Chapter 18 Impressions of modern literature

In the first place, a modern person can hardly fail to be shocked by the fact that two critics sitting on opposite sides of the same table can simultaneously express completely different opinions about the same book.The one on the right calls it a masterpiece of English prose; the one on the left, meanwhile, sees it as a pile of waste papers that should be thrown away if the fire is not extinguished.On Milton and Keats, however, the two critics agree.They display a keen sensibility and unmistakable genuine enthusiasm.It was only when they discussed the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably clashed.The controversial book, published about two months ago, is at once a lasting contribution to English literature and a hodgepodge of affectation and mediocrity.That explains why they disagree.

This is a peculiar description.As far as the reader is concerned, he hopes to get a compass to judge the situation in the chaos of modern literature; Does it forever complement the fixed luminaries of English literature, or does it just snuff out the spark, on the contrary.And this explanation leaves both readers and writers alike at a loss.But if we are on the reader's side, and first explore his predicament, we will soon see the light and the confusion no longer exist.The same situation has happened frequently in the past.Ever since Robert Ellesmieux (or perhaps Stephen Phillips) somehow diffused that vibe, we've heard on average twice a year—in the spring and fall—from the learned men that new methods There is disputation and unanimity about the old ways; and among grown-ups there is an equal disagreement about these books.It would be still more inconceivable, still more disconcerting, if, by accident, the two gentlemen on either side of the table were to agree that the book of Mr. Nothingness should be called an unquestionable masterpiece. Let us decide whether ten shillings and sixpence should be spent in support of their judgment.Both of them are well-known critics, and their coincident opinions here will be meticulously translated into lines of solemn eulogy to enhance the dignity of English and American literature.

It must be some natural irony, then, and some narrow-minded distrust of contemporary geniuses, that make us automatically decide, as that review goes on, whether they will agree or not—see They show no sign of it now—it would be a waste to pay half a guinea for all the modern zealous controversies, and a library card would satisfy us quite well on the occasion. needs.Yet the question remains, and let us venture to submit it to the reviewers themselves.A reader who has as much reverence for the dead as anyone else, is tormented by doubts that reverence for the dead is indispensably bound up with an understanding of the living.Is there no one now to act as a guide to such a reader?After a quick survey, both critics agree: Unfortunately, there is no such character.For what value are their own reviews, so far as recent works are concerned?Certainly not worth ten shillings and sixpence.They next draw from the storehouse of their own experience terrible examples of past mistakes; critical blunders, directed not at the living but at the dead, cost them their jobs and endanger their reputations.The only advice they can offer is to respect one's own instincts, to follow them fearlessly, not to subordinate them to the living critic or book reviewer, but to test one's own instincts by reading and rereading the masterpieces of the past. no.

While we humbly thank these reviewers, we cannot help but reflect that this was not always the case.We should believe that once upon a time there was a norm, a maxim, which governed a great republic of readers in ways unknown to us now.This is not to say that those great critics - Treyden, Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold - were impeccable judges of their contemporary works, whose judgments imprinted them indelibly and exonerated It saves the reader the trouble of judging the valuation for himself.The errors of these great men in their criticism of their contemporaries are too well known to be worth mentioning here.But the mere fact of their presence has a concentrating effect.It is not fancy that we suppose that that influence alone would be sufficient to control dissent at the dinner table, and to give the ramblings about a work just published the authority we are looking for.The different schools will argue as vehemently as ever, but, behind every reader's mind, there is a realization that there is at least one man who is watching closely the major canons of literature, and if you bring before him some peculiar work of the present , he would consider it in connection with eternity, and confine it, by his own authority, to waves of opposing praise and reproach.But when it comes to making a critic, nature must be generous and society must be mature.The scattered dining tables of the modern world, the pursuit and eddy of currents that constitute contemporary society, can only be dominated by a colossus of incomparable majesty.Where is that tall figure whom we have a right to hope for?We have book critics, but no critics; we have a million competent, clean police officers, but we don't have a single judge.Men of taste, learning, and ability have been addressing the young, and praising the dead.However, the result of their capable and diligent pen and ink is often to dry the living body of literature into a small skeleton.Treyden had his straightforward force, Keats had his graceful natural style and deep insight and wisdom, Flaubert had the boundless force of his fanatical convictions, and especially Coleridge, with his Whole poetry is concocted in it, and here and there utters a kind of deep generalization, which are sparks of the mind as it is read, and which seem to be the very soul of the work—a critic of the kind we have nowhere now. can be found.

To all this, the reviewers generously agreed.A great critic, they say, is the rarest of men.But if a great critic should miraculously appear, how should we support him, what should we support him with?Great critics, if they are not great poets themselves, are hatched and bred from the profligacy of the age. (Literary Criticism) To defend a great man, to establish or destroy a school.But our age is on the brink of poverty.No one name stands out from the crowd.There is no workshop where a master master can make a young man proud to apprentice there.Old Mr. Hardy has long since retired from the arena, and there is something exotic in Mr. Conrad's genius which prevents him from exerting his influence as an admirable and honorable icon, but alienates him from all others.As for the others, none of them, though numerous, energetic, and at the height of their creative powers, could seriously influence his contemporaries, or give insight through the present reality to what we would gladly call immortality. That not-too-distant future.If we take a century as our trial period, and ask how much of the writings produced in England in these days will survive then, we shall have to answer that not only is it impossible for us to agree on a certain This book will live on forever, and we very much doubt that there will be such a book.This is a fragmented era.There are stanzas, pages, chapters here and there, the beginning of this novel and the end of that novel, to rival the best of any age or author.But can we take a pile of loose pages to our posterity, or ask the readers of that time, facing the whole literary heritage, to remove our little pearl from our Sifting from a pile of junk?That's the question critics can legitimately ask of their tablemates—novelists and poets.

At first, the weight of pessimism seemed strong enough to overwhelm any opposition.Yes, we reiterate, these are barren times.There are many reasons for its poverty; yet, frankly, if we compare this century with another, the comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. Waverley, Journey, Kublai Khan, Don Juan, Hazlett's Essays, Heporion, and Prometheus Unchained are all published Between 1800 and 1821.Our century is not short of hard work; yet, if we are asking for literary masterpieces, the pessimists are, on the face of it, right.It seems that after an age of genius must be followed by an age of struggle: the expression of riotous and transgressive ideas through pure and hard work.All credit, of course, goes to those who sacrificed their personal immortality to put that house in order.But if what we want is literary masterpieces, where do we look for them?We may feel that a little contemporary poetry will survive; they are a few poems by Mr. Yeats, Mr. Davis, and Mr. de la Meier.Of course Mr. Lawrence is great at times, but on many more occasions he is far from it.Mr. Bilbohm is perfect within the confines of his own way of writing, but not in a great way. Some fragments of "Distant Places and Days of Past" will undoubtedly be left to posterity forever.It was a memorable sudden upheaval--infinitely daring, terrible disaster.So we pick and choose, choose now this and now that, hold up the chosen work for all to see, hear it defended or ridiculed, and at last we have to accept the objection that even if In this way, we are merely agreeing with the critics that this is an age incapable of sustained effort, an age of fragments and fragments, which cannot be seriously compared with the preceding one.

But just as this opinion prevails, and we subscribe to its authority, we sometimes become acutely aware that we don't believe a word we say.We reiterate that these were barren and exhausting times; we must look back with envy.It was the first of another sunny day in early spring.Life isn't completely devoid of color.The telephone that interrupts the most serious conversations, interrupts the most weighty observations, has a legend in itself.The occasional gossip that has no chance of immortality to give expression to men's thoughts, often has a setting of lights, streets, houses, and people, whether beautiful or grotesque, that weaves itself into a In the moment that lasts forever.Yet such is life; and we are speaking of literature.We must try to separate the two, keep them out of the entanglement, and defend the rash spirit of optimism against the seemingly superior rhetoric of pessimism.

Much of our optimism comes from instinct.It comes from fine days, wine, and conversation; it comes from the fact that when life daily offers such treasures, each day brings to mind more than the most eloquent man can express, though we admire death so much As a generation, we would rather have the life we ​​have now.There is something about modern life that we would not want to trade if all the lives of past ages were available to us.Modern literature, with all its inadequacies, has the same power and the same fascination over us.It seems to be some kind of kinship that we want to deliberately neglect and abandon every day, but we cannot do without it after all.It has the same homely quality as the world in which we live, of our own making, and in which we live, rather than something seen from the outside, which, though majestic, is alien to us.No one in the past needs to cherish and cherish our contemporary writers more than our generation.We are simply severed from our ancestors.A slight shift in the scale of measurement—a mass of things that had been put in place for many generations, then suddenly fell—has shaken that fabric through and through, alienating us from the past, and making us perhaps overdo it. Be vividly aware of the present.Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, and thinking things that were impossible for our parents.We are far more sensitive to differences hitherto unnoticed than to similarities which have been so well expressed.Part of the reason new books tempt us to read them is that we hope they will reflect this realignment of our attitudes—these scenes, ideas, and The apparently fortuitous assemblage of the incongruous things that strike—and, as literature often does, return it to our depository intact and distinct.We do have every reason for optimism here.No age has more writers than ours determined to express the differences that separate them from the past, rather than the similarities that bind them to it.It is unpleasant to name authors, but it is almost impossible for the most casual reader who dabbles in poetry, novels, and biographies to remain indifferent to the courage and sincerity, and in general, to the wide-ranging originality of our writers.However, our sense of excitement was strangely truncated.Book after book leaves us with the same feeling that the original promises were not kept;Much of the best modern work appears to be recorded under pressure, in a pale abbreviation that preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of characters as they pass the screen.But that flash faded quickly, leaving us with a deep sense of dissatisfaction.The sharp stimulation we receive is as intense as the pleasure we get.

After all, we are back where we started, vacillating between two extremes, now enthusiastic, the next pessimistic, unable to draw any conclusions about our contemporary writers.We have turned to the critics, and they have passed the buck.Now, then, is the time to take their advice and turn to the masterpieces of a bygone era to correct our extreme attitudes.We feel ourselves drawn to these masterpieces not by sober judgment, but by some urgent need to fix our wavering thoughts on their safe and secure foundations.But, honestly, the startling contrast between past and present does feel unnerving at first.There is no doubt that in great writing there is always a certain element of dullness.In the page after page of Wordsworth, Scott, and Lady Jane Austen, there is a poised tranquility that is almost drowsy.All kinds of opportunities came one after another, but they ignored them.Shades and nuances of color accumulate and they ignore them.They seem to deliberately refuse to satisfy those senses that modern man so eagerly stimulates: sight, hearing, touch—and above all, it is about the senses of man, in short, the depths of his soul. And changes in perception, his complexities, his turmoil, his ego.All this, in the works of Wordsworth, Scott and Jane Austen, there is little.Where, then, does that sense of security, which gradually, joyfully, and completely overwhelm us, come from?It is their beliefs—their unwavering beliefs—that work on us.In Wordsworth, the philosophical poet, this is very obvious.Yet the same is true of the novelist who conceives his castles in the air and scribbles out his masterpieces before breakfast, and the humble girl who writes quietly and quietly just for the pleasure of others.They both share the same natural conviction that life has a certain affirmative quality.They have their own judgments about behavior.They understand the relationship between people and between people and nature.Neither of them had said anything frankly about this, but that was the point.We find ourselves saying: Just trust and everything else will fall into place.To take a simple example recently brought to mind by the publication of "The Watsons": you have only to believe that a good girl instinctively comforts a boy who is being taunted at a ball, and if you silently and unquestioningly believe that With it, you will not only make readers feel the same way a hundred years later, but you will make them feel it as a literary work.Because that certainty is the condition that enables one to write.To believe that your impressions are equally applicable to other people is to break free from the shackles and shackles of individuality.To explore the whole world of adventure and romance with an energy that still fascinates us is freedom, Scottish freedom.It is also the first step in that mystical creative process of which Jane Austen was a very great master.That little grain of life experience, once selected, convinced, and placed outside of herself, it will be placed in its proper place, and she will be free to use it in a way that analysts will never be able to see through. its arcane procedure, to turn it into such a complete statement that it is literature.

Our contemporary writers, then, trouble us because they no longer believe.The most sincere of them will only tell us what happened to him.They cannot create a world because they cannot escape the bondage of other people.They can't tell stories because they don't believe the stories are true.They cannot generalize particular cases.They rely on their feelings and emotions because their evidence is solid; they don't rely on their reason because its messages are hazy.They can't help it, they don't use some of the most powerful and delicate weapons in the writer's art.Though they had all the wealth of the English language behind them, they passed from hand to hand, book to book, nothing but the meanest copper coins.Settled on a fresh angle of that eternal prospect, they simply took out their notebooks quickly, and frowning desperately recorded the fleeting dawn (on what did it shine?) and the illusory brilliance ( They may constitute nothing).Here, however, the critics chime in and strike out as impartial.

If, they say, this description is applicable and not, as it is likely to be, entirely dependent on where we sit at the table, and on some purely personal relation to mustard jars and vases, then, in The stakes in judging contemporary work are now greater than ever before.If their criticisms are greatly off-target, they have all sorts of excuses; and no doubt it is better to take Matthew Arnold's advice and retreat from the burning land of the present to the safety and tranquility of a bygone age.Matthew Arnold writes: "When we approach poetry so close to our own time—like those of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth—we enter a burning land, because, Evaluations of such poetry are often not only personal, but sentimental personal." This passage, we are reminded, was written in 1880.They said: Be careful when you take an inch out of miles of ribbon and put it under a microscope.If you wait patiently, things will fall into place by themselves.To maintain the golden mean, to study the classics.What's more, life is short; with the centenary of Byron's death approaching, the hotly debated question is: did he marry his own sister?All in all—if there is any conclusion to be drawn at all at the moment when the time should come to an end, and everyone is still talking at the same time, then let us conclude! —It seems wise for modern writers to give up hope of creating literary masterpieces.Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not works but notebooks; and time, like a good teacher, takes them in his hand and points out their ink smears, scribbles, erasures and tear them in two; however, he will not throw them in the wastebasket.He will save them because other students will find them useful.It is from these present notebooks that future masterpieces will be created.Literature, as critics have said, has long roots and has undergone many changes; and only the short-sighted and narrow-minded would exaggerate these little storms, though they may confuse those who toss the sea The boat rocked.On the surface of the sea, people are drenched by violent storms; in the depths of the ocean, there is a continuous and calm undercurrent. As for those critics who make it their business to disseminate opinions about contemporary works, let us admit that their work is difficult, dangerous, and often tiresome; let us implore them to be generous in their encouragement, but Spare wreaths and laurel wreaths, for they twist and wither easily, and within six months make the wearer look a little funny.Let them take a more expansive and less personal view of modern literature, and indeed see writers as men engaged in some grand construction, built by a collective effort, as individual workers Just be silent.Let them slam the door on the well-fed party, abandon, at least for the time being, the bewildering subject—whether Byron married his sister—and back away from the table where we sit and gossip Let's talk about some interesting things about literature itself at a distance as wide as a palm.When they go, let us keep them, and remind them of that haggard lord, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a creamy steed in her stable, ready for the Saviour's use, She has been watching impatiently but confidently from the top of the mountain, waiting for every sign of the coming of the Redeemer; let us ask them to follow her example, carefully watching the distant horizon, preparing the way for the masterpiece to come.