted to the inevitable couplet, which again he wrote well; in fact, Gay did nothing ill, he only wanted initiation and discretion. The Shepherd’s Week (1714) relapsed on parody, the subject being now Virgil and Spenser, or rather the namby-pamby imitators of both. The mock-heroic couplets of this are often happy, if not very strong. But Gay’s skill in this kind reached its acme in Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1715), which is one of the most vivid things of the sort ever done, and for all its rather teasing falsetto, remains a document for the subject and a pleasant poem in itself. His Epistles exhibit the same pleasing, if somewhat uninspired, accomplishment, and his Ecologues might sometimes be Pope and sometimes Young. It is more to his real credit that he had a lyrical gift possessed by neither of these, his greater contemporaries. The immortal, if conventional, "Black-Eyed Susan," the more genuine "’Twas when the seas were roaring," the most musical "Phyllida" song, and a great many others, have sometimes more sweetness than Prior, though seldom as much air and fire. His dramatic pieces, Acis and Galatea, and still more the Beggar’s Opera, are yet unforgotten. He wrote Tales, again very like Prior’s; and lastly, there are his once universally, and still widely, known Fables. They have been for some time neglected, which is a pity, for they are perennial sense expressed in good, though not quite perennial, verse. Gay could do almost anything that his friends told him to do or that he had a model for; but he required these assistances.
Young.
With Edward Young [NOTE 1: In Chalmers, but not recently edited as a whole] we come to a poet of greater originality and force, but of much less equal achievement, than Gay, a poet who in more ways than one represents a development independent of Pope, and to some extent reactionary from the movement which Pope represented. Young was not merely Pope’s senior; he actually, in the Universal Passion (1725-28), preceded that writer in his special form of satire, and did nearly, if not quite, as well in it as Pope himself at his very best. But the major part of his work is of a kind very different from Pope’s. He was born in Hampshire in the year 1681, went to Oxford, and obtaining one of the then very rare Fellowships (at All Souls) which were not necessarily clerical, did not take orders till late in life. He is said to have at last done so from ambition, and disappointment in his hopes of preferment is credited with at least part of the gloom of the Night-Thoughts. He did not die till 1655, having published verse, Resignation, as late as three years earlier. He was a playwright, and his play of The Revenge was long very popular. His non-dramatic verse is copious, and its merit varies in the strangest degree.
Young’s first poem was The Last Day, published in 1713. It, like The Force of Religion, which followed it a year later, is in couplets, and both poems display Young’s peculiar and, to modern tastes, not very pleasant mixture of probably sincere, but gloomy and bombastically expressed, religious awe, together with an exaggeration of that flattery of "the great" on earth which seventeenth and eighteenth century century feeling permitted, if it did not actually demand. There are, however, very fine things in The Last Day, and it is the best piece on any great scale that he did, except the Night-Thoughts. The Force of Religion, on the story of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, is mawkish and sometimes ridiculous. There could be few greater contrasts than the seven satires of Love of Fame, or The Universal Passion, which followed at about ten years’ interval. As observed above, Pope is anticipated, and all but equalled, in these vigorous compositions, where the artificiality of the treatment is excused by theat of the subjects, and where Young shows himself a past master, not merely of the crack but of the sting, of the couplet lash. Then we come upon Ocean, an Ode (1728), which, like all Young’s other odes (Imperium Pelagi, 1729, etc.), affords examples, hard to be excelled in the works of the meanest writers, of the unintentional mock heroic, and then to The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts.
It is difficult to give even a guess whether this remarkable poem will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which it long held, and which, for two generations at least, it has almost entirely lost. It has against it, the application of phrase and even of thoguht, merely of an age, to the greatest and most lasting subjects, and a tone only to be described as the theatrical-religious. Its almost unbroken gloom frets or tires according to the mood and temperament of the reader. On the other hand, the want of sincerity is always more apparent than real, and the moral strength and knowledge of human nature, which were the great merits of the eighteenth century, appear most unmistakably. Above all, the poem deserves the praise due to very fine and, in part at least, very original versification. If Young here deserts the couplet, it is, as we have seen, by no means because he cannot manage it; it is because he is at least partly dissatisfied with it, and sees that it will not serve his turn. And his blank verse is a fine and an individual kind. Its fault, due, no doubt, to his practice in drama, is that it is a little too declamatory, a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak with footlights in front. But this of itself distinguishes it from the blank verse of Thomson, which came somewhat earlier. It is not a direct imitation either of Milton or of Shakespeare, and deserves to be ranked by itself. The Night-Thoughts, which were late (1742-44) were at once Young’s best work and his last good work. Resignation is much weaker, but not quite dotage.
Parnell.
Thomas Parnell [NOTE 1: Ed. Aitken, London, 1894.] may also be classed as an unconscious rebel. He was of a good Cheshire family, but was born in Dublin in 1679; entered Trinity College, took his degree and orders, and in 1705 was made Archdeacon of Clogher. Swift introduced him to Harley and converted him to Toryism, but the change of dynasty made his converstion infructuous, though Swift procured further preferment for him from Archbishop King. He is said to have felt the death of his wife very severely, and himself died young in 1717.
It is curious that, out of the small bulk of Parnell’s poetical work, poetical criticism of the most various times and tastes has been able to pick quite different things to sustain his reputation. The famous "Hermit" has kept its place in all anthologies; Goldsmith extolled the translations, and Johnson endorsed his views, though he himself liked the "Allegory on Man" best. And later censorship, which finds the "Hermit" not much more than a smooth and ingenious exercise in verse, and the translations and imitations unimportant, has lavished praise on two small pieces, "The Night-Piece on Death" and the "Hymn to Contentment," the former of which certainly displays nature-painting of a kind unknown in the work of any but one contemporary, while the return of the second to the Comus alternation of trochaic and iambic cadence is an almost equally important, though doubtless unintended, protest against the ceaseless iambs of the couplet. It is not possible to call Parnell a great poet as he stands; but the quality and the variety of his accomplishment show that in slightly different circumstances and in other times he would probably have been one.
Lady Winchelsea.
The other exception, a notice of whom may fitly conclude this chapter and this Book, was Anne, Countess of Winchelsea. Lady Winchelsea was the daugher of Sir William Kingsmill, and was born in Hampshire about the time of the Restoration. She died sixty years later, in 1720, having been a friend of the wits (she is Pope’s Ardelia) and herself a considerable practitioner in verse. She wroter The Spleen, a Pindaric ode (1701), The Prodigy (1706), Miscellany Poems (1714), the publication which, almost by a lucky accident, has revived her memory, and a tragedy, Aristomenes. The accident referred to was the mention of her by Wordsworth in his famous polemical essay appended to the Lyrical Ballads in 1815, where he excerpts her Nocturnal Reverie (with an odd companion, Pope’s Windsor Forest) from his sweeping denunciation of the poetry between Paradise Lost and The Seasons, as "not contaning a single new image of external nature." The statement is not by any means true, or rather its exaggeration swamps what truth it has, but the commndation of Lady Winchelsea is deserved. It is a pity that her poems have not been reprinted and are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them. (NOTE 1).
NOTE 1.The Reverie and some other pieces will be found in Ward’s Poets, vol. iii.
It is not a little noteworthy that lady Winchelsea began as a Pindaric writer. The imitators of Cowley (unless Dryden is classed among them) have been not altogether unjustly regarded as having furnished one of the most uninviting divisions of English poetry, and it is no doubt in part due to them that the couplet, as a revolt, obtained its sway. But Cowley, though even in him the high and passionate stpirit of the earlier poetry was dropping and falling, still preserved something of it, and "flights" were necessary to a Pindaric. Fortunately for Lady Winchelsea, natural taste and the opportunities of life seem to have inclined her to take natural objects as the source of her imagery. What place suggested the Norcturnal Reverie we cannot say, but it is clearly a corrected impression and not merely conventional. It is all seen: the waving moon on the river, the sleepy cowslip, the foxglove, paler than by day, but chequering still with red the dusky brakes, and the wonderful image of the horse, take us almost a century away from the drawing-rooms and the sham shepherdesses of her contemporaries. And she could manage the shortened octosyllable even better than Parnell, could adjust the special epithet (Pope borrowed or stole "aromatic pain" from her, though probably she took it from Dryden’s "aromatic splinters"). Altogether she is a most remakable phenomenon, too isolated to point much of a moral, but adorning the lull of early eighteenth-century poetry with images even more correct than Thomson’s, and put in language far less artificial.
—oOo—
Henry Vaughan, Silurist
Henry Vaughan, Silurist
From George Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature (1907)
Vaughan
The contrast between Crashaw and Herbert is repeated in that between Herbert and Vaughan (NOTE 1), but with certain variations. Henry Vaughan—"Silurist," as he called himself, from the seat of his family in South Wales, "Swan of Usk," Olor Iscanus, from the river on whose banks he lived—was born in or about 1622, at a place called Newton, St. Bridget. He and his twin brother Thomas (a poet likewise and a diligent writer on occult and "Hermetic" subjects) went to Jesus College, Oxford. He seems to have begun the study of law in London, but to have turned to that of medicine. He may have actually served in the Royalist forces during the Rebellion, and was certainly a strong partisan of the King's cause. He retired quietly to Brecon during the usurpation and there practised physic. Hardly anything is known of his long life. He may have had two wives; he certainly had one, who survived him at his death, on St. George's Day, 1695. He was the last of the Caroline school proper.
NOTE 1. The Poems of Vaughan, after being completely accessible only in one of Dr. Grosart's privately printed editions, have been at last edited by Mr. E. K. Chambers in two volumes of "The Muses' Library" (London, 1896). The Sacred Poems were provided long since in the Aldine series (ed. Lyte, often reprinted), and there is an edition of the Secular Poems by J. R. Tutin (Hull, 1893).
His poetry as originally published is contained in four volumes—Poems, chiefly secular, in 1646; Silex Scintillans, his principal book, and wholly sacred, in 1651; Olor Iscanus, also sacred, a year later; and Thalia Rediviva, many years afterwards, in 1678, which retruns to the secular. There is no doubt (we have his word for it, and without his word there could not be any) that Vaughan was greatly influenced in all the more remarkable part of his work by Herbert whose poems were published twenty years before Silex Scintillans. The relation between the two men is altogether that of master and pupil, but in divers ways. Often Vaughan copies Herbert directly. But the spirit of the two was different and resulted differently. Vaughan is not more or less pious than Herbert, but his piety is much more mystical; his thoughts are deeper and farther brought. And his expression is much less equable. He is seldom fantastic to frigidity, but he is often meditative to dulness. He never disgusts, but he sometimes tires, because he has not cared, or has not been able, to give his thought clear poetic expression.
There was no real reason on the moral side for the compunction which Vaughan felt, late in life, expressed for his early secular poems. But as a profane poet he has nothing above the average of dozens of half or wholly forgotten versifiers of his time, and is often below that average. His love-poems to Amoret and Efesia are sometimes pretty, though never distinguished; and in octossyllables, where he chiefly follows the manner of Jonson, he is at about his happiest. His decasyllabic couplets are, as Mr. Chambers has justly observed, based on Donne, and on the worst part of Donne, the designedly crabbed form of the Satires and some of the Epistles. It is as the author of the Silex Scintillans that Vaughan holds his place. And the title itself, which is explained in the frontispiece—a heart of flint burning and bleeding under the stroke of a thunderbolt from a cloud—is approopriate in more than the pious sense. At times there is in Vaughan genuine blood and fire; but it is by no means always, or even very often, that the flint is kindled and melted to achieved expression. His most famous and successful things, "They are all gone into the world of light"; "The World," with its magificent opening—
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light
All calm as it was bright;
Like a great ring of pure and endless light
All calm as it was bright;
"The Retreat," with its suggestions of Wordsworth's great ode; "The Storm," with its intensely realised imagery; the quaint and pleasant piece beginning, "I walked the other day to spend my hour"; the beautiful "Joy"; "The Garland," with its wonderfully striking picture of youthful delusions, and the sharp turn, "I met with a dead man, Who thus to me began"; "The Waterfall", with its Miltonic richness and appropriateness of epithet, and a marvellous adaptation of sound to sense—these and some othe things are not merely in company unworthy of them as far as the achieved expression goes, but are even for the most part unworthy of themselves. But this inequality of expression is redeemed by the almost constant presence of a rare and precious tone of thought. The great age of the Church of England finds in Vaughan, at his best, its best poetical exponent. He stops short of the almost maudlin intoxication with divinity which carried Crashaw out of the Church altogether, and he far transcends the decent piety of Herbert.
The pair chosen to follow this trio is in general character strangely contrasted with it, though a certain bridge of transition exists in Herrick's "Divine" poems. Both Herrick and Carew are far greater artists than any of the three just mentioned. But despite of this and of the fact that their temper is far more mundane, they are still alike.
—oOo—
Cowley (and Denham)
From George Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature (1907)
Cowley
The position now for two centuries assigned to Milton was during his lifetime held by Abraham Cowley (NOTE 1). This poet, whose popularity, extraordinarily high and extraordinarily brief, was not quite so unreasonable as his loss of it, was a Londoner born ten years after Milton, in 1618. He went to Westminster, and thence to Cambridge. He certainly wrote verse, and good verse, very early, for some of it was published when he was fifteen; but whether his reading and emulation of Spenser really enabled him to produce some of these poems at ten years old must be left to the reader. He had but just taken his Master's degree in 1643 when Cambridge fell into the power of the Parliamentarians and he was ejected, went to Oxford, where he stayed for two years, and then going with Henrietta Maria to Paris, became her secretary. After some ten years' stay abroad, in 1656 he returned to England, and was arrested, but received his liberty on condition of some indefinite compliances which are vaguely and differently related. He returned to France till the Restoration, and was then, like many other Royalists, disappointed in hopes which Charles II. was perhaps not too careful to satisfy, but which he certainly could not in all cases have satisfied if he would. Nor was it very long before a beneficial lease of the Queen's lands gave him competence, if not affluence. He retired, however, in some dudgeon to Chertsey, and died there—not finding the country quite the poet's paradise—in July 1667. 
Cowley's remarkable prose may be for the present put aside. In his verse he is not merely a most curious bridge of communication between the couplet poets, the "school of good-sense," and the metaphysicals, but almost more than Waller, and much more than Denham, the pair who usually go with him, a bridge between one whole period of poetry and another. He wrote in youth a play called The Guardian, which he did not then intend for the stage, but after the Restoration altered and acted as Cutter of Coleman Street. But this requires no special notice. His purely poetical works, which are by no means so easily to be distinguished by mere chronological order as might be thought likely, fall pretty easily into three classes when judged from the point of view of form—namely, couplet verse, lyrics and stanza poems of various kinds, and Pindarics.
NOTE 1. In Chalmers. More completely in Dr. Grosart's "Chertsey Worthies."
His couplets
Of the couplet verse the most important piece in size, as indeed it is of the whole, is the curious sacred epic of the Davideis, much of which was written at Cambridge, though it was continued (it never was completed) later. Four books exist; but even this manageable length, assisted by Cowley's immense popularity, never made it generally read. There are unquestionably fine things in it—from the opening picture of Hell, earlier by much than that of Milton, through the sketch of the Priests' College, a favourite theme with the author, and worked out by him also in prose, to David's account of Saul and of Jonathan. And the passages of length are as a rule inferior to the single lines and couplets, which are sometimes wonderfully fine. But the miscarriage of the piece as a whole may be accounted for many times over. It is true, as Johnson urges, that the story, being merely begun, has no time to justify itself, that its amplification of familiar Scripture is felt as impertinent, and that the decorations exhibit the fatal fault of the "metaphysicals" almost in the worst degree. But there is more than this. The very accomplishment of the couplets now and then jars with the phraseology and imagery, as would not have been the case in stanza or blank verse; and, little story as the poet gives himself room to tell, he interferes with the interest even of what little there is by constant divagation. The book is a museum of poetic fragments tastelessly cemented together, not an organic whole.
In his other couplet pieces, from quite early things to the translations intercalated in the Essays, Cowley shows much better, or at any rate is much more accessible, as a pioneer in the path. The piece upon the "Happy Birth of the Duke of Gloucester" in 1640, though sometimes "enjambed," shows on the whole a great preference for, and a pretty complete command of, the authentic, balanced, self-contained couplet with the cracker of rhyme at the tail of it. We only want weight to give us Dryden, and polish to give us Pope: the form is there already.
The lyrics
In his stanza-poems and lyrics proper Cowley shows the retrospective side of his poetic Janus-head, though it is observable that even in Constantia and Philetus, one of the earliest of the Juvenilia, the concluding couplets of the sizain "snap" as they would not have done in Daniel or in Drayton. The lyrics are often quite Jonsonian, while sometimes they have a lightness which Ben rarely achieved, and which is cheifly proper to his "sons," of whom Cowley was born just too late to be one. The famous Chronicle, his best-known thing, is the very best of poetic froth; while the Anacreontics are often equal to Ben, and sometimes not very far below Milton. One is frequently inclined to give Cowley a really high place, when something—his shallowness or his frigid wit, or a certain "shadow before" of eighteenth-century prose—interferes, especially in his once adored Mistress.
The Pindarics
Undoubtedly, however, Cowley's Pindarics are the most peculiar efforts of his talent, and those which, upon his own time, produced most of the effect of genius. They are little read now, and there can be no doubt thet both their structure and the presumed necessity of imitating Pindar's style of obscure conciet encouraged the metaphysical manner very treacherously. But they would be interesting to us even were they far worse than they are intrinsically, because to the historian of literature nothing can ever be uninteresting which has, for a long time, supplied an obvious literary demand on the part of readers and provided employment for great writers. To Cowley we owe—in that sense of obligation which always presupposes remembrance, that the debt would have been due to another if this man had not been in case to lend—the really magnificent odes of Dryden, Gray, and Collins pretty directly: indirectly that strill greater one of Wordsworth which is almost his solitary claim to have reached the highest summits of poetry; and many great things of Shelley and Tennyson, not to mention lesser men. And the eager adoption of the form, which for more than half a century prduced libraries full of unreadable Pindarics (the most interesting and nearly the most hopeless examples being those of no less a man than Swift), whows us what the time wanted, how it was sick of the regular stanza, how blank verse was still a little too bold for it, while it had not yet settled down or become satisfied with the regular tick of the couplet-clock. But as a matter of fact the things themselves are not contemptible. "Life and Fame," "Life," the "Ode to Mr. Hobbes," and others are, or at least contain, very fine things; and the chief drawback of the whole is that descent to colloquial abbreviations ("I'm" etc.) which was due partly to the slow vulgarising of popular taste on such points which we shall have to record, partly to the still prevailing dread of slur and trisyllabic equivalence. On the whole, no doubt, Rochester was right when he said ("profanely," as Dryden very properly adds) that "Cowley was not of God, and so he could not stand." But the special reason of his fall was that he never could make up his mind whether to stand with the old age or with the new, with the couplet or with the wilder verse, with mystical fantasy or clear common sense, with lawless splendour or jejune decency.
(...)
Cowley's Prose
(...) Until 1660 it cannot be seriously maintained that England possessed, or even had possessed, a prose style suited for those misceellaneous and average purposes which, after all, prose is chiefly meant to subserve. (...) But we have examples of Dryden's prose at a time when it is next to impossible that he could have been influenced by Tillotson; the change is evident in the work of Cowley and other earlier still; and on the whole it is far safer and far more philosophical to take it as, like other literary evolutions or revolutions, a "flying spirit on the driven air," generally diffused and felt by many if not by all, rather than as a deliberately caused product of this or that person's idiosyncrasy, or study, or simple desire of innovation.
Cowley has just been mentioned, and his case is a notable one. His small handful of extremely pleasant Essays displays many of the characteristics of the new prose, but it is most noteworthy that they seem to date from the close of his life and after the Restoration. In his most brilliant piece, the Discourse concerning Oliver Cromwell (1661), old and new jostle each other in a fashion almost startling, and the colour, form and fire of the sinister angel who defends the Protector contrast with the almost eighteenth-cnetury correctness of some passages. As in verse, Cowley is the Janus of the time, but his forward face is that which is here most noticeable.
Cowley's Prose
(...) Until 1660 it cannot be seriously maintained that England possessed, or even had possessed, a prose style suited for those misceellaneous and average purposes which, after all, prose is chiefly meant to subserve. (...) But we have examples of Dryden's prose at a time when it is next to impossible that he could have been influenced by Tillotson; the change is evident in the work of Cowley and other earlier still; and on the whole it is far safer and far more philosophical to take it as, like other literary evolutions or revolutions, a "flying spirit on the driven air," generally diffused and felt by many if not by all, rather than as a deliberately caused product of this or that person's idiosyncrasy, or study, or simple desire of innovation.
Cowley has just been mentioned, and his case is a notable one. His small handful of extremely pleasant Essays displays many of the characteristics of the new prose, but it is most noteworthy that they seem to date from the close of his life and after the Restoration. In his most brilliant piece, the Discourse concerning Oliver Cromwell (1661), old and new jostle each other in a fashion almost startling, and the colour, form and fire of the sinister angel who defends the Protector contrast with the almost eighteenth-cnetury correctness of some passages. As in verse, Cowley is the Janus of the time, but his forward face is that which is here most noticeable.
Denham
One splendid passage—which, by the way, did not appear in the first edition of the poem, Cooper's Hill, that contains it—has preserved to Sir John Denham (NOTE 1) a little of the very disproportionate reputation which he earned during his life, thanks chiefly to his younger contemporary Dryden's generous eulogy of it. He was born in Dublin, and of Irish parentage on his mother's side, in 1625; had at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn a reputation for idleness and extravagance, especially in gambling; obtained some fame in 1641 by The Sophy, and published Cooper's Hill soon afterwards; lived chiefly at Oxford during the war, and chiefly in France after it; was knighted at the Restoration, and received a valuable place, the surveyorship of the king's buildings; was unlucky in marriage, became disordered in mind, and died on 10th April 1668.
Few, except for studious curiosity, are ever likely again to read Denham through, or even any considerable part of his not extensive work. The Sophy was a feeble tragedy; Cooper's Hill, putting aside the patch
Oh! could I flow like thee
and a few other fine lines, is chiefly a creditable, and tolerable though not very early, exercise in the new kind of couplet. A verse paraphrase of the Second Aeneid adopts the older and looser "enjambed" form of the same measure; indeed, this enjambment is common in Denham, and is found in Cooper's Hill itself. Prudence, Justice, Old Age (of all odd things a verse handling of the De Senectute), The Progress of Learning, are preludes to the eighteenth-century concert of couplet tunes on things not tunable. The smaller poems, with occasional flashes, such as the happy transformation (for translation it is not) of Martial's Non ego sum Curius nec Numa nec Titius into
I pretend not to the wise ones
To the grave or the precise ones,
To the grave or the precise ones,
and a few pieces of some nobility like the elegy on Cowley and the attack on Love in favour of Friensship, are apt to oscillate between the tastelessly fantastical and the merely gross. Moreover, Denham is an eminent sinner in the small matters of grammar, rhyme, and measure which disgrace so many writers in the middle and later part of the seventeenth century and are obviously due not to any imperfect condition of the language, but to sheer carelessness and a down-at-heel fashion of literature. He has occupied that place between Cowley and Waller as the "three reformers of our numbers" so long, that he has established a title to it by prescription; and as it has long been understood what this "reform in numbers" meant, there is the less reason for turning him out. But he is much less of a poet than Cowley, while it is an injustice to couple his slatternly muse with the neat and graceful, if not radiantly lovely or bewitching, muse of Edmund Waller.
—oOo—
Retropost (2006): Una reseña de FABULA
Una reseña de FABULA
Publicado en Literatura y crítica. com. José Ángel García Landa
Hay un sitio web en francés excelente, Fabula: La recherche en littérature. A los favoritos tiene que ir. Y ahí acaba de aparecer (en portada y todo) una reseña de The Dynamics of Narrative Form, editado por John Pier, un libro de la serie "Narratologia" en el que tengo un capítulo (Berlín y Nueva York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). Y como la reseña me recomienda, pues os la recomiendo a su vez. De hecho es todo un pequeño tratado de narratología en sí misma. Se titula "Le récit comme forme-mouvement" y la ha escrito Didier Coste, el autor de Narrative and Communication. ¡Muchas gracias por la buena opinión, y por darla a conocer! (que son dos cosas, y no una). Esta es la parte de la reseña que habla de mi artículo:
L’excellent et limpide article de J.A. García Landa intitulé « Overhearing Narrative » se meut agilement entre pragmatique conversationnelle, théorie du littéraire et narratologie structurale, disciplines dont il combine les apports sans rien rogner de leurs spécificités ni gommer ce qui dépasse de chacune d’elles et continue de dépasser leur combinaison.
Loin de s’arrêter même au schéma complexe mais désormais classique de la communication narrative consacré par Wolfgang Iser, il saisit la force heuristique de l’analogie entre récit oral et récit écrit pour mettre en relief la figure de l’« unintended reader », que nous appellerons, faute de mieux, «lecteur imprévu » en tant que rôle transgressif paradoxalement nécessaire à la production collaborative du sens. Ni narrataire textuellement désigné, ni même inclus par le texte dans les catégories du public de lecteurs préférés ou de lecteurs moyens ou quelconques, le lecteur imprévu est à son tour différencié selon qu’il occupe telle ou telle position d’extériorité : tantôt simple « overhearer » (témoin involontaire) ou « eavesdropper » (guetteur invisible, espion qui prend note, derrière la porte ou le rideau). L’appel à Erving Goffman, entre autres, fait fructifier de façon surprenante des notions introduites par Gerald Prince il y a vingt ans et scolairement sédimentées depuis, illustrant ainsi à la fois une continuité de propos avec une certaine narratologie structurale et le clair besoin d’aller voir de plus près dans la « vie réelle » des récits et des œuvres de tout poil. Cette prise en compte de «formes complexes d’interaction communicationnelle » (199) débouche sur deux constats particulièrement intéressants. D’une part, l’incomplétude du dialogisme bakhtinien —et l’on pourrait épiloguer sur les raisons qui interdirent à Bakhtine de sortir d’une dialectique strictement historique. Et, d’autre part, que la « critique critique » (en particulier celle qui pratique une interprétation plus symptomatique qu’empathique afin de débusquer l’idéologie ou d’autres composantes sous-jacentes des dispositifs textuels) est précisément celle qui, sans surplomber le texte, se place plus ou moins délibérément en porte-à-faux, de biais ou de côté, dans cette lacune de l’espace communicationnel pré-arrangé par l’institution littéraire et dont l’émergence du lecteur imprévu ouvre la béance transgressive.
García Landa a parfaitement raison d’insister sur le besoin d’étudier à la fois et parallèlement l’interaction préconstruite par le texte littéraire et son auto-contextualisation, et l’interaction effective qui peut avoir lieu dans des situations et contextes radicalement étrangers à l’époque de production textuelle, voire inconcevables pour cette culture. Il a raison aussi de souligner que les récepteurs même hostiles ne peuvent échapper à une certaine «ratification » dans la mesure où ils doivent au moins un temps faire comme s’ils partageaient les présupposés idéologiques textualisés, fût-ce pour les dénoncer. Il fait enfin un pas décisif en suggérant que la production lectorale du sens ne résulte pas seulement d’une interaction entre, mettons, un lecteur impliqué et un auteur impliqué, mais au moins d’une négotiation, si ce n’est une mise en acte de conflit, du sujet lisant avec soi-même. (204) Le sujet clivé, postcolonial, par exemple, qui est entre dedans et dehors, aurait vocation privilégiée à être un tel lecteur intensif, générateur de sens et de signifiance littéraire.
Jusqu’ici cependant, on ne voit guère en quoi la communication narrative diffèrerait de toute autre communication littéraire, et le régime lyrique, dont il est question aussi dans ces pages, fournirait, García Landa en a conscience, d’excellents exemples, sinon l’exemple par excellence de la génération d’un lecteur/auditeur officiellement imprévu —indésirable ou titillant par sa tierce présence— s’invitant au cœur du soliloque plaintif ou du dialogue amoureux. L’auteur émet alors l’hypothèse, a priori recevable que le récit fictionnel (le romanesque), en tant que genre composite notamment, est à même de déployer des stratégies tour à tour subtiles et déconcertantes (de représentation et de dissimulation de la dynamique de communication souhaitée ou refusée) pour jouer à cache-cache avec ses anti-lecteurs, ses lecteurs subreptices et autres envahisseurs de la veillée des chaumières. Une dynamique (transgressive et analogue à celle de la métalepse) est une fois de plus mise en valeur ; mais sur ce dernier et ce seul point on pourrait peut-être demander au théoricien d’aller encore un peu plus loin en se posant la question redoutable pour tout narratologue de l’inertie et de la répétitivité du récit.
Loin de s’arrêter même au schéma complexe mais désormais classique de la communication narrative consacré par Wolfgang Iser, il saisit la force heuristique de l’analogie entre récit oral et récit écrit pour mettre en relief la figure de l’« unintended reader », que nous appellerons, faute de mieux, «lecteur imprévu » en tant que rôle transgressif paradoxalement nécessaire à la production collaborative du sens. Ni narrataire textuellement désigné, ni même inclus par le texte dans les catégories du public de lecteurs préférés ou de lecteurs moyens ou quelconques, le lecteur imprévu est à son tour différencié selon qu’il occupe telle ou telle position d’extériorité : tantôt simple « overhearer » (témoin involontaire) ou « eavesdropper » (guetteur invisible, espion qui prend note, derrière la porte ou le rideau). L’appel à Erving Goffman, entre autres, fait fructifier de façon surprenante des notions introduites par Gerald Prince il y a vingt ans et scolairement sédimentées depuis, illustrant ainsi à la fois une continuité de propos avec une certaine narratologie structurale et le clair besoin d’aller voir de plus près dans la « vie réelle » des récits et des œuvres de tout poil. Cette prise en compte de «formes complexes d’interaction communicationnelle » (199) débouche sur deux constats particulièrement intéressants. D’une part, l’incomplétude du dialogisme bakhtinien —et l’on pourrait épiloguer sur les raisons qui interdirent à Bakhtine de sortir d’une dialectique strictement historique. Et, d’autre part, que la « critique critique » (en particulier celle qui pratique une interprétation plus symptomatique qu’empathique afin de débusquer l’idéologie ou d’autres composantes sous-jacentes des dispositifs textuels) est précisément celle qui, sans surplomber le texte, se place plus ou moins délibérément en porte-à-faux, de biais ou de côté, dans cette lacune de l’espace communicationnel pré-arrangé par l’institution littéraire et dont l’émergence du lecteur imprévu ouvre la béance transgressive.
García Landa a parfaitement raison d’insister sur le besoin d’étudier à la fois et parallèlement l’interaction préconstruite par le texte littéraire et son auto-contextualisation, et l’interaction effective qui peut avoir lieu dans des situations et contextes radicalement étrangers à l’époque de production textuelle, voire inconcevables pour cette culture. Il a raison aussi de souligner que les récepteurs même hostiles ne peuvent échapper à une certaine «ratification » dans la mesure où ils doivent au moins un temps faire comme s’ils partageaient les présupposés idéologiques textualisés, fût-ce pour les dénoncer. Il fait enfin un pas décisif en suggérant que la production lectorale du sens ne résulte pas seulement d’une interaction entre, mettons, un lecteur impliqué et un auteur impliqué, mais au moins d’une négotiation, si ce n’est une mise en acte de conflit, du sujet lisant avec soi-même. (204) Le sujet clivé, postcolonial, par exemple, qui est entre dedans et dehors, aurait vocation privilégiée à être un tel lecteur intensif, générateur de sens et de signifiance littéraire.
Jusqu’ici cependant, on ne voit guère en quoi la communication narrative diffèrerait de toute autre communication littéraire, et le régime lyrique, dont il est question aussi dans ces pages, fournirait, García Landa en a conscience, d’excellents exemples, sinon l’exemple par excellence de la génération d’un lecteur/auditeur officiellement imprévu —indésirable ou titillant par sa tierce présence— s’invitant au cœur du soliloque plaintif ou du dialogue amoureux. L’auteur émet alors l’hypothèse, a priori recevable que le récit fictionnel (le romanesque), en tant que genre composite notamment, est à même de déployer des stratégies tour à tour subtiles et déconcertantes (de représentation et de dissimulation de la dynamique de communication souhaitée ou refusée) pour jouer à cache-cache avec ses anti-lecteurs, ses lecteurs subreptices et autres envahisseurs de la veillée des chaumières. Une dynamique (transgressive et analogue à celle de la métalepse) est une fois de plus mise en valeur ; mais sur ce dernier et ce seul point on pourrait peut-être demander au théoricien d’aller encore un peu plus loin en se posant la question redoutable pour tout narratologue de l’inertie et de la répétitivité du récit.
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Retropost (2006): En Tropelías
En Tropelías (sic)
Publicado en Literatura y crítica. com. José Ángel García Landa
Me he acercado los ratos que he podido por el Seminario de Investigaciones Culturales "Tropelías", organizado por el área de Teoría Literaria de nuestra universidad (Túa Blesa, Alfredo Saldaña et al.), y aparte de ponencias de días anteriores sobre Espinosa, Javier Marías y otros, he escuchado esta mañana a Túa hablando sobre Gimferrer y a Darío Villanueva sobre la poética de la novela de Francisco Ayala. Y además de escucharlos con mucho gusto, también me he escuchado hacer preguntas o comentarios desde el público (con una voz que siempre suena un tanto ajena en estos casos, y que no la escucho con todo el gusto que esperaba pero que debe de ser la mía).
Bueno, pues Túa hablaba sobre la poética de innovación permanente de Gimferrer, su herencia de tradiciones rompedoras (entre otras de mis lecturas de adolescente modelnista, Rimbaud y Lautréamont)—la de Rubén Darío, la del surrealismo, el modernismo à la Saint-John Perse, Eliot y Pound... y su autor-reinvención con cada libro, en una trayectoria que quiere evitar el "autoepigonismo" y mantener a la poesía en una búsqueda permanente que es su misión.... "su misión: insumisión", apostillo, y especulo sobre maneras de figurar las trayectorias creadoras de los escritores, siguiendo la inspiración matemática de las trayectorias e inflexiones de Túa:
- El punto y parado, o el círculo vicioso, para los escritores que no salen de lo mismo, los autoepígonos.
- La ideal línea recta, para los escritores que siguen siempre adelante, westward ho, sin volver a pisar terreno ya pisado.
- Pero claro, en la Tierra (decía Bonilla) siguiendo adelante volvemos a donde ya estábamos. Igual así hemos trazado un círculo inabarcable para nuestra vista. Quizá haga falta otra persona que nos diga cuál es el centro del círculo que hemos trazado mientras creíamos trazar una recta, en sucesión de estilos, maneras y nuevas identidades y preocupaciones... Sublunarmente, no me parece la recta una opción realizable; toda recta es ideal.
- A mí me gustan las espirales (Nota 1). La espiral tiene algo de progreso y algo de retorno; da vueltas sobre un centro, sin por ello ser un círculo vicioso. Va abarcando cada vez más terreno, abre espacios nuevos sin por eso dejar de tener un centro de gravedad. Creo que seguramente todos nos movemos en espirales, alrededor de nuestras estructuras de personalidad, o temáticas centrales o métaphores obsédantes, auque las vayamos ampliando con nuevas preocupaciones y conocimiento, en nuestro viatge a esa Ítaca que a la vez está en el centro y en la periferia de nuestro mundo a la que nunca llegamos. Queda para un tercero, para un crítico quizá, el ver el trayecto espiral o la amplia circunferencia que describe lo que nosotros percibimos como una recta, o como un divagar en direcciones diversas. Esa figura geométrica es, quizá, una función de la percepción.
Darío Villanueva da un repaso admirable al contexto intelectual de la teoría de la novela de Ayala dentro de los parámetros del pensamiento teórico del siglo XX: sus preocupación por el lector ficcionalizado, ideal en el sentido de implícito en la comunicación narrativa; las concomitancias de este modelo con las ideas de Booth, las de Bajtín, las de Ingarden e Iser, o de los narratólogos franceses. (Apunta también, cosa con la que concurro, los problemas de Iser a la hora de determinar la relación entre el lector implícito y el lector efectivo). Señala DV la influencia por la fenomenología por sus estudios en Alemania. Su continuación de la herencia de Cervantes, y de ese pronunciamiento crucial del Cura sobre la verdad de la ficción: que reside su éxito en el encuentro de autor y lector sobre el texto, sobre unas convenciones de comunicación compartidas. Describe Villanueva un curioso texto de Ayala: tras Muertes de Perro, en El fondo del vaso nos presenta lo que Booth llamaría un narrador no fiable... y lector no fiable a la vez, pues es uno de los lectores de Muertes de Perro que toma la defensiva del dictador contra lo que para él son los infundios que se han publicado en Muertes de Perro, así como contra la manera solapada en que se comunican esos infundios por medio de la ironía.
Yo sugiero que podría verse ahí un síntoma de la hiperconsciencia de Ayala frente a sus lectores: el exiliado teme que sus textos no van a ser bien leídos, sabe que van a encontrar una lectura hostil, quizá; y responde apoderándose del lector hostil, del lector imprevisto, para volverlo a incluir en el círculo idealizado de la comunicación textual. En la práctica de Ayala encontramos pues una dialéctica que va más allá del formalismo (si bien la estructura formal de la obra contraataca, exigiendo ser leída a su manera). Pero ¿encontramos una teorización de esas importantes figuras lectoras que deberíamos añadir al lector implícito? Me refiero al lector hostil, por una parte, y al lector crítico, por otra, dos figuras que comparten una porción de territorio común además de ser bien diferenciables. El lector hostil no aceptará los valores del autor o la justeza de sus representaciones. El lector crítico va más allá del papel que le encomienda la obra, del lugar que le tiene preparado. Una obra crea espacios en blanco para ser rellenada, con la colaboración del lector, pero cuenta con un lector amistoso, favorable, que no entre a rebatir sus presupuestos... Ahora bien, un lector crítico puede hallar huecos en el texto que no han sido previstos por el autor, cosas que faltan porque el autor no ha sabido o no ha querido ver: y la labor del crítico es señalar y completar esas ausencias, de una manera que no consta precisamente en el proyecto estético o ideológico de la obra. Una obra quiere ser leída, pero sus mejores críticos no son los que la leen tal y como quería ser leída. Van más allá: son lectores resistentes, o no invitados, o respondones. Los autores no suelen gustar de los críticos, porque los críticos también son autores, y lejos de escribir ficciones, intentan apropiarse de las de los autores, disputándoles su autoridad, y hasta su autoría si se tercia. Intolerable.
Nota 1: José Ángel García Landa, “Tematización retroactiva, interacción e interpretación: La espiral hermenéutica de Schleiermacher a Goffman.” En Hans-Georg Gadamer: Ontología estética y hermenéutica. Ed. Teresa Oñate y Zubía, Cristina García Santos and Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz. Madrid: Dykinson, 2005. 679-88.
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Harry Thompson, THIS THING OF DARKNESS
Harry Thompson, THIS THING OF DARKNESS
Publicado en Literatura y crítica. com. José Ángel García Landa
Me compré este libro (2005; Headline Review, 2006) por la preciosa ilustración de la portada, que si no es de Turner debería serlo. También por la cita shakespeariana del título, claro: "Esta cosa de la oscuridad reconozco que es mía", dice Próspero sobre el degradado indígena Caliban en The Tempest. La obra de Shakespeare se ha venido leyendo como una alegoría, comentario o síntoma sobre el colonialismo, y también de eso va la novela de Thompson. Qué digo la novela de Thompson. La EXCELENTE novela de Thompson: a por ella si podéis, sin pensarlo dos veces. Ojo: 875 páginas que se hacen cortas.
Como decía, va del imperialismo y colonialismo, de las actitudes occidentales y de los genocidios perpetrados en Tierra del Fuego y en Oceanía. Pero también va sobre teoría de la evolución: otra razón por la que me la compré es que Darwin es uno de los protagonistas. La novela dramatiza el conflicto religioso y filosófico que supuso el avance de la ciencia y la racionalidad en el XIX, llevando a la crisis de la fe y al escepticismo en el caso de Darwin. El panorama es amplio, casi planetario, abarcando desde contactos con pueblos primitivos hasta elegantes salones ingleses; grandiosos paisajes sudamericanos y tormentas vívidamente descritas, horizontes enormes. Un panorama amplio también en el tiempo, siendo la pieza central el viaje alrededor del mundo de Darwin en la expedición del Beagle al mando de FitzRoy; pero abarca el libro desde los preliminares (con el suicidio del anterior capitán del Beagle en Patagonia), pasando por el famoso debate sobre la evolución entre Huxley y un primate of the Church, el obispo Wilberforce... Hasta terminar con el suicidio del propio FitzRoy, desencantado con su fortuna y su carrera, y atormentado por el avance del escepticismo y de un mundo que él ve carente de sentido si no está organizado por una divinidad benevolente.
Y la benevolencia de la Divinidad queda bastante en duda... Los nativos a los que quiere civilizar y cristianizar FitzRoy son impredecibles: tan pronto dan resultados casi demasiado buenos, adoptando los valores y modales ingleses casi hasta el extremo de la caricatura, o son incomprensibles, brutales y enigmáticos. Si logra entenderse con ellos, son entonces los europeos quienes plantean problemas, con su simplismo, su codicia brutal y su desprecio a la vida e intereses de los nativos. FitzRoy no encuentra acomodo en la vida; él mismo sufre de accesos súbitos de demencia, y aunque consigue tras largos años de soledad casarse con la mujer ideal que le quitaba la respiración (a regular angel in the house, además) ésta muere. Los proyectos de FitzRoy para desarrollar sistemas de predicción meteorológica se enfrentan a los absurdos burocráticos y la ignorancia de las autoridades; su intento de aplicar equitativamente la justicia inglesa cuando lo nombran gobernador de Nueva Zelanda topan con el doble rasero que las autoridades y los colonos esperaban de él.
Fitzroy cree en un mundo ordenado donde todos tienen su lugar; el mundo que inaugura el pensamiento Darwin justifica la superioridad del hombre occidental, y aboca a las razas inferiores al la extinción en una lucha por la vida que aquí se encarna a escala mundial en el imperialismo británico, y en el americano contemporáneo, por analogía transparente que establece el autor. Las palabras del general Rosas para justificar su guerra contra los indios están calcadas de los discursos de Tony Blair. Darwin es aquí un Darwinista social, que aunque en absoluto aprueba el genocidio, predice que las razas inferiores y los grandes simios serán exterminados para ahondar la diferencia entre el hombre y los animales. Para disgusto suyo, Fitzroy se ve asociado a las teorías de Darwin, y ve cómo sus acciones contribuyen a fines globalizadores que él no deseaba. FitzRoy era un explorador, no un conquistador, y le da asco el progreso de la máquina imperialista.
Y su inicial amistad con Darwin, que lo acompaña durante años en el Beagle, se enfría y termina en un enfrentamiento espiritual de proporciones casi cósmicas. Darwin acaba con Dios y se pone a sí mismo, viejo primate, en su lugar, dejándose una larga barba blanca por subrayar la parodia; desarrolla una teoría de la realidad, de la estructura de la tierra y del origen y lugar del hombre, que repugna y horroriza a FitzRoy, cuyos afanes de ilustración y desarrollo del conocimiento no pretendían este resultado. La novela dramatiza así el enfrentamiento entre un cosmos ordenado por Dios, y visto desde el prisma de un aristócrata que tenía su lugar en el siglo XVIII, y el universo vacío de sentido del siglo XX, anticipado por Darwin. FizRoy cierra el círculo con su suicidio, arruinado por sus empresas benevolentes, envejecido, desilusionado por el avance de una civilización burocrática, mecánica, regimentada y sin ideales que él pueda compartir.
"Cuando era joven, pensó FitzRoy, era un viajero, cruzando mares desconocidos, amo de mi propio destino. El viento y las olas se han estrellado contra mí, pero me abrí paso luchando, para descubrir nuevas costas y mundos desconocidos. Luego me volví parte de una máquina, un simple diente en un engranaje. Me quitaron mi libertad, mi independencia. Pero al menos mi esfuerzo sirvió para allanar el camino a otros viajeros, que siguieron mis pasos. Ahora, me han quitado hasta ese pequeño consuelo. La solución está clara. Debo viajar a donde no puedan alcanzarme. Debo emprender el viaje una vez más, a la orilla más lejana. Debo emprender el viaje más allá de los viajes. Un viaje sin mapas."
Fizroy sueña con volver a ver a su esposa amada; a Jemmy Button, el nativo que tanta amistad le profesó, a sus jóvenes marineros que murieron ahogados. ¿Los verá, o tiene razón Darwin? ¿Era FitzRoy sólo un primate más, demasiado evolucionado para su propio bien?
Una novela histórica magnífica, no sólo de la historia,sino sobre la historia. Y para la historia. Con horizontes inmensos, que abarcan el origen y sentido de la humanidad, de la modernidad, de la globalización, y de las vidas individuales, pequeñas historias que buscan su sentido dentro de esta gran narración. Harry Thompson murió de una grave enfermedad al poco de publicarla; es su única novela. Tampoco necesitaba otra.
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