Modernism (Routledge Revivals)

Peter Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135036775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977, this book focuses on Modernism, one of the most frequently used terms in the discussion of twentieth-century literature and culture. It provides an historical account of the concept, showing the relation of Modernism to Victorian culture and uses the work of Henry James and W. B. Yeats in its analysis. The text focuses on the time period between 1910 and 1930 and considers the criticism of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce's Ulysses, Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the complex relationship of D. H. Lawrence to Modernism. The author also includes a section on developments since 1930 to show both the value of Modernism as a critical term, and the problems of achieving an exact usage.

1

Development

Modernism is part of the historical process by which the arts have dissociated themselves from nineteenth-century assumptions, which had come in the course of time to seem like dead conventions. These assumptions about literary forms were closely related to a particular relationship between the writer and his readers – on the whole a stable relationship in which the writer could assume a community of attitudes, a shared sense of reality.

The most obvious manifestation of this is the ‘realism’ of the Victorian novel. Although the novelists were intelligently aware of the varieties of human experience – how otherwise could they have been novelists? – they assumed that they and their readers shared a common reality. On the whole the Victorian novel followed the path entered on by Jane Austen, as suggested by Scott when he praised Emma for exemplifying

the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.

This emphasis on common experience is typical of the Victorian novelists – of Thackeray, Trollope, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot. Thackeray, indeed, complained of Dickens’ failure in this respect in a letter to David Masson in 1851: ‘I quarrel with his Art in many respects: which I don’t think represents Nature duly.’ But, while Dickens certainly used sensation, melodrama and coincidence more than his contemporaries, he did not doubt that he was leading his readers into a shared ethical realm where they would recognize the moral truth in the exaggerated or selective representation of life. He had a wider understanding of reality rather than a dismissive attitude to it.

The stress on shared experience explains the habit of direct address in Victorian novels, which modern readers find distressingly coy:

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having, is satisfied? – Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

(Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847)

The author now leaves him [Mr Harding] in the hands of his readers; not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts he has striven to learn.

(Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1857)

But the effect of her [Dorothea’s] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

(George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1870)

These conclusions to major Victorian novels all appeal directly to their readers in emotional terms, assuming that their experiences of life will be sufficiently like those of the authors to claim assent. Once the novelist senses a likely failure of response in the readers, this kind of ending disappears. With it goes the nineteenth-century consensus.

That consensus, the view that writer and reader share a justified expectation of what literature is and can provide, did not need to be confined to the realistic novel. With the drama it simply took the form of the belief that entertainment was paramount, in burlesque, melodrama, pantomime – or, indeed, Shakespeare. In poetry as in the novel, the expectation was of ethical enlightenment, to be conveyed in a form intelligible to a wide audience. It was because Tennyson was prepared to fulfil these requirements that he came to occupy so prominent a position in the intellectual life of his time. The review of Tennyson’s two-volume Poems of 1842 by his friend James Spedding reveals the underlying attitude:

All that is of true and lasting worth in poetry, must have its root in a sound view of human life and the condition of man in the world. Where this is not, the most consummate art can produce nothing which man will long care for – where it is, the rudest will never want an audience.

In Memoriam was the poem in which Tennyson managed to fulfil these expectations while at the same time expressing his own deepest perplexities. In his later poems, it sometimes seems as if his sense of public responsibility plays too large a part in determining the nature of what he writes. It was because Tennyson came to accept this ‘public’ conception of poetry that he was able to fulfil the duties of Poet Laureate with such confidence – and was perhaps the last poet so able to act. In other Victorian poets such as Browning and Hopkins there is a gap between the poetry and the audience’s expectations. Browning managed to out-talk his critics, but his poetry became garrulous in the process, while Hopkins did not publish. Tennyson spoke for and to his age, and the Idylls of the King themselves were written as his fullest effort to express sound moral teaching in the form of poetry: ‘I tried in my Idylls to teach men the need of the ideal’, he was to say. Few later writers would admit to so directly didactic a purpose, or have such confidence that ‘the ideal’ was an entity universally recognizable.

The high esteem in which writers like Tennyson and George Eliot were held indicates that Victorian culture accepted literature as socially important, and allowed it to take over some of the functions previously fulfilled by religion. In order to do this, it had to be ethically orientated. But the price of this was a certain lack of force and range in Victorian literature, most notoriously in the treatment of sexual relationships. How little we learn from even the relatively outspoken Dickens about the commonness of prostitution in his society. (There could be no English Balzac or Dostoevsky.) This sense of the limitation imposed on the writer as his part of the social consensus became increasingly irritating, as the period went on, to those more interested in the True and the Beautiful than the Good. On the Continent, especially in France, this had long been the case. Neither Baudelaire nor Flaubert would have fulfilled the bourgeois conception of morality, and both were acutely aware of their alienation. In England the reaction came later with the Pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti and Swinburne (denounced so vituperatively by Robert Buchanan as ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ in 1871). Aestheticism, as justified by Walter Pater in the Conclusion of The Renaissance in 1873, was a direct challenge to the prevailing view that the artist’s standing was that of a moral spokesman. For Pater the artist is valuable because he helps to bring about ‘a quickened, multiplied consciousness’ through his creation of beautiful works. In Oscar Wilde’s formulation in ‘The Decay of Lying’ in 1890 the whole Victorian position is neatly subverted: ‘The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’. Thus the moral earnestness of the mid-century was finally dissipated in the extravagances and paradoxes of the Nineties.

Nor was the tradition which passed from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetes the only one to challenge Victorian orthodoxies. In the theatre, the new drama began to develop, deriving from Ibsen’s middle-period plays with their powerful assaults on social convention, like The Pillars of the Community (1877) and A Doll’s House (1879). Bernard Shaw published his three earliest plays in 1898 with the title Plays Unpleasant, as a direct attack on the susceptibilities of his audience. As he put it in his Preface: ‘I must, however, warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.’ Far from seeking a consensus, the dramatist is challenging his audience’s whole scheme of values. A similar development can be seen in the late nineteenth-century novel. George Moore’s attack on the circulating library system in his brilliant pamphlet ‘Literature as Nurse, or Circulating Morals’ in 1895 marked the end of the easy Victorian agreement about which constituted an acceptable morality. The outraged reception of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1896) shows the shock caused when a novelist tried to alter the focus of the novel. (The Bishop of Wakefield wrote to the Yorkshire Post to relate that he had been so disgusted with its insolence and indecency that he threw it on the fire.) Hardy’s dignified remark in his 1902 Preface that he could see nothing exceptionable in his handling of the tragic theme in ‘a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age’ suggests his sense that the novel should belong not to the Victorian family fireside but to the mature and responsible reader. In ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ in 1885 Tennyson had already denounced the new literary frankness through his aged spokesman:

Authors – essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.

Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare; Down with Reticence, down with Reverence – forward, naked – let them stare.

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;

Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, – Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.

Divergent and often conflicting ideas about art and culture are characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century, and this suggests the breakdown of prevailing assumptions, artistic, ethical and social.

The novelist who most consistently strove to create a new form of fiction in English at this time was Henry James (1843–1916). (Hardy, disgusted and upset at the reception of Jude, turned after it exclusively to poetry.) Apart from his numerous novels and stories, James also wrote literary criticism in which he showed an intense interest in the technical problems of the novelist’s art. This theoretical concern running alongside the practice of the art was itself to be characteristic of Modernism. James noted this change in The Art of Fiction’ in 1884:

Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it – of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.

James welcomed the change since the era of Dickens and Thackeray when ‘there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.’ He argued, indeed, that theoretical understanding, such as he found in the French novelists from Flaubert to Zola, was necessary to complete artistic success, and himself provided, in his many reviews and in the Prefaces he wrote for the New York edition of his novels (1906–7), the most sustained criticism of the novel in English. It is not surprising to find him challenging many Victorian assumptions about the novel.

In ‘The Art of Fiction’ James criticized the tendency for Victorian novelists to break into their novels by some form of direct statement:

I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only ‘making believe’. He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime …

James is here insisting, in what may now seem a naive way, that the novelist must take seriously his role as a truth-teller. The easy-going relationship with the public is replaced by an austere responsibility to the work itself. And in relation to that work, James’ emphasis is on unity:

A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.

Here James is applying the language of the Romantic critics, especially Coleridge, to the novel. The concern with organic unity remained central for him, and led him away later from Victorian conventions. But he always argued that unity did not mean simply selecting a limited range of material; on the contrary, fiction was animated by the attempt to catch ‘the note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life.’ Finally, he wittily took issue with complacency about the moral purity of the English novel, asserting ‘not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence.’ It avoids, that is to say, dangerous topics, particularly those concerned with sexual behaviour, in order to retain its purity, which turns out to be morally vacuous. Thus in respect to authorial intrusion and to the evasiveness resulting from the ethical consensus, James is critical of the conventional novel, and advocates a deeper kind of unity as his ideal.

In his critical prefaces, published as The Art of the Novel by R. P. Blackmur, James discusses his own work and his attempts to solve the problems arising from the limitations of the Victorian novel. Probably the best-known single passage is in the preface to The Tragic Muse:

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is moreover not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? … There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from ‘counting’, I delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form.

The analogy with pictorial composition is used to insist upon the necessity for aesthetic unity in a novel. In fact Victorian painters had been as profuse of detail as Victorian novelists, but just as Whistler was creating a strikingly harmonious pictorial art, so James aimed at the unified novel. Thackeray, Dumas, Tolstoy: the grouping now seems curious, but is presumably to suggest the widespread tendency for nineteenth-century novels to be what James called Middlemarch, ‘a treasure-house of detail but … an indifferent whole.’

The idea of unity, of organic form, is central to James’ thinking about the novel. But he does not seek this unity in what might seem the simplest way: by writing only short novels, or stories on single subjects (though he sometimes does this). What he values about the novel is certainly not its exclusiveness; he often emphasizes its variety as a merit, as in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:

Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form – its power … to appear most true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.

James goes further here than his predecessors in stressing the variety of personal responses which may occur, the subjectivity of each individual observer of the human scene:

He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.

Victorian writers would have been disturbed by the subjectivism of this; James rejoices in it (‘there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may not open’). But the admission that the world is different for different observers poses urgent problems for the artist who is preoccupied with unity. How is he to unify the divergent elements which he knows to constitute life itself, especially when he is aware that each consciousness experiences life differently? James’ answer is what Blackmur calls the Fine Central Intelligence. In The Portrait of a Lady that Intelligence (I would prefer to call it a Consciousness) is Isabel Archer. James describes how he saw her as the answer to his problem of focus:

‘Place the centre of the subject in the you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Development
• 2 The era of Modernism: 1910–1930
• 3 Since 1930
• Bibliography
• Index