Chapter 20 narrow bridge of art

Most critics are dismissive of the present, their eyes firmly fixed on the past.No doubt they are wise not to comment on what is currently being produced; they leave that task to book critics, a title which seems to imply that they and what they observe are ephemeral things.However, you sometimes cannot help asking yourself: must the task of the critic always be to evaluate the works of the past?Should their gaze be fixed forever on the past?Could he also turn sometimes, like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, and look into the future with his hand over his eyes, and draw in the mist the vague outline of the land we may one day reach?Whether these ideas are true, of course, can never be proved; but, in a time like ours, there is indeed a great temptation to indulge in such speculations.We are clearly in a time when we are not firmly fixed in our footings; things move around us; we ourselves move.And isn't it the critic's job to tell us, or at least guess, where we're going?

Obviously, this inquiry must strictly narrow itself; but, in a short space, it may be possible to take an unsatisfactory and entangled case, on which we examine And with this puzzle solved, we may be able to better speculate about where we're headed. Indeed, no one can read much of modern literature without feeling that something unsatisfactory and entangled stands in the way.Writers everywhere try to do what they cannot do, to make the form they use contain a meaning foreign to it.Many reasons could be suggested, but let us select only one here, and that is that poetry has not served our generation as it has served our grandparents.Poetry is not free to serve us now as it used to serve them.The great channel of thought and feeling, which once carried such energy and genius, itself now seems narrowed, or has been diverted from its original direction.

Of course, the above statement is true only to a certain extent; our age is rich in lyric poetry; in this respect, perhaps no age has ever been richer than ours.But that lyrical cry of ecstasy and despair, so focused, so personal, and so limited, is, for our generation and for the next to come, It is no longer enough.People's hearts are filled with terrible, mixed, uncontrollable emotions.The history of the earth is three billion years long, and the life of man lasts only a brief moment; for all that, his powers of thought are infinite; life is infinitely beautiful, yet repulsive; Love and hate; opposite science and religion destroy the faith that is between them; all the bonds of mutual union between men seem to be broken, yet some control must remain— —It is in this atmosphere of hesitation and inner conflict that writers now have to create, and the delicate structure of a lyric poem is no longer suitable for containing such insights, just as a rose petal is not suitable for wrapping a rough and huge rock.

But when we ask ourselves what has been used in the past to express an idea—an idea full of contrasts and conflicts; an idea that seems to require one character to be in conflict with another, and at the same time need each other A certain ability to form a whole needs some concept to give harmony and strength to this whole?We must answer: there was such a literary form in the past; it was not the form of the lyric; it was the form of the drama, the poetic drama of the Elizabethan age.And this form seems to be dead today, and there is no possibility of resurrection and regeneration at all. For, if we look at the state of the poetic theater, we must doubt deeply that there is any power in the world to revive it.Writers of the highest genius and ambition have been writing, and are still writing, poetic dramas.It seems that every great poet since Treyden's death has tried his hand at this field.Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne and Browning (we are only citing the dead poets) all wrote poetic plays, but none succeeded.Of all the poetic plays they wrote, perhaps only Swinburne's Etalente and Shelley's Prometheus are still read, but compared with the other works of these two writers, they seem relatively cold.Other poetic dramas have long since been shelved, sleeping with their heads buried under their wings like birds.No one wants to disturb the sweet dreams of these sound sleepers.

It is still fascinating to try to find some explanation for this failure, and maybe it will illuminate future directions we are considering.Perhaps the reason why poets can no longer write good poetic dramas lies somewhere in this direction. There is a vague and mysterious thing called an outlook on life.If we turn from literature to life for a moment, in life we ​​all know people who are in conflict with life, unhappy people who never get what they want; Everything you see is crooked.Then there are those who, though contented, seem to have lost all connection with reality.They waste all their affection on puppies and china bric-a-brac.They are uninterested in everything but the changes in their own health and the ups and downs of snobbery in society.There are others, however, who make a strong impression on us; it is difficult to say whether for what exact reason, whether by nature or by circumstance, they are in a position which enables them to give full play to important things. their sensual instincts.They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a passion in their demeanor, an interest in their behaviour.They seemed to be full of life.This may be partly the result of circumstance—they were born in the right environment for them—but much more is the result of some fortunate balance of their own qualities, so that they are not at an awkward angle, See everything crooked; nor do they see everything distorted through a fog; everything they see is square and in proportion; they grasp Something solid; when they act, they are productive.

A writer also has a view of life, though it is a different kind of life.They will also be in an uncomfortable position; as writers, they will also be blocked and frustrated, and they will not get what they want.This is the case, for example, with the novels of George Gissing.So they, too, retire to the suburbs, and waste their interest on lapdogs and duchesses—those flashy, sentimental, sycophantic snobs; and we have some of the most accomplished novelists, That's it.There are, however, other writers who, as if by nature or circumstance, were in a position which freed them to apply their sensuous instincts to matters of importance.That's not to say that they write quickly and fluently, or that they're instantly famous or well-known.You would have to take pains to analyze a quality which is present in most of the great literary ages and which stands out in Elizabethan drama.The Elizabethans seem to have had a view of life, a position which allowed them to move freely about their limbs, a proper view which, though composed of various elements, served their purpose.

Of course, part of this is the result of the environment.At a time when the public interest was not in books but in the theatre, the towns were still relatively small, the distances between people, and the ignorance of even the educated, filled the imagination of the Elizabethans very naturally. A lion and a unicorn, a duke and a duchess, violence and mystery.This tendency is also reinforced by something which we cannot articulate so simply, but nevertheless feel with certainty.They have a view of life which enables them to express their own thoughts and feelings freely and fully.Shakespeare's plays are not the products of a fettered and frustrated mind; they are the flexible envelopes in which his thoughts were contained.He passed without hindrance from philosophy to drunken din, from love song to an argument, from simple joy to deep meditation.This is true of all Elizabethan plays: though they may—and do—wear us, they never make us feel that they are fearful, or coy, or that anything is hindering, hindering, or depressing them. The full expression of thoughts and feelings.

Yet when we open a modern poetic drama—and this applies to most modern poetry as well—our first thought is that the author is not free-spirited.He is fearful, he is coerced, he is coy.We might marvel; and what a good excuse!For who among us can still feel at ease with a man in a robe called Sinocrest, or with a woman in a blanket called Udusa?For some reason, however, the modern poetic drama has always to do with Sinocrese rather than with Mr. Robinson; it deals with Thessaly and not with Charing Cross Road.When the Elizabethan dramatists set their scene in a foreign country, and made princes and princesses the heroes and heroines of their plays, they merely moved that scene from one side of a thin veil to the other. .It's a natural way of giving depth and distance to their characters.But the country is still English; and the Bohemian prince and the English nobility are still the same thing.Our modern poetic dramatists, however, seem to seek that veil of the past and distance for a different reason.They do not want a veil raised high, but a veil that encloses things; and they set their scenes in the past because they fear the present.They realized that it would be detrimental to the decency of poetry if they tried to express the thoughts, the sights, the sympathies and antipathies that really swirled in their heads during the fine year of 1927; You can groan, hesitate, and maybe have to sit down, or leave the room.The Elizabethans had an idea which allowed them complete liberty; the modern dramatist either has no idea, or has an idea so rigid that it binds his hands and feet, and distorts what he sees. to the scene.He had therefore to take refuge with Messrs. Sinocrates, who said nothing, or only what could be decently expressed in blank verse.

But can we express our views a little more fully?What has changed, what has happened, what factors now place writers in such a position that they cannot simply pour their thoughts and feelings into the old channels of English poetry?We only need to take a walk in the streets of any large town to get some kind of answer.The long brick-and-stone avenue was divided into box-like houses, each house inhabited by a different person who put locks on the doors and deadbolts on the windows to gain solitude. A certain guarantee of undisturbed; yet the aerials above him, the sound waves that pierced the roofs, loudly told him news of wars, murders, strikes, and revolutions all over the world, by which he and his fellow-citizens keep in touch.If we went into the house and talked to him, we found him to be a cautious, secretive, suspicious animal, extremely coy and cautious lest his own secrets should be revealed.In fact, nothing in modern life compels him to do so.In our private lives there is no element of violence; when we meet we are courteous, forgiving, pleasant.Even wars are fought in groups and against each other, not alone.Dueling between individuals is extinct.The marriage relationship has been able to extend indefinitely without fighting and grabbing.Ordinary people are more serene, kind, and self-controlled than they used to be.

But if we go for a walk with our friend, we find that he is extremely sensitive to everything—the ugly, the dirty, the beautiful, the funny.He drifted with the flow and let every thought lead him around.He discusses openly matters that were inconvenient to mention in the past even in private.Perhaps it was this kind of laissez-faire and curiosity that contributed to his most distinctive trait—the curious way in which things with no apparent connection were connected together in his mind.Sensations that used to occur individually and in isolation no longer do so.Beauty and ugliness, interest and aversion, joy and pain all interpenetrate.Emotions that had always entered the soul whole, now crumbled to pieces at the threshold.

For example, on a spring night, with a bright moon in the sky, nightingales singing, and drooping willows fluttering on the river.However, at this moment, a crippled old woman was picking through her greasy rags on a steel bench.She entered his mind with the spring; they intertwined, but not intermingled.These two emotions are so irrationally combined that they bite and kick and twist together.But when Keats heard the song of the nightingale, he felt a unity of emotion, though it passed gradually from the joy of beauty to the melancholy of human misfortune.He doesn't make comparisons.In his poetry, sorrow is always a shadow accompanied by beauty.In the modern mind, beauty is not with her shadow but with her adversary.The poet now speaks of the nightingale as "chirping to dirty ears."The nightingale chirping beside our modern beauty is some mocking spirit who sniffs at beauty; it turns the mirror over and shows us Beauty's other cheek sunken and disfigured.It seems that the modern mind, always trying to validate its emotions, has lost the ability to accept things simply as they are.There is no doubt that this spirit of doubt and verification has renewed the soul and accelerated the rhythm.There is a candid, sincere quality in modern writing which is salutary, if not very lovely.Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater made modern literature a little fanatical and scented, and when Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw began to light feathers and put smelling salt bottles under her nose, she immediately went from Awakened from the slumber of the nineteenth century.She woke up; she sat up; she sneezed.The poets were naturally scared away. Poetry, of course, is always overwhelmingly on the side of beauty.She always insisted on certain rights, such as rhythm, meter, and poetic diction.She was never used to serving the ordinary goals of everyday life.Prose carried all the dirty work on her shoulders: she answered letters, paid bills, wrote articles, gave speeches, served merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers and farmers. Poetry, in the hands of her priests, remained isolated from the masses.She had become a little rigid, and that was perhaps the price she paid for her isolation.She appears before us with all her accoutrements—her veil, her crown of flowers, her memories, her associations—and when she speaks, she moves us.When we ask poetry to express the incongruity, the incongruity, the mockery, the contradiction, the curiosity of modern life—these sensitive, strange emotions cultivated in isolated rooms, these broad ranges that civilization has taught us Her actions are not quick, straightforward, or open-minded when she is not familiar with the general concept.Her pronounced accents were too harsh; the way she overemphasized was too conspicuous.Instead of lovely lyric, she gives us wild cries; , Sensitively, enthusiastically throw oneself into its various sufferings and joys.Byron pointed the way for us in Don Juan; he showed what a flexible instrument poetry can be; but no one has followed in his footsteps, or made further use of his instrument.We still don't have a decent poetic drama. So, this prompts us to ponder: Can poetry take on the task we are entrusting to her now?Perhaps the moods of the modern mind, whose outlines we have here so roughly sketched and ascribed to them, prefer to give themselves over to prose than to verse.It is quite possible that prose will - indeed has - take on some of the functions once performed by poetry. If, then, we are not afraid to be ridiculed, and try boldly to discover the direction in which we seem to be moving very rapidly, we may as well deduce that we are moving in the direction of prose, and that within ten to fifteen years prose will have what it used to be. Unused use.That gluttonous novel has swallowed up so many literary forms, and by then, it will swallow up even more things.We'll be forced to invent new titles for different works that use the title of fiction.And among those so-called novels, it is likely that there will be a kind of work that we can hardly name.It will be written in prose, but a prose that has many of the characteristics of poetry.It will have a certain condensedness of poetry, but approach more to the commonplace of prose.It will be dramatic, but it will not be dramatic.It will be read, not performed.What name we shall call it is not very important.What matters is that we see this kind of novelty emerging on the horizon for expressing complex feelings that at the moment seem flatly rejected by poetry and equally unwelcome by theatre.Let us try, then, to deal more closely with it, and imagine its extent and nature. You will guess at first: the main difference between it and the novel we are familiar with now is that it will take a step back from life and stand a little farther away.It will, like poetry, offer only the outlines of life, not its details.It will make little use of that astonishing capacity for realism that is one of the novel's hallmarks.It will tell us very little about the housing, income, occupations, etc. of its characters; it has little kinship with that kind of social and environmental fiction.With these limitations, it will closely and vividly express the thoughts and feelings of the characters, but this is expressed from a different angle.It will not, as hitherto in the novel, describe merely or chiefly the relation of men to one another, and their common activities; Inner monologue in state.For, under the reign of the novel, we observe one part of the mind closely and scrutinize another part.We have gradually forgotten that a large and important part of life is contained in our emotions for such things as roses, nightingales, dawn, sunset, life, death and destiny; Time is spent sleeping, dreaming, thinking, and reading alone; we don't spend all our time in our personal relationships; and not all of our energies are expended in earning a living.Psychological novelists, too, tend to confine the concept of psychology to the confines of personal interactions; psychological novelists tend to dwell on someone falling in and out of love, Tom falling in love with Judith and Judith falling in love. Falling in love with him or not loving him at all, etc., and we sometimes long for a break from these constant, relentless analyses.We long for something more impersonal.We long for ideals, dreams, imagination and poetry. One of the great feats of the Elizabethan dramatists is that they give us these things.The poet is always able to transcend the specificity of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, and he asks us not about his own personal fate, but about the living conditions of all human beings.For example, in "Measurable Crimes", some passages of extremely subtle psychoanalysis are mixed with profound reflections and amazing imaginations.It is remarkable, however, that if Shakespeare gave us this profound thought, this psychological insight, at the same time he was not trying to give us something else.As "applied sociology," these scripts are useless.If we had to rely on them to gain any knowledge of Elizabethan social and economic conditions, we would be at a loss. In these respects, then, the novel, or variants of the novel to come, will have some of the attributes of poetry.It will express the relationship between man and nature, man and destiny, and express his imagination and his dreams.But it will also display the irony, contradiction, questioning, closure and complexity that characterize life.It will adopt the pattern of that strange amalgam of incongruous elements—the modern mind.It will thus hold close to its breast the cherished qualities of prose as a democratic art form—its freedom, its fearlessness, its flexibility.For prose is so humble that it can pass everywhere; there is nothing too low, too dirty, too mean for it to tread.It is infinitely patient, humbly eager for knowledge.It can lick up the tiniest fragments of things with its slimy tongue, and stir them together into a most delicate maze; it can listen silently at a door, though behind it only a murmur can be heard Talk to yourself or whisper in a low voice.It has all the flexibility and familiarity of an incessantly used tool, able to record the typical changes of the modern mind with perfect tune.On this point, with Proust and Dostoevsky at our backs, we should agree. But, we might ask, though prose is suited to both the ordinary and the complex—can prose express so many simple things?Can it express those emotions that are so amazing?Can it sing a plaintive dirge, or hum a lingering love-song, or shriek of terror, in praise of the rose, or the nightingale, or the beauty of the night?Can it, like a poet, jump to the heart of its subject at once?I don't think it can.Such is the penalty it pays for throwing away the rhyme and meter, magic and mystery of poetry.To be sure, prose writers are daring; they are constantly forcing their instrument to that poetic end.However, facing those gorgeous chapters or prose poems, you always have an uncomfortable feeling.However, what is objected to to a stanza is not because it is swanky, but because it is a solitary sentence.For example, let us recall the passage "playing the tin flute for amusement" in Meredith's novel "Richard Feverel".How artificially it begins with a broken poetic rhyme: "Gold lies in the grass; gold runs in the streams; red gold glistens on the pine-stalks. The sun shines on the ground, over fields and rivers." Or, let us recall the famous description of the stormy scene at the end of Charlotte Brontë's novel Villetti.These passages are meaningful, lyrical, and brilliant; they can be recited aloud when they are extracted and included in anthologies; however, putting them in a novel and reading them in context makes us feel very uncomfortable.For both Meredith and Charlotte call themselves novelists; their footing is close to that of life; yet they make us look forward to poetic rhythms, observations, and perspectives.We feel the sharp turn and painstaking effort; we wake up from that trance of admiration and fancy, and in that state of ecstasy we were completely and utterly overwhelmed by the author's imagination. . Let us now consider another work, which, though written in prose and called a novel, takes a different attitude, a different rhythm from the beginning, which steps back from life, and which makes us anticipate a Different methods of perspective.It was Triston Shandy.This is a book full of poetry, but we have never paid attention to it before; the words in this book are extremely gorgeous, but it is by no means fragmentary chapters.Although the emotional tone of this book has been changing, the changes and transitions are seamless, and there is absolutely no sharp turning point of bumps and vibrations to wake us up from the intoxicated state of admiration and trust.Stern laughs, sneers, and cracks some crude jokes at the turn of the text, all in one go, before he transitions to a passage that reads: "Time passes so quickly: from every letter I write, I realize how quickly life passes on the tip of my pen; every day, every hour of life—my dear Jenny—is less The rubies on your neck are more precious, they fly over our heads like a whirling cloud, never to return; everything is rushing forward--while you were curling my locks with your delicate hands —Look! it's gray; every time I kiss your hand to say goodbye, and every parting that follows, Is but a prelude to the farewell that's soon to come,—Bless God Have mercy on us! Now, whatever the world may think of that involuntary cry—I will say nothing." So Stern went on to describe Uncle Toby, the sergeant, Mrs. Shandy, and other characters. Here you see the smooth flow of poetry into prose, and prose into poetry.Standing a little out of life, Sterne grasped lightly imagination, wit, and fancy with his hand; and now that he had put his hand on the high boughs where these delicate fruits grew, it was not so much the case for those that grew above the ground. A solid vegetable, he certainly would have no doubt voluntarily surrendered his rights. Because, unfortunately, it seems inevitable that we will have to give up something.You can't cross that narrow bridge of art with all the tools of expression in your hand.There are some things you have to keep, or you'll throw them into the water midway, or worse, lose your balance and kill yourself. This variant of the novel, which does not yet have a name, will therefore be written by the writer standing a step back from life, because this expands the horizon and captures certain important features of life; it will be written in prose, because if You free prose from the heavy burden that so many novelists place on its back like a pack animal, stripping it of details and facts—if prose is treated like this, it will show It has the ability to rise from the ground and soar upwards, but it does not soar into the sky and go straight to the sky, but rises spirally like a sweeping whirlwind. Keep in touch. However, there is a further problem.Can prose be dramatic?Shaw and Ibsen, to be sure, used prose dramatically to the highest degree of success, but they remained true to the dramatic form.And this form, you can predict, is by no means the form of the poetic drama of the future.To achieve the various purposes of the author, the prose drama seems too blunt, too limited, and too strong in tone.It misses half of what the author wants to express in its mesh sieve.He cannot compress all the rich content he wants to express into the dialogue.He craved, however, the explosive emotional effects of drama; he wanted to make his readers' blood boil, not just hit their intellectual sensibilities, or scratch their itch. The loose and free text of "Triston Shandy" floats such characters as Uncle Toby and Sergeant Trim, drifting away in a circle, but it does not try to move them in the dramatic conflict. arranged together.Therefore, it is very necessary for the author of this very demanding future novel to place a strict, logical, imaginative, simple force on his various turbulent and contradictory emotions, and act as a kind of supervision. The role of control.Turmoil is hateful; chaos is hateful; and in a work of art, everything should be tightly controlled and orderly.He will endeavor to generalize these passions and to diffuse them.He will not list all the details one by one, but cast them into large articles.Thus his characters have a dramatic force which, in the detailed and realistic characters of modern fiction, is often sacrificed to psychological interest.Thus, although this kind of work is still on the edge of such a distant horizon, almost just visible - you can imagine that the author will expand his field of interest in order to dramatize certain influences that have played a huge role in life. influences which novelists have hitherto neglected to notice: they are the effects on us of the power of music, the stimulation of scenery, the changes of shadows and hues of trees, of emotions which grow up in us in heaps, certain The vague fear and loathing that some place or person irrationally arouses in us, the intoxicating sensation that the joy of action and wine give us.Each moment is the center of a mass of unanticipated sensations.Life is always inevitably much richer than we, the people who try to represent it. It doesn't take any great gift of prophecy to tell you that whoever attempts to do the above will have to use all his courage.Prose never meets the first writer who comes before it, bows its head, and prepares to learn to take a new step.However, if the stamp of the times is anything to go by, the need for new developments is being felt.There is no doubt that a group of writers, scattered throughout England, France, and America, are trying to free themselves from the old formula which has bored them; The position that allows them to give full play to important things.When a book impresses us as the result of that idea, rather than by its beauty or splendor, we know that there is in it the seed of abiding existence.