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"Satire"
is a protean term. Together with its derivatives, it is one of the most heavily
worked literary designations and one of the most imprecise. The great English
lexicographer Samuel Johnson
defined satire as "a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured,"
and more elaborate definitions are rarely more satisfactory. No strict
definition can encompass the complexity of a word that signifies, on one hand, a
kind of literature--as when one speaks of the satires of the Roman poet Horace
or calls the American novelist Nathanael West's A
Cool Million a satire--and, on the other, a mocking spirit or tone that
manifests itself in many literary genres but can also enter into almost any kind
of human communication. Wherever wit
is employed to expose something foolish or vicious to criticism, there satire
exists, whether it be in song or sermon, in painting or political debate, on
television or in the movies. In this sense satire is everywhere. Although this
section deals primarily with satire as a literary phenomenon, it records its
manifestations in a number of other areas of human activity.
The terminological difficulty is pointed
up by a phrase of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian:
"satire is wholly our own" ("satura tota nostra est").
Quintilian seems to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had
read the Greek dramatist Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek
forms that one would call satiric. But the Greeks had no specific word for
satire; and by satura (which meant
originally something like "medley" or "miscellany" and from
which comes the English "satire") Quintilian intended to specify that
kind of poem "invented" by Lucilius,
written in hexameters on certain appropriate themes, and characterized by a
Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred,
in short, to a poetic form, established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian
mentions also an even older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius
Varro and, one might add, by Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.)
After Quintilian's day satura began to
be used metaphorically to designate works that were "satirical" in
tone but not in form. As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one
modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension; and satura
(which had had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately
broadened by appropriation from the Greek word for "satyr" (satyros) and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English
"satire" comes from the Latin satura;
but "satirize," "satiric," etc., are of Greek origin. By
about the 4th century AD the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus;
St. Jerome, for example, was called by one of his enemies "a satirist
in prose" ("satyricus scriptor in prosa"). Subsequent
orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the world satire: satura
becomes satyra, and in England, by
the 16th century, it was written "satyre." (see also Latin literature,
Ancient Greek literature, poetry)
Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow
Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that
"satyre" derived from the Greek satyr
play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to
follow that "satyre" should be harsh, coarse, rough. The English
author Joseph Hall wrote: (see
also Elizabethan
literature)
The Satyre should be like the
Porcupine,
That shoots sharpe quils out in each
angry line,
And wounds the blushing cheeke, and
fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth
guiltily.
(Virgidemiarum,
V, 3, 1-4.) (see also "Virgidemiarum:
Six Books")
The false etymology that derives satire
from satyrs was finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac
Casaubon; but the old tradition has aesthetic if not etymological
appropriateness and has remained strong.
In the prologue to his book, Hall makes
a claim that has caused confusion like that following from Quintilian's remark
on Roman satire. Hall boasts:
I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English Satyrist.
But Hall knew the satirical poems of
Geoffrey Chaucer and John Skelton, among other predecessors, and probably meant
that he was the first to imitate systematically the formal satirists of Rome.
By their practice, the great Roman poets
Horace and Juvenal set indelibly the lineaments of the genre known as the formal
verse satire and, in so doing, exerted pervasive, if often indirect, influence
on all subsequent literary satire. They gave laws to the form they established,
but it must be said that the laws were very loose indeed. Consider, for example,
style. In three of his Satires
(I, iv; I, x; II, i) Horace
discusses the tone appropriate to the satirist who out of a moral concern
attacks the vice and folly he sees around him. As opposed to the harshness of
Lucilius, Horace opts for mild mockery and playful wit as the means most
effective for his ends. Although I portray examples of folly, he says, I am not
a prosecutor and I do not like to give pain; if I laugh at the nonsense I see
about me, I am not motivated by malice. The satirist's verse, he implies, should
reflect this attitude: it should be easy and unpretentious, sharp when
necessary, but flexible enough to vary from grave to gay. In short, the
character of the satirist as projected by Horace is that of an urbane man of the
world, concerned about folly, which he sees everywhere, but moved to laughter
rather than rage. (see also Horatian
satire, Juvenalian satire)
Juvenal,
over a century later, conceives the satirist's role differently. His most
characteristic posture is that of the upright man who looks with horror on the
corruptions of his time, his heart consumed with anger and frustration. Why does
he write satire? Because tragedy and epic are irrelevant to his age. Viciousness
and corruption so dominate Roman life that for an honest man it is difficult not
to write satire. He looks about him, and his heart burns dry with rage;
never has vice been more triumphant. How can he be silent (SatiresI)? Juvenal's declamatory manner, the amplification and luxuriousness of his
invective, are wholly out of keeping with the stylistic prescriptions set by
Horace. At the end of the scabrous sixth satire, a long, perfervid invective
against women, Juvenal flaunts his innovation: in this poem, he says, satire has
gone beyond the limits established by his predecessors; it has taken to itself
the lofty tone of tragedy.
The results of Juvenal's innovation have
been highly confusing for literary history. What is satire if the two poets universally acknowledged to be supreme
masters of the form differ so completely in their work as to be almost
incommensurable? The formulation of the English poet John
Dryden has been widely accepted. Roman satire has two kinds, he says:
comical satire and tragical satire, each with its own kind of legitimacy. These
denominations have come to mark the boundaries of the satiric spectrum, whether
reference is to poetry or prose or to some form of satiric expression in another
medium. At the Horatian end of the spectrum, satire merges imperceptibly into comedy,
which has an abiding interest in the follies of men but has not satire's
reforming intent. The distinction between the two modes, rarely clear, is marked
by the intensity with which folly is pursued: fops and fools and pedants appear
in both, but only satire tries to mend men through them. And, although the great
engine of both comedy and satire is irony,
in satire, as the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye has said, irony is militant.
(see also tragedy)
Boileau, Dryden, and Alexander
Pope, writing in the 17th and 18th centuries--the modern age of
satire--catch beautifully, when they like, the deft Horatian tone; however,
satire's wit can also be sombre, deeply probing, and prophetic, as it explores
the ranges of the Juvenalian end of the satiric spectrum, where satire merges
with tragedy, melodrama, and nightmare. Pope's Dunciad
ends with these lines: (see also "Dunciad,
The")
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is
restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the
curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
It is the same darkness that falls on
Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels, on some of Mark Twain's satire--The Mysterious Stranger, To The Person Sitting in Darkness--and on
George Orwell's 1984.
Roman satire is hardly more determinate
in its structure than in its style; the poems are so haphazardly organized, so
randomly individual, that there seems little justification for speaking of them
as a literary kind at all. Beneath the surface complexity of the poems, however,
there exists, as one modern scholar has pointed out, a structural principle
common to the satires of the Roman poets and their French and English followers.
These poems have a bipartite structure: a thesis part, in which some vice or
folly is examined critically from many different angles and points of view, and
an antithesis part, in which an opposing virtue is recommended. The two parts
are disproportionate in length and in importance, for satirists have always been
more disposed to castigate wickedness than exhort to virtue.
Most verse satires are enclosed by a
"frame." Just as a novel by the early-20th-century writer Joseph
Conrad may be framed by a situation in which his narrator sits on a veranda in
the tropics, telling his tale, stimulated into elaboration by the queries of his
listeners, so the satire will be framed by a conflict of sorts between the
satirist (or, more reasonably, his persona, a fictive counterpart, the
"I" of the poem) and an adversary. Usually the adversary has a minor
role, serving only to prod the speaker into extended comment on the issue (vice
or folly) at hand; he may be sketchily defined, or he may be as effectively
projected as Horace's Trebatius (Satires, II,
i) or his awful bore (I, vi) or his slave Davus, who turns the tables on his
master (II, vii). Similarly, the background against which the two talk may be
barely suggested, or it may form an integral part of the poem, as in Horace's
"Journey to Brundisium" (I, v) or in Juvenal's description of the
valley of Egeria, where Umbricius unforgettably pictures the turbulence and
decadence of Rome (Satires, III). In
any event, the frame is usually there, providing a semidramatic situation in
which vice and folly may reasonably be dissected. (see also
frame story)
The satirist has at his disposal an
immense variety of literary and rhetorical devices: he may use beast fables,
dramatic incidents, fictional experiences, imaginary voyages, character
sketches, anecdotes, proverbs, homilies; he may employ invective, sarcasm,
burlesque, irony, mockery, raillery, parody, exaggeration, understatement--wit
in any of its forms--anything to make the object of attack abhorrent or
ridiculous. Amid all this confusing variety, however, there is pressure toward
order--internally, from the arraignment of vice and appeal to virtue, and
externally, from the often shadowy dramatic situation that frames the poem.
Thus, although the formal verse satire
of Rome is quantitatively a small body of work, it contains most of the elements
later literary satirists employ. When satire is spoken of today, however, there
is usually no sense of formal specification whatever; one has in mind a work
imbued with the satiric spirit--a spirit that appears (whether as mockery,
raillery, ridicule, or formalized invective) in the literature or folklore of
all peoples, early and late, preliterate and civilized. According to Aristotle
(Poetics, IV, 1448b-1449a), Greek Old
Comedy developed out of ritualistic ridicule and invective--out of
satiric utterances, that is, improvised and hurled at individuals by the leaders
of the phallic songs. The function of these "iambic" utterances, it
has been shown, was magical;
they were thought to drive away evil influences so that the positive fertility
magic of the phallus might be operative. This early connection of primitive
"satire" with magic has a remarkably widespread history.
In the 7th century BC, the poet Archilochus,
said to be the "first" Greek literary satirist, composed verses of
such potency against his prospective father-in-law, Lycambes, that Lycambes and
his daughter hanged themselves. In the next century the sculptors Bupalus and
Athenis "knit their necks in halters," it is said, as a result of the
"bitter rimes and biting libels" issued by the satirical poet Hipponax.
Similar tales exist in other cultures. The chief function of the ancient Arabic
poet was to compose satire (hija`)
against the tribal enemy. The satires were thought always to be fatal, and the
poet led his people into battle, hurling his verses as he would hurl a spear.
Old Irish literature is laced
with accounts of the extraordinary power of the poets, whose satires brought
disgrace and death to their victims: (see also
Arabic literature)
. . . saith [King] Lugh to his poet,
"what power can you wield in
battle?"
"Not hard to say," quoth
Carpre. . . ."I will satirize them, so that through the spell of my art
they will not resist warriors."
("The Second Battle of
Moytura," trans. by
W. Stokes, Revue Celtique, XII [1891], 52-130.)
According to saga, when the Irish poet
uttered a satire against his victim, three blisters would appear on the victim's
cheek, and he would die of shame. One story will serve as illustration: after
Deirdriu of the Sorrows came to her unhappy end, King Conchobar fell in love
again--this time with the lovely Luaine. They were to be married; but, when the
great poet Aithirne the Importunate and his two sons (also poets) saw Luaine,
they were overcome with desire for her. They went to Luaine and asked her to
sleep with them. She refused. The poets threatened to satirize her. And the
story says:
The damsel refused to lie with them. So
then they made three satires on her, which left three blotches on her cheeks, to
wit, Shame and Blemish and Disgrace . . . . Thereafter the damsel died of shame.
. . .
("The Wooing of Luaine . . .
," trans. by
W. Stokes, Revue Celtique, XXIV [1903], 273-85.)
An eminent 20th-century authority on
these matters adduces linguistic, thematic, and other evidence to show a
functional relation between primitive "satire," such as that of Carpre
and Aithirne, and the "real" satire of more sophisticated times.
Today, among various preliterate peoples the power of personal satire and
ridicule is appalling; among the Ashanti
of West Africa, for example, ridicule is (or was recently) feared more than
almost any other humanly inflicted punishment, and suicide is frequently
resorted to as an escape from its terrors. Primitive satire such as that
described above can hardly be spoken of in literary terms; its affiliations are
rather with the magical incantation and the curse.
When the satiric utterance breaks loose
from its background in ritual and magic, as in ancient Greece (when it is free,
that is, to develop in response to literary stimuli rather than the
"practical" impulsions of magic), it is found embodied in an
indefinite number of literary forms that profess to convey moral instruction by
means of laughter, ridicule, mockery; the satiric spirit proliferates
everywhere, adapting itself to whatever mode (verse or prose) seems congenial.
Its targets range from one of Pope's dunces to the entire race of man, as in Satyr
Against Mankind (1675), by John Wilmot, the earl
of Rochester, from Erasmus' attack on corruptions in the church to
Swift's excoriation of all civilized institutions in Gulliver's
Travels. Its forms are as varied as its victims: from an anonymous medieval
invective against social injustice to the superb wit of Chaucer and the laughter
of Rabelais; from the burlesque of Luigi Pulci to the scurrilities of Pietro
Aretino and the "black humour" of Lenny Bruce; from the flailings of
John Marston and the mordancies of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas
to the bite of Jean de La Fontaine and the great dramatic structures of Ben
Jonson and Molière; from an epigram of Martial to the fictions of Nikolay
Gogol and of Günter Grass and the satirical utopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin,
Aldous Huxley, and Orwell.
It is easy to see how the satiric spirit
would combine readily with those forms of prose fiction that deal with the ugly
realities of the world but that satire should find congenial a genre such as the
fictional utopia seems odd. From the publication of Thomas
More's eponymous Utopia(1516), however, satire has been an important ingredient of utopian fiction.
More drew heavily on the satire of Horace, Juvenal, and Lucian in composing his
great work. For example, like a poem by Horace, Utopia
is framed by a dialogue between "Thomas More" (the historical man
a character in his own fiction) and a seafaring philosopher named Raphael
Hythloday. The two talk throughout a long and memorable day in a garden in
Antwerp. "More's" function is to draw Hythloday out and to oppose him
on certain issues, notably his defense of the communism he found in the land of
Utopia. "More" is the adversary. Hythloday's role is to expound on the
institutions of Utopia but also to expose the corruption of contemporary
society. Thus he functions as a satirist. Here Hythloday explains why
Englishmen, forced off their land to make way for sheep, become thieves: (see
also utopian
literature)
Forsooth . . . your sheep that were
wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so
great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men
themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.
For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest
wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt,
not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to
grow to their fore-fathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content
that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the
weal-public, leave no ground for tillage. They enclose all into pastures; they
throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the
church to be made a sheep-house.
(More's Utopia, Everyman edition, 1951.)
Here are characteristic devices of the
satirist, dazzlingly exploited: the beast fable
compressed into the grotesque metaphor of the voracious sheep; the
reality-destroying language that metamorphoses gentlemen and abbots into
earthquakes and a church into a sheep barn; the irony coldly encompassing the
passion of the scene. Few satirists of any time could improve on this.
Just as satire is a necessary element of
the work that gave the literary form utopia its name, so the utopias of
Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Houyhnhnmland are essential to the satire of More's
great follower Jonathan Swift.
He sent Gulliver to different lands from those Hythloday discovered, but
Gulliver found the same follies and the same vices, and he employed a good many
of the same rhetorical techniques his predecessor had used to expose them. Gulliver's
Travelsas one
scholar points out, is a salute across the centuries to Thomas More. With this
kind of precedent, it is not surprising that in the 20th century, when utopia
turns against itself, as in Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World(1932), the result is satire unrelieved.
The drama has provided a favourable
environment for satire ever since it was cultivated by Aristophanes,
working under the extraordinarily open political conditions of 5th-century
Athens. In a whole series of plays--The Clouds,
The Frogs, Lysistrata, and
many others--Aristophanes lampoons the demagogue Cleon by name, violently
attacks Athenian war policy, derides the audience of his plays for their
gullible complacency, pokes fun at Socrates as representative of the new
philosophical teaching, stages a brilliantly parodic poetic competition between
the dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, and in general lashes out at
contemporary evils with an uninhibited and unrivalled inventiveness. But the
theatre has rarely enjoyed the political freedom Aristophanes had--one reason,
perhaps, that satire more often appears in drama episodically or in small doses
than in the full-blown Aristophanic manner. In Elizabethan England, Ben
Jonson wrote plays that he called "comicall satyres"--Every Man Out of His Humour, Poetaster--and there are substantial
elements of satire in Shakespeare's
plays--some in the comedies, but more impressively a dark and bitter satire in Timon
of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and King
Lear. The 17th-century comedy of Molière
sometimes deepens into satire, as with the exposure of religious hypocrisy in Tartuffe
or the railing against social hypocrisy by Alceste in The
Misanthrope. George
Bernard Shaw considered himself a satirist. He once compared his
country's morals to decayed teeth and himself to a dentist, obliged by his
profession to give pain in the interests of better health. Yet, as inventive and
witty as Shaw is, compared to the 20th-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht,
whose anatomizing of social injustice cuts deep, Shaw is a gentle practitioner
indeed. (see also "Frogs,
The," , Ancient Greek
literature, Elizabethan
literature, "Imposter,
The," )
The movies have sometimes done better by
satire than the theatre, and it is in the movies that an ancient doctrine having
to do with principles of decorum in the use of satire and ridicule has been
exploded. The English novelist Henry
Fielding was reflecting centuries of tradition when, in the preface to Joseph Andrews(1742), he spoke of the inappropriateness of ridicule applied to black
villainy or dire calamity. "What could exceed the absurdity of an Author,
who should write the Comedy of Nero, with the merry Incident of ripping up his Mother's Belly?"
Given this point of view, Hitler seems an unlikely target for satire; yet in
The Great Dictator (1940) Charlie
Chaplin managed a successful, if risky, burlesque. Chaplin has written,
however, that, determined as he was to ridicule the Nazi notions of a superrace,
if he had known of the horrors of the concentration camps, he could not have
made the film. Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove;
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) denies
all limitation; through some alchemy Kubrick created an immensely funny,
savagely satirical film about the annihilation of the world. A combination of
farce and nightmare, Dr. Strangelove satirizes
military men, scientists, statesmen--the whole ethos of the technological
age--in the most mordant terms; it shows the doomsday blast, yet leaves
audiences laughing. "You can't fight in here," says the president of
the United States as doom nears, "this is the War Room." The film's
tone is less didactic than in most powerful satire--the mushroom cloud carries
its own moral--yet satire's full force is there.
Television
has not proved a notably receptive medium. That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satirical review started in
England in 1962, had remarkable success for a time but succumbed to a variety of
pressures, some of them political; when a version of the program was attempted
in the United States, it was emasculated by restrictions imposed by sponsors
fearful of offending customers and by program lawyers wary of libel suits.
Jonathan Swift said that he wrote to vex the world rather than divert it; it is
not an attitude calculated to sell soap.
Yet satire does much more than vex, and
even in Swift's work there is a kind of gaiety that is found in many nonliterary
manifestations of the satirical spirit. Satire always accompanies certain
festivals, for example, particularly saturnalian festivals. Many different
cultures set aside a holiday period in which customary social restraints are
abandoned, distinctions of rank and status are turned upside down, and
institutions normally sacrosanct are subjected to ridicule, mockery, burlesque.
The Romans had their Saturnalia,
the Middle Ages its Feast of Fools;
and in the 20th century many countries still have annual carnivals (Fasching
in Austria, the Schnitzelbank in Basel, Switzerland, for example) at which, amid
other kinds of abandon, an extraordinary freedom of satirical utterance is
permitted. Even in Africa among the Ashanti, for whom ridicule has such terrors,
there is a festival during which the sacred chief himself is satirized.
"Wait until Friday," said the chief to the enquiring anthropologist,
"when the people really begin to abuse me, and if you will come and do so
too it will please me." Festivals such as these provide sanctioned release
from social inhibition and repression, and, in these circumstances, satire
directed at men in power or at taboo institutions acts as a safety valve for
pent-up frustrations. (see also social control)
Satire may often function this way. A
story is told that the 16th-century pope Adrian
VI was highly offended at satirical verses written against him and
affixed to Pasquino's statue (a famous repository for lampoons in Rome), but he
became a willing target once he realized that his enemies vented otherwise
dangerous hostility in this relatively harmless manner. Similar mechanisms
operate today when, at a nightclub or theatre, audiences listen to satirical
attacks on political figures or on issues such as racial discrimination,
identify with the satirist, laugh at his wit, and thereby discharge their own
aggressive feelings. Satire of this order is a far cry, of course, from that
written by a Swift or Voltaire, whose work can be said to have a revolutionary
effect.
The critique of satire may be conveyed
even more potently in the visual arts than by way of the spoken or written word.
In caricature and in what came
to be known as the cartoon, artists since the Renaissance have left a wealth of
startlingly vivid commentary on the men and events of their time. The names
alone evoke their achievement: in England, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson,
Sir John Tenniel, and Sir Max Beerbohm; in France, Charles
Philipon (whose slow-motion metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe into a poire--that
is, "fathead," or "fool"--is classic) and Honoré
Daumier; in Spain, Francisco Goya, and out of Spain, Pablo Picasso; and among
recent political cartoonists, Sir David Low, Vicky (Victor Welsz), Herblock
(Herbert Block), and Conrad.
The favourite medium of such individuals
is the black-and-white print in which the satirical attack is pointed up by a
brief verbal caption. The social impact of their art is incalculable. Dictators
recognize this all too well, and in times of social tension political
cartoonists are among the first victims of the censor.
Indeed, the relations of satirists to
the law have always been delicate and complex. Both Horace and Juvenal took
extraordinary pains to avoid entanglements with authority--Juvenal ends his
first satire with the self-protective announcement that he will write only of
the dead. In England in 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
London issued an order prohibiting the printing of any satires whatever and
requiring that the published satires of Hall, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, and
others be burned. (see also censorship)
Today the satirist attacks individuals
only at the risk of severe financial loss to himself and his publisher. In
totalitarian countries he even risks imprisonment or death. Under extreme
conditions satire against the reigning order is out of the question. Such was
the case in the Soviet Union
and most other Communist countries. For example, the poet Osip
Mandelstam was sent to a concentration camp and his death for composing a
satirical poem on Stalin.
One creative response the satirist makes
to social and legal pressures is to try by rhetorical
means to approach his target indirectly; that is, a prohibition of direct attack
fosters the manoeuvres of indirection that will make the attack palatable: e.g., irony, burlesque, and parody. It is a nice complication that
the devices that render satire acceptable to society at the same time sharpen
its point. "Abuse is not so dangerous," said Dr. Johnson, "when
there is no vehicle of wit or delicacy, no subtle conveyance." The
conveyances are born out of prohibition.
Anthony
Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, writing in the 18th
century, recognized the "creative" significance of legal and other
repressions on the writing of satire. "The greater the weight [of
constraint] is, the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the
more exquisite the buffoonery." Shaftesbury's insight requires the
qualification made above. Under a massively efficient tyranny, satire of the
forms, institutions, or personalities of that tyranny is impossible. But, under
the more relaxed authoritarianism of an easier going day, remarkable things
could be done. Max Radin, a Polish-born American author, noted how satirical
journals in Germany before World War I, even in the face of a severe law, vied
with each other to see how close they could come to caricatures of the Kaiser
without actually producing them. "Satire which the censor
understands," said the Austrian satirist Karl
Kraus, "deserves to be banned." (see also
German literature)
The 20th-century American critic Kenneth
Burke summed up this paradoxical aspect of satire's relation with the law
by suggesting that the most inventive satire is produced when the satirist
knowingly takes serious risks and is not sure whether he will be acclaimed or
punished. The whole career of Voltaire is an excellent case in point. Bigots and
tyrants may have turned pale at his name, as a famous hyperbole has it; however,
Voltaire's satire was
sharpened and his life rendered painfully complicated as he sought to avoid the
penalties of the law and the wrath of those he had angered. Men such as Voltaire
and Kraus and the Russian Ye.I. Zamyatin attack evil in high places, pitting
their wit and moral authority against cruder forms of power. In this engagement
there is frequently something of the heroic.
Readers have an excellent opportunity to
examine the satirist's claim to social approval by reason of the literary
convention that decrees that he must justify his problematic art. Nearly all
satirists write apologies, and nearly all the apologies project an image of the
satirist as a plain, honest man, wishing harm to no worthy person but appalled
at the evil he sees around him and forced by his conscience to write satire.
Pope's claim is the most extravagant:
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the
Throne,
Yet touch'd and sham'd by Ridicule
alone.
O sacred Weapon! left for Truth's
defence,
Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and
Insolence!
(Epilogue
to the SatiresII,
208-13.)
After the great age of satire, which
Pope brought to a close, such pretensions would have been wholly anachronistic.
Ridicule depends on shared assumptions against which the deviant stands in naked
relief. The satirist must have an audience that shares with him commitment to
certain intellectual and moral standards that validate his attacks on
aberration. The greatest satire has been written in periods when ethical and
rational norms were sufficiently powerful to attract widespread assent yet not
so powerful as to compel absolute conformity--those periods when the satirist
could be of his society and yet apart, could exercise a double vision.
Neoclassic writers had available to them
as an implicit metaphor the towering standard of the classical past; for the
19th and 20th centuries no such metaphors have been available. It is odd,
however, that, whereas the 19th century in general disliked and distrusted
satire (there are of course obvious exceptions), our own age, bereft of unifying
symbols, scorning traditional rituals, searching for beliefs, still finds satire
a congenial mode in almost any medium. Although much of today's satire is
self-serving and trivial, there are notable achievements. Joseph
Heller's novel Catch-e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">22
(1961) once again makes use of farce as the agent of the most
probing criticism: Who is sane, the book asks, in a world whose major energies
are devoted to blowing itself up? Beneath a surface of hilariously grotesque
fantasy, in which characters from Marx brothers' comedy carry out lethal
assignments, there is exposed a dehumanized world of hypocrisy, greed, and cant.
Heller is a satirist in the great tradition. If he can no longer, like Pope,
tell men with confidence what they should be for, he is splendid at showing them
what they must be against. The reader laughs at the mad logic of Catch-22, and, as he
laughs, he learns. This is precisely the way satire has worked from the
beginning. (R.C.E.)
Defining nonfictional
prose literature is an
immensely challenging task. Nonfictional prose literature differs from bald
statements of fact, such as those recorded in an old chronicle or inserted in a
business letter or in an impersonal message of mere information. As used in a
broad sense, the term nonfictional prose literature here designates writing
intended to instruct (but not highly scientific and erudite writings in which no
aesthetic concern is evinced), to impart wisdom or faith, and especially to
please. Separate sections cover biographical literature and literary criticism.
Nonfictional prose genres cover an
almost infinite variety of themes, and they assume many shapes. In quantitative
terms, if such could ever be valid in such nonmeasurable matters, they probably
include more than half of all that has been written in countries having a
literature of their own. Nonfictional prose genres have flourished in nearly all
countries with advanced literatures. The genres include political and polemical
writings, biographical and autobiographical literature, religious writings, and
philosophical, and moral or religious writings.
After the Renaissance, from the 16th
century onward in Europe, a personal manner of writing grew in importance. The
author strove for more or less disguised self-revelation and introspective
analysis, often in the form of letters, private diaries, and confessions. Also
of increasing importance were aphorisms after the style of the ancient Roman
philosophers Seneca and Epictetus, imaginary dialogues, and historical
narratives, and later, journalistic articles and extremely diverse essays. From
the 19th century, writers in Romance and Slavic languages especially, and to a
far lesser extent British and American writers, developed the attitude that a
literature is most truly modern when it acquires a marked degree of
self-awareness and obstinately reflects on its purpose and technique. Such
writers were not content with imaginative creation alone: they also explained
their work and defined their method in prefaces, reflections, essays,
self-portraits, and critical articles. The 19th-century French poet Charles
Baudelaire asserted that no great poet could ever quite resist the
temptation to become also a critic: a critic of others and of himself. Indeed,
most modern writers, in lands other than the United States, whether they be
poets, novelists, or dramatists, have composed more nonfictional prose than
poetry, fiction, or drama. In the instances of such monumental figures of
20th-century literature as the poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and perhaps William
Butler Yeats, or the novelists Thomas Mann and André Gide, that part of
their output may well be considered by posterity to be equal in importance to
their more imaginative writing. (see also French
literature, literary criticism)
It is virtually impossible to attempt a
unitary characterization of nonfictional prose. The concern that any definition
is a limitation, and perhaps an exclusion of the essential, is nowhere more
apposite than to this inordinately vast and variegated literature. Ever since
the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers devised literary
genres, some critics have found it convenient to arrange literary
production into kinds or to refer it to modes.
Obviously, a realm as boundless and
diverse as nonfictional prose literature cannot be characterized as having any
unity of intent, of technique, or of style. It can be defined, very loosely,
only by what it is not. Many exceptions, in such a mass of writings, can always
be brought up to contradict any rule or generalization. No prescriptive
treatment is acceptable for the writing of essays, of aphorisms, of literary
journalism, of polemical controversy, of travel literature, of memoirs and
intimate diaries. No norms are recognized to determine whether a dialogue, a
confession, a piece of religious or of scientific writing, is excellent,
mediocre, or outright bad, and each author has to be relished, and appraised,
chiefly in his own right. "The only technique," the English critic F.R.
Leavis wrote in 1957, "is that which compels words to express an
intensively personal way of feeling." Intensity is probably useful as a
standard; yet it is a variable, and often elusive, quality, possessed by
polemicists and by ardent essayists to a greater extent than by others who are
equally great. "Loving, and taking the liberties of a lover" was Virginia
Woolf's characterization of the 19th-century critic William
Hazlitt's style: it instilled passion into his critical essays. But other
equally significant English essayists of the same century, such as Charles Lamb
or Walter Pater, or the French critic Hippolyte Taine, under an impassive mask,
loved too, but differently. Still other nonfictional writers have been detached,
seemingly aloof, or, like the 17th-century French epigrammatist La
Rochefoucauld, sarcastic. Their intensity is of another sort.
Prose that is nonfictional is generally
supposed to cling to reality more closely than that which invents stories, or
frames imaginary plots. Calling it "realistic," however, would be a
gross distortion. Since nonfictional prose does not stress inventiveness of
themes and of characters independent of the author's self, it appears in the
eyes of some moderns to be inferior to works of imagination. In the middle of
the 20th century an immensely high evaluation was placed on the imagination, and
the adjective "imaginative" became a grossly abused cliché.
Many modern novels and plays, however, were woefully deficient in imaginative
force, and the word may have been bandied about so much out of a desire for what
was least possessed. Many readers are engrossed by travel books, by descriptions
of exotic animal life, by essays on the psychology of other nations, by Rilke's
notebooks or by Samuel Pepys's diary far more than by poetry or by novels that
fail to impose any suspension of disbelief. There is much truth in Oscar
Wilde's remark that "the highest criticism is more creative than
creation and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it
really is not." A good deal of imagination has gone not only into criticism
but also into the writing of history, of essays, of travel books, and even of
the biographies or the confessions that purport to be true to life as it really
happened, as it was really experienced.
The imagination at work in nonfictional
prose, however, would hardly deserve the august name of "primary
imagination" reserved by the 19th-century English poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge to creators who come close to possessing semidivine powers. Rather,
imagination is displayed in nonfictional prose in the fanciful invention of
decorative details, in digressions practiced as an art and assuming a character
of pleasant nonchalance, in establishing a familiar contact with the reader
through wit and humour. The variety of themes that may be touched upon in that
prose is almost infinite. The treatment of issues may be ponderously didactic
and still belong within the literary domain. For centuries, in many nations, in
Asiatic languages, in medieval Latin, in the writings of the humanists of the
Renaissance, and in those of the Enlightenment, a considerable part of
literature has been didactic. The concept of art
for art's sake is a late and rather artificial development in the history
of culture, and it did not reign supreme even in the few countries in which it
was expounded in the 19th century. The ease with which digressions may be
inserted in that type of prose affords nonfictional literature a freedom denied
to writing falling within other genres. The drawback of such a nondescript
literature lies in judging it against any standard of perfection, since
perfection implies some conformity with implicit rules and the presence, however
vague, of standards such as have been formulated for comedy, tragedy, the ode,
the short story and even (in this case, more honoured in the breach than the
observance) the novel. The compensating grace is that in much nonfictional
literature that repudiates or ignores structure the reader is often delighted
with an air of ease and of nonchalance and with that rarest of all virtues in
the art of writing: naturalness. (see also
didactic literature)
The writing of nonfictional prose should
not entail the tension, the monotony, and the self-conscious craft of fiction
writing. The search for le mot juste ("the
precise word") so fanatically pursued by admirers of Flaubert and
Maupassant is far less important in nonfictional prose than in the novel and the
short story. The English author G.K.
Chesterton (1874-1936), who was himself more successful in his rambling
volumes of reflections and of religious apologetics than in his novels, defined
literature as that rare, almost miraculous use of language "by which a man
really says what he means." In essays, letters, reporting, and narratives
of travels, the author's aim is often not to overpower his readers by giving
them the impression that he knows exactly where he is leading them, as a
dramatist or a detective-story writer does. Some rambling casualness, apparently
irrelevant anecdotes, and suggestions of the conclusions that the author wishes
his readers to infer are often more effective than extreme terseness.
There is also another manner of writing
that is more attentive to the periodic cadences and elegance of prose, in the
style of the ancient Roman orator Cicero. The 19th-century English essayist William
Hazlitt praised the felicities of style and the refinements of the prose of the
British statesman Edmund Burke
(1729-97) as "that which went the nearest to the verge of poetry and yet
never fell over." A number of English writers have been fond of that
harmonious, and rhetorical prose, the taste for which may well have been
fostered not only by the familiarity with Cicero but also by the profound
influence of the authorized version of the Bible (1611). Martin Luther's
translation of the New Testament (1522) and of the Old Testament (1534) likewise
molded much of German prose and German sensibility for centuries.
In the 20th century that type of prose
lost favour with American and British readers, who ceased to cherish Latin
orators and Biblical prose as their models. In German
literature, however, in which harmonious balance and eloquence were more
likely to be admired, and in other languages more directly derived from Latin, a
musical style, akin to a prolonged poem in prose, was cultivated more
assiduously, as exemplified in Italian in the writings of Gabriele D'Annunzio,
in French in those by André Gide, and in German in Die
Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) by the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke. Such an elaborate style appears to be more easily tolerated
by the readers in nonfictional writing, with its lack of cumulative continuity
and, generally speaking, its more restricted size, than in novels such as
Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885)
and occasionally in Thomas Mann's fiction, in which such a style tends to pall
on the reader. Similarly, it is easier for the nonfictional prose writer to
weave into his style faint suggestions of irony, archaisms, alliterations, and
even interventions of the author that might prove catastrophic to credibility in
fiction. Critics have argued that too close attention to style was harmful to
the sweep necessary to fiction: they have contended that many of the greatest
novelists, such as Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Zola at times
"wrote" badly; assuredly, they treated language carelessly more than
once. Essayists, historians, orators, and divines often affect a happy-go-lucky
ease so as to put them on the same footing with the common reader, but they
realize that language and style are vital. They must know what resources they
can draw from vivid sensations, brilliant similes, balanced sentences, or
sudden, epigrammatic, effects of surprise. (see also Latin language,
Italian literature)
The one feature common to most authors
of nonfictional prose (a few staid historians and even fewer philosophers
excepted) is the marked degree of the author's presence in all they write. That
is to be expected in epistolary literature, and, although less inevitably, in
the essay, the travel book, journalistic reporting, and polemical or hortatory
prose. Although the 17th-century French religious philosopher Pascal
hinted that "the ego is hateful," the author's presence is still
strongly felt. This presence endows their works with a personal and haunting
force that challenges, converts, or repels, but hardly ever leaves the reader
indifferent. Saint Paul's
epistles owe their impact--perhaps second to none in the history of the Western
World--to the self that vehemently expresses itself in them, showing no concern
whatever for the niceties of Attic prose. In the treatises, discourses, and
philosophical argumentation of the great writers of the Enlightenment,
such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, they frequently resort to the first
person singular, which results in a vivid concreteness in the treatment of
ideas. To think the abstract concretely, a precept reminiscent of the
18th-century philosophers, was also the aim of the 20th-century philosophers
Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty when they naturalized Existentialist
thought in France. The growth of personal literature in its myriad shapes is one
of the striking features of modern literary evolution.
The very fact that the writer of
nonfictional prose does not seek an imaginary projection to impart his vision,
his anguish, and his delights to readers also underlines the nature of his
intention. A school of critics has vigorously attacked "the intentional
fallacy," which leads biographers and some literary historians to
ask what an artist intended before evaluating the completed work of art. But in
a work of apologetics or of homiletics, in a work of history or of sociology, in
a critical or even in a desultory and discursive essay, and certainly in
aphorisms or maxims or both, the intention of the author remains omnipresent.
This intention may be disguised under the mask of a parable, under the
interlocutors of a philosophical dialogue, or under the admonitions of a
prophet, but the reader is never oblivious of the thinker's intent. The reader
has a sophisticated enjoyment of one who shares the creator's intent and travels
familiarly along with him. He respects and enjoys in those authors the exercise
of an intelligence flexible enough to accept even the irrational as such.
In terms of approach, that is, the
attitude of the writer as it can be inferred from the writing, the
distinguishing features of nonfictional prose writings are the degree of
presence of the ego and of the use of a subjective, familiar tone. Such devices
are also used, of course, by authors of fiction, but to a lesser extent.
Similarly, the basic modes of writing--the descriptive, the narrative, the
expository, and the argumentative--are found in both nonfictional literature and
in fiction, but in different degrees.
In nonfictional prose, essayists,
moralists, naturalists, and others regularly evoked nature scenes. The most
sumptuous masters of prose composed landscapes as elaborately as landscape
painters. The French writer and statesman Chateaubriand
(1768-1848), for example, who was not outstandingly successful in inventing
plots or in creating characters independent from his own self, was a master of
description; his writings influenced the French Romantic poets, who set the
impassive splendour of outward nature in contrast to the inner anguish of
mortals. The 19th-century English art critic John
Ruskin had a more precise gift of observation, as revealed in his
descriptions of Alpine mountains and of the humblest flowers or mosses, but his
ornate and sonorous prose was the climax of a high-flown manner of writing that
later read like the majestic relic of another era. American nonfictional writers
of the same period such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry
Thoreau scrupulously described the lessons of organization, of unity, and
of moral beauty to be deciphered from the vicissitudes of nature. Russian
essayists vied with novelists in their minute yet rapturous descriptions of the
thaw releasing the torrents of spring or the implacable force of the long
Northern winters. Writers more inclined to the observation of social life, in
satirical sketches of the mechanically polite and artificial habitués of
salons, helped the novel of social life come into existence in several Western
countries. (see also American
literature)
The narrative element is less
conspicuous in writing that does not purport to relate a story than in fictional
works, but there is a role for narrative in letters, diaries, autobiographies,
and historical writing. Most often, an incident is graphically related by a
witness, as in letters or memoirs; an anecdote may serve to illustrate a moral
advice in an essay; or an entertaining encounter may be inserted into an essay
or a travel sketch. Digression here represents the utmost in art; it provides a
relief from the persistent attention required when the author is pursuing his
purpose more seriously. Similarly, such writing provides a pleasant contrast to
the rigid structure of the majority of novels since the late 19th century. In
historical writing, however, simplicity and clarity of narrative are required,
though it may be interspersed with speeches, with portraits, or with moral and
polemical allusions. In other forms of nonfictional prose, the meandering fancy
of the author may well produce an impression of freedom and of truth to life
unattainable by the more carefully wrought novel. Many writers have confessed to
feeling relieved when they ceased to create novels and shifted to impromptu
sketches or desultory essays. The surrealist essayists of the 20th century
poured their scorn on detective fiction as the most fiercely logical form of
writing. In contrast, the author of essays or other nonfictional prose may blend
dreams and facts, ventures into the illogical, and delightful eccentricities.
The rules of old-fashioned rhetoric
apply better to expository and argumentative prose than to the other modes.
These rules were first set down in ancient Greece by teachers who elicited them
from the smooth eloquence of Socrates, the impassioned and balanced reasoning of
Demosthenes, and others. The ancient Romans went further still in codifying
figures of speech, stylistic devices, and even the gestures of the orator.
Such treatises played a significant part in the education of the Renaissance
Humanists, of the classical and Augustan prose writers of 17th-century England
and France, of the leaders of the French Revolution in the 18th century, and
even in 19th-century historians and statesmen such as Guizot in France and
Macaulay and Gladstone in Britain. But the sophisticated oratory of such
18th-century British orators as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and
Charles Fox or, more recently, that of Winston Churchill, hardly seems attuned
to audiences in the age of television.
It has been suggested by students of
German history that Adolf Hitler,
in his vituperative speeches at Nuremberg in the 1930s, fascinated the Germans
because they had been unaccustomed, unlike other Western nations, to eloquence
in their leaders. If a large part of a population is illiterate, such as the
Cubans under Fidel Castro, unending flows of eloquence may constitute a
convenient means of educating the masses. Elsewhere, a more familiar and casual
type of address from political leaders tends to be preferred in an era of mass
media. The gift of a superior orator has been facetiously defined as that of
saying as little as possible in as many words as possible. Like sermons, many
types of formal address such as lectures, political speeches, and legal
pleadings appear to be doomed as documents of literary value, as Burke's or
Lincoln's orations and addresses were when they were learned by heart by the
younger generations and helped mold the style and contribute to the moral
education of men.
In modern literatures, the category of
nonfictional prose that probably ranks as the most important both in the
quantity and in the quality of its practitioners is the essay.
Before the word itself was coined in the
16th century by Montaigne and Bacon, what came to be called an essay was called
a treatise, and its attempt to treat a serious theme with consistency deprived
it of the seductive charm relished in the later examples of that form of
literature. In this sense, the word "essay" would hardly fit the
didactic tone of Aristotle's Rhetoric or
his Metaphysics. There were, however,
ancient masters of an early form of the essay, such as Cicero
discoursing on the pleasantness of old age or on the art of
"divination"; Seneca, on anger or clemency; and Plutarch, more
superficially and casually, on the passing of oracles. The relentless desire to
analyze one's own contradictions, especially among Christians, who, like Saint
Paul, were aware of their duality and of "doing the evil which they would
not," also contributed to the emergence of the essay. But Christian writing
tended to be highly didactic, as may be seen in the work of Saint Augustine of
the 5th century, or of the 12th-century theologian Abélard, or even in
the Latin writings on "the solitary life" or on "the scorn of the
world" by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch. Not until the
Renaissance, with its increasing assertion of the self, was the flexible and
deliberately nonchalant and versatile form of the essay perfected by Montaigne.
Montaigne,
who established the term essay, left his mark on almost every essayist who came
after him in continental Europe, and perhaps even more in English-speaking
countries. Emerson made him one of his six Representative
Men along with others of the stature of Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Hazlitt
lauded Montaigne's qualities as precisely those that "we consider in great
measure English," and another English romantic writer, Leigh
Hunt, saw him as "the first man who had the courage to say as an
author what he felt as a man." And the 20th-century poet T.S.
Eliot declared him to be the most important writer to study for an
insight into the literature of France. With Montaigne, the essay achieved for
the first time what it can achieve better than any other form of writing, except
perhaps the epistolary one: a means of self-discovery. It gave the writer a way
of reaching the secret springs of his behaviour, of seizing the man and the
author at once in his contradictions, in his profound disunity, and in his
mobility. The essay was symbolic of man's new attitude toward himself, revelling
in change, and hence in growth, and forsaking his age-old dream of achieving an
underlying steadfastness that might make him invulnerable and similar to the
gods. Now he set out to accept himself whole, with his body and his physical and
behavioural peculiarities, and thereby repudiate medieval asceticism. He would
portray his foibles and unworthiness, hoping to rise above his own mediocrity,
or, at the other extreme, he would exalt himself in the hope that he might
become the man he depicted. Montaigne in his essays pursued an ethical purpose,
but with no pompousness or rhetoric. He offered an ideal that was adopted by his
successors for 200 years: perfecting man as a tolerant, undogmatic, urbane
social being. But, unlike medieval Christian writers, he would not sacrifice to
others the most dearly cherished part of himself. To others he would lend
himself, but his personality and his freedom were his own, and his primary duty
was to become a wiser human being.
No essayist after Montaigne touched on
so many varied aspects of life with such an informal, felicitous, and brilliant
style. The later writers who most nearly recall the charm of Montaigne include,
in England, Robert Burton, though his whimsicality is more erudite, Sir Thomas
Browne, and Laurence Sterne, and in France, with more self-consciousness and
pose, André Gide and Jean Cocteau.
In the age that followed Montaigne's, at
the beginning of the 17th century, social manners, the cultivation of
politeness, and the training of an accomplished gentleman became the theme of
many essayists. This theme was first exploited by the Italian Baldassare
Castiglione in his Il cortegiano (1528;
The
Courtier). The influence of
the essay and of genres allied to it, such as maxims, portraits, and sketches,
proved second to none in molding the behaviour of the cultured classes, first in
Italy, then in France, and, through French influence, in most of Europe in the
17th century. Among those who pursued this theme was the 17th-century Spanish
Jesuit Baltasar Gracián
in his essays on the art of worldly wisdom. (see also Spanish literature)
With the advent of a keener political
awareness with the age of Enlightenment, in the 18th century, the essay became
all-important as the vehicle for a criticism of society and of religion. Because
of its flexibility, its brevity, and its potential both for ambiguity and for
allusions to current events and conditions, it was an ideal tool for
philosophical reformers. The Federalist Papersin America and the tracts of the French Revolutionaries, are among the
countless examples of attempts during this period to improve the condition of
man through the essay.
The advantage of this form of writing
was that it was not required to conform to any unity of tone or to similar
strictures assigned to other genres since it was for a long time not even
considered a genre. After ponderous apologies for traditional faith failed to
repulse the onslaught of deism and atheism, traditionalists of the 18th and 19th
centuries, such as Burke and Coleridge, abandoned unwieldy dogmatic
demonstrations in favour of the short, provocative essay. In the defense of the
past, it served as the most potent means of educating the masses. French
Catholics, German pietists, and a number of individual English and American
authors confided to the essay their dismay at what they saw as modern vulgarity
and a breakdown of the coherence of the Western tradition. Essays such as Paul
Elmer More's long series of Shelburne
Essays (published between 1904 and 1935), T.S. Eliot's After
Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards
the Definition of Culture (1948), and others that attempted to reinterpret
and redefine culture, established the genre as the most fitting to express the
genteel tradition at odds with the democracy of the new world.
The proliferation of magazines in the
United States, and the public's impatience with painstaking demonstrations and
polemics, helped establish the essay just as firmly as a receptacle for robust, humorous
common sense, unpretentiously expressed, as in the writings of Oliver Wendell
Holmes (1809-94). Creative writers resorted to it to admonish their compatriots
when they seemed too selfishly unconcerned by the tragedies of the world. Archibald
MacLeish, for instance, did so in A
Time to Speak (1941). Lewis Mumford, Allen Tate, and other literary and
social critics became crusaders for moral and spiritual reform; others seized
upon the essay for scathingly ironical and destructive criticism of their
culture: for example, James Gibbons
Huneker (1860-1921), an admirer of iconoclasts and of egoists, as he
called them, proposed European examples to Americans he deemed to be too
complacent and lethargic; and, more vociferously still, H.L.
Mencken (1880-1956), a self-appointed foe of prejudices, substituted his
own for those he trounced in his contemporaries.
In other new countries, or in cultures
acquiring an awareness of their own ambitious identity, the essay became
semipolitical, earnestly nationalistic, and often polemical, playful, or bitter.
Such essays sometimes succeeded in shaking the elite out of its passivity. In
Uruguay, for example, José
Enrique Rodó; (1872-1917), in an analogy to the characters in
Shakespeare's Tempest, compared what
should be the authentic South American to the spirit Ariel, in a work thus
entitled, in contrast to the bestial Caliban, representing the materialism of
North America. In Canada Olivar Asselin (1874-1937) used the essay to advocate
the development of a genuine French-Canadian literature. Among the older
cultures of Europe, Salvatore
Quasimodo (1901-68), the Italian poet and Nobel laureate, appended
critical and hortatory essays to some of his volumes of verse, such as Il
falso e vero verde (1956; "The False and True Green"). Other
European heirs to this tradition of the essay include Stefan Zweig and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal in Austria and Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht in Germany; their
sprightly and incisive essays on the arts can be traced to the 19th century
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. (see also
French literature)
One of the functions of literature is to
please and to entertain; and the essay, as it grew into the biggest literary
domain of all, did not lose the art of providing escape. Essayists have written
with grace on children, on women, on love, on sports, as in Robert Louis
Stevenson's collection Virginibus
Puerisque (1881), or Willa Cather's pleasant reflections in Not
Under Forty (1936). Ernest Renan
(1823-92), one of the most accomplished French masters of the essay, found
relief from his philosophical and historical studies in his half-ironical
considerations on love, and Anatole
France (1844-1924), his disciple, and hosts of others have alternated
playful essays with others of high seriousness. Sports, games, and other forms
of relaxation have not been so often or so felicitously treated. Izaak
Walton's The Compleat Angler (1953), however, enjoys the status of a minor
classic, and the best of the modern Dutch essayists, Johan
Huizinga (1872-1945), has reflected with acuteness on Homo
ludens, or man at play. A Frenchman, Jean Prévost (1901-44), who was
to die as a hero of the Resistance to the German occupation of France during
World War II, opened his career as an essayist with precise and arresting
analyses of the Plaisirs des sports (1925).
But there are surprisingly few very significant works, except in chapters of
novels or in short stories, on the joys of hunting, bullfighting, swimming, or
even, since Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin's overpraised essay, Physiologie
du goût (1825; "The Physiology of Taste") on gourmet
enjoyment of the table.
Serious speculations, on the other hand,
have tended to overburden the modern essay, especially in German and in French,
and to weigh it with philosophy almost as pedantic as that of academic
treatises, though not as rigorous. The several volumes of Jean-Paul
Sartre's Situationspublished from 1947 on, constitute the most weighty and, in the first two
volumes in particular, the most original body of essay writing of the middle of
the 20th century. Albert Camus'
Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; Myth of Sisyphus) and his
subsequent Homme révolté (1951;
The
Rebel) consist of grave, but inconsistent and often
unconvincing, essays loosely linked together. Émile Chartier (1868-1951),
under the pseudonym Alain,
exercised a lasting influence over the young through the disjointed, urbane, and
occasionally provoking reflections scattered through volume after volume of his
essays, entitled Propos.
Apart from philosophical speculation,
which most readers prefer in limited quantities, the favourite theme of many
modern essays has been speculation on the character of nations. It is indeed
difficult to generalize on the national temper of a nation or on the
characteristics of a given culture. The authors who have done it--Emerson in his
essay on English Traits (1856),
Hippolyte Taine in his studies of the English people, Alexis de Tocqueville in
his Democracy in America (1835,
1840)--blended undeniable conclusions with controversial assertions. Rather than
systematic studies, desultory essays that weave anecdotes, intuitions, and
personal remarks, ever open to challenge, have proved more effective in
attempting to delineate cultures. In the 20th century, the masters of this form
of writing have been among the most able in the art of essay writing: Salvador
de Madariaga in Spanish, Hermann Keyserling in German, and Elie Faure in French.
Some nations are much more prone than others to self-scrutiny. Several of the
finest Spanish essayists were vexed by questions of what it meant to be a
Spaniard, especially after the end of the 19th century when Spain was compelled
to put an end to its empire. Angel Ganivet in his essay on Idearium
español (1897; Spain: An
Interpretation), Ortega y Gasset
in España invertebrada (1922; Invertebrate
Spain), and Miguel de Unamuno
in almost every one of his prose essays dealt with this subject. A Spanish-born
essayist, George Santayana
(1863-1952), was one of the most accomplished masters of written English prose;
because of his cosmopolitan culture and the subtlety of his insights, he was one
of the most percipient analysts of the English and of the American character.
Laments on the decline of the essay in
the 20th century have been numerous since the 1940s, when articles in most
journals tended to become shorter and to strive for more immediate effect. As a
result, the general reader grew accustomed to being attacked rather than
seduced. Still, the 20th century could boast of the critical essays of Virginia
Woolf in England, of Edmund Wilson in America, and of Albert Thibaudet and
Charles du Bos in France, all of whom maintained the high standards of
excellence set by their predecessors of the previous century. It is regrettable
that, in the language in which the best modern essays have been written,
English, the term "essay" should also have acquired the connotation of
a schoolboy's attempts at elementary composition. For the essay requires vast
and varied information, yet without pedantry or excessive specialization. It
must give the impression of having been composed spontaneously, with relish and
zest. It should communicate an experience or depict a personality with an air of
dilettantism, and of love of composition, and it should make accessible to the
reader knowledge and reflection and the delight of watching a fine mind at work.
The essayist should possess the virtues that one of the most influential English
essayists, Matthew Arnold,
praised in Culture and Anarchy(1869): "a passion . . . to divest knowledge of all that was harsh,
uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it."
Among the ancient Greeks and Romans,
history was the branch of literature in which the most expert and the most
enduring prose was written. It only recovered its supreme rank in nonfictional
prose in the 18th century. Earlier, however, at the beginning of the 16th
century, in Florence, Italy, Niccolò
Machiavelli and Francesco
Guicciardini prepared the way for history to become great literature by
marrying it to the nascent science of politics and by enlarging its scope to
include elements of the philosophy of history. In the 18th century Voltaire,
tersely and corrosively, and Edward
Gibbon, with more dignity, established history again as one of the great
literary arts. In the 19th century, their lessons were taken to heart, as
writers and readers realized that, in Thomas
Carlyle's words, "every nation's true Bible is its history." In
some nations, historians, together with epic and political poets, instilled into
the people a will to recover the national consciousness that had been stifled or
obliterated. Macaulay's
ambition, to see history replace the latest novel on a lady's dressing table,
was endorsed as an eminently reasonable and beneficent ambition by scholars
throughout the 19th century. After an eclipse during the first half of the 20th
century, when erudition and distrust of elaborate style prevailed, the poetry of
history has again been praised by the most scrupulous practitioners of that
discipline. Poetry, in that context, does not mean fiction or unfaithfulness to
facts, or a mere prettification, which would be tantamount to falsification;
rather, it is the recognition that, as G.M.
Trevelyan, Regius professor at Cambridge University, proclaimed "The
appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic." Few historians
today would wholly agree with the once sacrosanct formula of Leopold
von Ranke (1795-1886) that their task is to record the past as it really
took place. They well know that, for modern history, facts are so plentiful and
so very diverse that they are only meaningful insofar as the historian selects
from them, places them in a certain order, and interprets them. Since World War
II, as history drew increasingly on sociology, anthropology, political and
philosophical speculation, and psychoanalysis, the conviction that objectivity
could be maintained by a scholar dealing with the past came to be questioned and
in large measure renounced. The Italian philosopher Benedetto
Croce's laconic warning that all history is contemporary history (i.e.,
bound to the historian's time and place, hence likely to be replaced by
another one after a generation) has come to be generally accepted. Nietzsche,
who had sharply questioned the historical methods of his German countrymen in
the 1870s, stressed the need to relate history to the present and to present it
in a living and beautiful form, if it is to serve the forces of life. "You
can only explain the past," he said, "by what is highest in the
present."
In Germany, Italy, Spain, England,
America, and most of all in France, where the vogue of sheer, and often
indigestible, erudition was never wholeheartedly adopted, more literary talent
may have gone into historical writing than into the novel or the short story.
Many reasons account for the brilliance, and the impact, of this branch of
nonfictional prose. Modern man has a powerful interest in origins--of
civilization, of Christianity, of the world initiated by the Renaissance, or the
French Revolution, or the rise of the masses. History invites an explanation of
what is in terms of its genesis, not statically but in the process of becoming.
The breadth of men's curiosity has expanded significantly since the 18th
century, when belief in the absolutes of religious faith tended to be supplanted
by greater concern for the relative world in which men live, move, and exist. A
primary factor in the increasing importance of history is the bewilderment
concerning the revolutions that occurred in or threatened so many countries in
the latter part of the 20th century. As fiction, philosophy, and the exact
sciences failed to provide a plausible explanation, many anguished readers
turned to the record of brutal change in earlier periods. The historians who
addressed themselves to those immense subjects, with their myriad ramifications,
often composed monumental works of a synthetical character, such as those of Arnold
Toynbee or Henri Pirenne,
but they also cultivated the essay. Sometimes these essays appeared as short and
pregnant volumes of reflections, such as Isaiah Berlin's Historical
Inevitability (1954), sometimes in collections of articles that first
appeared in magazines.
The question of how much of doctrinal
writing, dealing with faith, ethics, and philosophy,
can be called literature can only be answered subjectively by each reader,
judging each case on its own merits. There have been philosophers who felt in no
way flattered to be included among what they considered unthinking men of
letters. The prejudice lingers in some quarters that profundity and clarity are
mutually exclusive and that philosophy and social sciences therefore are beyond
the reach of the layman. On the other hand, many writers, while often profound
and fastidiously rigorous in their thought, such as Paul Valéry, have
vehemently objected to being called philosophers. Nonetheless, a vast number of
philosophical works owe their influence and perhaps their greatness to their
literary merits.
In periods when philosophical
speculation became very abstruse, as in Germany in the 19th century, men of
letters often acted as intermediaries between the highly esoteric thinkers and
the public. Much of the impact of the erudite 19th-century German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel
was due to the more easily approachable writings of those who took issue with
him, such as the Existentialist thinker Søren Kierkegaard, or to those who
reinterpreted him, such as Karl Marx. Similarly, the thoughts of 20th-century
German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl
achieved wider circulation by receiving more literary expression in the writings
of Jean-Paul Sartre. In modern
Europe, the men of letters of Germany were long the most deeply imbued with
abstract philosophy. After World War II, however, French writers appeared to
take on a zest for abstract speculation, for turgid prose, and for the coining
of abstruse terms. Much of French literature in the years after the war has been
characterized as "literature as philosophy."
A very few philosophers have reached
greatness by evolving a coherent, comprehensive system, ambitiously claiming to
account for the world and man. Such harmonious constructions by the greatest
philosophers, such as Descartes and Spinoza, might be compared to epic poems in
sometimes embracing more than there actually appears to be between heaven and
earth. These philosophical systems were conceived by powerful imaginative
thinkers whose creative abilities were not primarily of an aesthetic order. The
ability and the ambition to produce such systems has appeared in very few
countries or cultures. The Slavic, the Spanish, and Spanish-American cultures
have been richer in thinkers than in philosophers; that is, in men who reflected
on the problems of their own country, who attempted to evolve a philosophy from
history, or who applied a broad view to moral or political questions, rather
than in men who constructed abstract philosophical systems.
More and more in the 20th century, the
sciences that are called in some countries "social" and in others
"humane" have replaced the all-encompassing philosophical systems of
past ages. In Spain, Miguel de
Unamuno (1864-1936) and José
Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) marked the thought and the sensibility of
Spanish-speaking peoples far more than systematic philosophers might have done.
Their writing, which disdains impeccable logic, is no less thought-provoking for
being instinct with passion and with arresting literary effects.
In Russia, the doctrinal writers whose
thought was most influential and often most profound were also those whose prose
was most brilliant. They generally centred their speculations on two Russian
preoccupations: the revival of Christian thought and charity in the Orthodox
faith; and the relationship of Russia to Western Europe, branded by the
Slavophiles as alien and degenerate. The consistency of ancient Greek and later
Western thinkers, from Aristotle through Descartes, was of scant concern to
them, but in the vitality of their style, some of these Russian theorists were
masters, whose turbulent, paradoxical ideas were taken to heart by novelists,
poets, and statesmen. Among these masters, Aleksandr
Herzen (1812-70) combined romantic ardour and positivism, formulating a
passionately Russian type of socialism; he left his mark in autobiography,
political letters, fiction, and chiefly philosophy of history in From the Other Shore(1851). Nikolay Danilevsky
(1822-85), a scientist who turned to philosophy, attempted to convince his
compatriots that the manifest destiny of their country was to offer a purer and
fresher ideology in lieu of that of the decadent West. V.V.
Rozanov (1856-1919) was an apocalyptic prophet preaching an unusual
interpretation of Christian religion; a number of his intuitions and passionate
assertions are found in the novel The Possessed (1871-72), by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, whose own nonfictional prose is of considerable quality and
conviction. The strangest and most contradictory, but also the most brilliant
prose writer, among those thinkers who were torn between East and West, between
a jealous Orthodox faith and the attraction of Catholic Rome, was Vladimir
Solovyov (1853-1900). He blended the most personal type of visionary
mysticism with an incisive humour in a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard. His
philosophical essay-dialogue-treatise, Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of Human History (1900),
is representative of the nonfictional Russian prose that, while not widely known
outside Russia, is as revealing as the Russian novel of the permanent
contradictions and aspirations of the Slavic character.
The role of nonfictional prose in the
American literature of ideas is significant, as can be seen in several of Emerson's
philosophical essays and addresses; in Walt Whitman's Democratic
Vistas (1871); in William James's pleasantly written essays on religious
experience and on sundry psychological and ethical topics; in George Santayana's
dexterous and seductive developments on beauty, on nature, on poets, on the
genteel tradition, all envisaged with ironical sympathy. Irving Babbitt
(1865-1933), Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), and Lewis Mumford are among the many
American writers who, in the 20th century, maintained the tradition of writing
on abstract or moral themes with clarity and elegant simplicity. Earlier, Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had expressed their lay philosophy in a manner
they wished to be widely accessible.
In France the tradition haute
vulgarisation--"higher vulgarization" or popularization--never
died and was seldom slighted by the specialists. There, and to a slightly lesser
extent in Britain, much of the most valuable writing in prose was an elucidation
of the view of life underlying the creations of eminent men in many fields. Such
doctrinal writing, expounding innermost convictions and sometimes representing a
diversion from more intensive pursuits, constitutes a by no means negligible
portion of the writings of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, of the poet William
Butler Yeats, and others. The novelist or the poet may well use nonfictional
prose to purge his own anger, to give vent to his vituperation against his confrères,
and to relieve his imagination of all the ideological burden that might
otherwise encumber it. D.H. Lawrence
preserved the purity of his storyteller's art by expressing elsewhere his
animadversions against Thomas Hardy or Sigmund Freud. Albert Camus stripped his
fiction and short stories of the ideological musings found in his philosophical
volumes. Marcel Proust
succeeded in incorporating many abstract discussions of the value of art, love,
and friendship in his very original and loose type of fiction; but his great
work, À
la recherche du temps perdumight well have gained even more from the excision of those dissertations
and the writing of more volumes like his Chroniques
(1927) or Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954).
The masters of nonfictional prose in French in the 20th century have been those
thinkers who were also superb stylists and who deemed it a function of
philosophy to understand the aesthetic phenomenon: Henri Bergson (1859-1941),
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), and Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). No more
poetical advocate of reverie has arisen in the 20th century than La
Poétique de la rêverie (1960; The
Poetics of Reverie) and the posthumous collection of essays, Le
Droit de rêver (1970; "The
Right to Dream"), by Bachelard, who was also a philosopher of science.
A major influence on him, as on several earlier poets endowed with profound
intellect, such as Baudelaire and Valéry, was Edgar
Allan Poe, the impact of whose essays on poetics, on cosmology, and on
dreams and reveries has been immense and beneficent. More than a century after
his death, many of Poe's American compatriots have conceded that the storyteller
and the poet in Poe counted for less, as his European admirers had divined, than
the writer of critical and doctrinal prose rich in dazzling intuitions.
Although lectures, articles, and other
prosaic admonitions have tended to take their place, sermons, funeral orations,
allegories, and the visions of eternal punishment brandished by theologians
constitute some of the most unforgettable prose. This form of nonfictional prose
literature dates from before the Christian Era; Jewish thought and style were
molded by commentaries on the Old Testament and compilations of the wisdom of
the sages. Later, and more nearly literary, works of this nature include
Sebastian Brant's didactic, poetical, and satirical Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of
Fools), and the mystic writings of Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) in Germany,
the moving sermons of Jón Vídalín (1666-1720) in Iceland.
In England, Richard Baxter (1615-91) and John Bunyan (1628-88) were among the
most eloquent of the 17th-century Puritans who composed doctrinal works of
literary merit; along with the epic poet John
Milton (1608-74), whose prose works hardly count for less than his
poetry, they exercised a powerful influence on the English language through
their doctrinal prose. Their contemporary, the Anglican Jeremy
Taylor (1613-67), wrote the most sustained and dignified prose of an age
that, on the continent, would be called Baroque. A little later, in northern
Europe, the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg
(1684-1754), who spent most of his life in Denmark and became best known as a
comic writer, also advised his contemporaries how to live morally in his Ethical Thoughts and other didactic treatises. The Swede Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772), less gifted as a writer but far more original in
his blend of mysticism and science, outshone all previous Scandinavians in
impressing the imagination of other Europeans. No less influential, Søren
Kierkegaard (1813-55), because of his stimulating ambiguities, his bold
treatment of traditional theology and philosophy, and his extraordinary ability
to write vivid, biting, and provoking prose, was, a century after his death, one
of the most potent forces in the literature and thought of Western civilization.
(see also religious
literature)
Many 20th-century readers experience a
feeling of remoteness in this kind of doctrinal writing, which stems in part
from a lack of vital interest in the beliefs it embodies and from a coolness
toward religious dogmatism or fanaticism. Intolerance has shifted from religion
to the domain of politics. But the contemporary estrangement from that rich
literary heritage is due also to a distrust of high-flown eloquence. Cotton
Mather's Essays to do good (1710)
has few readers in present-day New England, despite that region's Puritan
tradition, and Jonathan Edwards
(1703-58), a writer of great spiritual warmth and imaginative style who was the
first of the great prose writers of America, is admired today chiefly by
specialists.
A less sonorous style, one that does not
ring so monotonously ornate to the reader's ears, is now preferred. In Spain, Antonio
de Guevara (c. 1480-1545), a
preacher who was at his best in his familiar and satirical moments, and St.
Teresa of Avila (1515-82), in her records of her mystical ecstasies, have
withstood the changing tides of taste. The French also succeeded in maintaining
their appreciation of their two greatest religious writers, Pascal
and Bossuet, at the very top
of the nonfictional prose writers; both are still revered and occasionally
imitated. Pascal took over traditional theology and treated it as literature;
his unfinished Pensées have
exercised far more influence than the rationalism of the greatest French
philosophers on the sensibilities of the French. Bossuet's orations reveal the
magnificent but refrigerating decorum that seems inseparable from eulogies of
the dead--a genre that precludes full sincerity and cultivates tremulous emotion
to a dangerous degree. Bossuet's sermons and treatises, however, include
masterpieces of simple, terse, direct oratory, which show him as the majestic
defender of the unity of faith, of absolutism, and of tradition. His was the
last significant endeavour in the 17th century to arrest the flow of relativism
and of rebellious individualism, which had engulfed Western civilization with
the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Humanism. The two most brilliant writers
of religious prose in France in the 20th century were Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a poetical writer with a luxury of
images, and Simone Weil
(1909-43), more terse and restrained; they steered a middle course between
dogmatism and humility in luring the lay reader to their ardent expressions of
conviction.
In the 20th century, political,
economic, and social thought has attempted to reach scientific precision through
the use of quantitative data, processing machines, and mathematical formulas.
Through such means, other disciplines eventually were elevated to the status of
sciences. Literature lost a great deal as a result of this scientific urge, and
political and economic thought may have lost even more; for example, the ability
to be understood, and perhaps applied, by men of affairs and leaders of nations.
The result has been that momentous decisions may be made independent of
political theory, which is more often called upon to explain them afterward. Albert
Einstein remarked that politics is much more baffling and difficult than
physics and that consequences of errors in politics are likely to make far more
difference to the world than the miscalculations of science. Politics is often
defined as the art of the possible; it is also an art of improvisation, since
the fleeting occasions must be grasped when they appear, and risks must be taken
without a full array of scientific data. Like military action, however,
political action can be studied in historical writings and in the literary
testimonials of men who ran the affairs of their country. Thucydides, Cicero,
Caesar, Milton, Burke, Napoleon, and Jefferson were such men of action who were
also endowed with uncommon literary gifts. In varying degrees, Benjamin
Disraeli, Winston Churchill,
Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau, Lenin, and de
Gaulle owed some of their insight and effectiveness to their literary
efforts. (see also political
philosophy)
Authors, however, are by no means
infallible in dealing with the unpredictable course of political life.
Interpreting and channelling public opinion proved insuperably difficult, for
example, to Alphonse de Lamartine in the revolutionary period of 1848-49 in
France, to the bookish Aleksandr Kerensky during the 1917 Revolution in Russia,
and to a number of brilliant writers who attempted to guide the Spanish Republic
in the 1930s. Crowds often can be moved more readily by vapid, repetitious, or
inflammatory speeches than by profound or wise counsel. Abraham Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, Churchill's speeches during Britain's "finest
hour" early in World War II, and de Gaulle's lofty eloquence regarding the
crises of three decades in France were admired less when they were delivered
than afterward. As they are collected, studied, and engraved in the mental
makeup of millions of future citizens, such speeches have an effectiveness
second to no other form of nonfictional prose. Novels may exercise immense
influence through the acute social criticism they embody, but their impact upon
the sensibility and the behaviour of their readers is probably less than that of
political prose.
Although the Spanish language cannot
boast of any political thinker comparable to Plato, Machiavelli, or Rousseau, it
may boast a large number of fine writers on political topics. Generally, these
writers reveal a restrained and terse style, like the poets of Spain, the Latin
country least addicted to inflation of language. Garcilaso
de la Vega (1539-1616), the son of an Inca mother, wrote with courage and
talent of the Peruvians and other cultures of the New World cruelly wrecked by
their Catholic conquerors. The Argentinian Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento (1811-88) fought in battle and with his pen against
his country's dictator and left a masterpiece of social insight, written with
rare effectiveness, Facundo (1845). Miguel
Ángel Asturias (1899-1974), from Guatemala, scathingly depicted
the evils of dictatorship in Central America. Like many others in South America,
where versatility is not uncommon, Francisco
de Miranda (1750-1816) of Venezuela was both a political writer and a
statesman.
Italy, after Machiavelli, failed to
produce political writers of very great eminence, even during its liberation and
unification in the 19th century. The universal thinker Benedetto
Croce (1866-1952), however, had the courage to publish during the Fascist
era the most impassioned defense of liberty in volumes such as La
storia come pensiero e come azione (1938; History
as the Story of Liberty). Another Italian--but from another political
direction -- Antonio Gramsci
(1891-1937), one of the most intelligent exponents of Communism in western
Europe, was aware of the vital significance of literary form to spread political
ideas. He bitterly deplored the lack of a popular literature in his country that
reflected the morality and sentiment of the people.
In France political speculation was more
comprehensive: few political theoricians have proved as influential as the
philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially Montesquieu and Rousseau. It was
the good fortune of the French that during their Revolution at the end of the
18th century and throughout the 19th century, its keenest political minds were
also writers of admirable prose. Tocqueville's observations became a sacred text
for many a student of America and of pre-Revolutionary France. Since the French
seldom give ideas serious consideration unless they are well expressed, however,
it was a misfortune that most political speculation after the Napoleonic age was
written by gifted, often brilliant, conservatives, such as Joseph de Maistre,
Auguste Comte, Frédéric Le Play, Renan, Taine, and Charles
Maurras. Those advocating a socialistic view, such as Jean Jaurès and the
more elegant and genteel Léon Blum, failed to express their theories in
classic prose. The level of political comment in the magazines and newspapers in
France is consistently high, but the writers tend to be either too clear-sighted
or too arrogant to grant their statesmen a chance to act. "Fair play"
is an untranslatable phrase in French, and politics in France, unlike some other
countries, is never regarded as a game or sport. Rather, it is a passionate
affair of the heart and intellect, conducted in a mood of intransigence. The
English essayist Walter Bagehot
(1826-77), observing the French at the time of the 1851 coup d'état,
commented wryly that "the most essential quality for a free people, whose
liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity
. . . . Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of
conduct and consistency of opinion."
English and American political works,
from the 17th century on, excel all others; they constitute the richest form of
nonfictional prose in the English language. John Milton's Areopagitica(1644) and his other political pamphlets are monuments of political prose
that survive to this day as classics. Edmund
Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord (1796)
was praised a century and a half after its composition as the greatest piece of
invective in the English language. William Godwin's Political
Justice(1793) does
not compare in the majesty of its prose to those supreme models, but it did
inflame Shelley and other men of letters of the time. Walter Bagehot wrote
equally well on literature, politics, and economics, and The Economistwhich he edited, was the best-written weekly of its kind in any language.
John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle also helped to maintain the tradition of
political and social thought expressed as literature through the 19th century.
Polemical prose significantly declined
in the modern era. Few moderns express the rage for invective seen in the verse
of satirists such as the ancient Roman Juvenal or Alexander Pope in 17th-century
England or even in the writings of Christian disputants such as Martin Luther.
Voltaire rejoiced in flaying not only his enemies but also some, such as
Montesquieu and Rousseau, who were fundamentally in agreement with him in the
fight against the religion of his age. Literary polemics of a high order were
employed against the cultural imperialism of the French in Gotthold Lessing's Hamburgische
Dramaturgie (1767-69; Hamburg
Dramaturgy). Beside these examples, the polemics of more recent periods seem
tame, or else gross and venomous. Later practitioners of the literature of
insult include Émile Zola,
particularly in his celebrated article on the Dreyfus affair, J' Accuse (1898). Later writers, however, often overreach
themselves; their rhetoric sounds vapid and their epigrams strained.
The rift between the two cultures,
scientific and humanistic, is probably not as pronounced or final as it has been
alleged to be. About the time the division was enunciated, in the mid-20th
century, it was possible to point to a number of eminent scientists who were
also masters of prose writing--Henri Poincaré, Jean Rostand, and Gaston
Bachelard in France; Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in England; and
René Dubos and Robert Oppenheimer in the U.S. The peril for scientists
who undertake to write for laymen appears to lie in a temptation to resort to
florid language and to multiply pretentious metaphors and elaborate cadences in
their prose. Some scientists who wrote on astronomy, on anthropology, and on
geology have not altogether escaped that pitfall: Sir James Jeans, Loren
Eiseley, Sir James Frazer, Teilhard de Chardin. The marriage of the "two
cultures" in one mind, which was no less concerned with scientific truth
than with beauty of form, was found frequently in older times; Aristotle,
Hippocrates, Galileo, Newton, and Goethe all showed strong interest in both. The
popularization of science reached a level of a lucid and elegant art with the
writings of Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) in French, Francesco Algarotti
(1712-64) in Italian, and later, with a masterpiece of scientific rigour
expressed in flexible and precise prose, Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale,
by the physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-78).
Journalism
often takes on a polemical cast in countries in which libel laws are not
stringent. Polemical journalism flourished in continental Europe when a
journalist's insults could be avenged only in a duel; one of the great
journalists of this heroic era of the press in France, Armand Carrel, died in
such a duel with another journalist in 1836. Most journalistic literature,
however, deserves none of the ill-repute that is associated with its more
polemical expressions. Rather, it is a remarkably elastic form, as adaptable to
sarcasm and the puncturing of illusions as to reflection, subtle persuasion, and
infectious geniality. Among the eminent writers who explored its possibilities
in the 18th century, Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele offered
models of polished English prose in the journals The Tatlerand The
Spectatorand
Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith also used it effectively in England. In
France Voltaire, the novelist Abbé Prévost, and the dramatist
Pierre-Carlet de Marivaux all found effective use for the form. By the 19th
century, most eminent men of letters attempted to broaden their audiences by
means of articles and essays in the press, and in the 20th century, the
influence of journalism pervaded the most important works of some authors. Some
of the works of G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells, for example, were reminiscent of
journalism in the manner in which they sought topical controversy and challenged
social and political prejudices. Many of the finest essays of Virginia
Woolf, John Middleton Murry, and Aldous Huxley represented British
literary journalism at its most intelligent level. In America, the more
heterogeneous public to which authors must address themselves and, later, the
competition of the audiovisual media, were not propitious to the flowering of
literary journalism of that type. In a more ephemeral genre, that of political
reflections couched in clear, pungent style, Walter
Lippmann composed models of commentaries on politics and ethics.
The more self-centred and passionate
writers seldom succeeded in journalistic prose as well as those who could forget
their ego and adapt their style to a public that wanted to be entertained,
moved, or convinced, perhaps, but whose attention span extended no further than
the 15 minutes of a train ride or of a hurried breakfast. In France, Proust
dreamt for years of appearing as a journalist on the first column of the journal
Le Figaro. But he and his
contemporaries Gide, Claudel, and Valéry, and, later, the imperious and
nervous André Malraux, did not conform to the limitations of the
newspaper article. On the other hand, Colette, Paul Morand, and François
Mauriac proved conspicuously successful in writing the brief, gripping, taut
article dear to readers of many of the better continental dailies and weeklies.
The insidious appeal of journalistic
writing to thinkers, novelists, and poets is similar to the siren charm of
conversation for the author who enjoys talking brilliantly at dinner parties. As
Oscar Wilde ruefully remarked, conversationalists and journalists, intent on
reporting on the ephemeral, pour whatever genius is theirs into their lives, and
only their talent into their works.
Authors of maxims and aphorisms, on the
contrary, strive for the brevity of inscriptions on medals and public buildings
and for a diamond-like resistance to the devastation of time upon diffuse and
padded writing. This form is periodically revived. In modern letters, in the
latter half of the 20th century, a condensed and enigmatic sort of prose was
preferred to poetry by several poets, who invested their sensations, their
illuminations, or their reflections with the mystery and éclat of
aphorisms. Among the French, who have always favoured the maxim for
philosophical, psychological, and ethical advice, a great poet, René
Char, came to be more and more fascinated by that epigrammatic form,
harking back to the ancient Greek philosopher whom he admired most, Heracleitus.
Char found in the aphorism a means of "pulverizing language" and of
allowing the isolated words or groups of words, freed from rhetoric and from the
exigencies of clarity, to emerge like rocks from a sunken archipelago. Other
French prose writers, including Camus,
Char's warmest admirer, and Malraux, likewise scattered through their prose
works striking aphorisms that summed up the sense of a situation or the
experience of a lifetime. French novels, from the 18th century through the 20th,
reflect the influence of the unforgettable maxims coined by the 17th-century
moralists Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère. The novelist could
never long resist the seduction of brevity, the challenge of condensing wisdom
into a neat, usually bitter, formula, which usually suggested to the reader not
to expect overmuch from life and to take revenge upon its little ironies by
denouncing it in advance.
Maxims and other pointed and
epigrammatic phrases of the sort the ancient Romans called sententiae can become too sophisticated or can too obviously strive
for effect. This form of expression reached its point of perfection, balancing
profundity and solidity of content with pointedness of form, with the moralists
of the 17th and 18th centuries in France, whom Nietzsche ranked above all other
writers. They included Pascal and La Rochefoucauld and, later, Sébastien
Chamfort (1740/41-94), a satirical pessimist often quoted by Schopenhauer
and Joseph Joubert (1754-1824). This form, even more than poetry, represents the
most economical means of communicating long experience and for imparting moral
advice. In a very few words, or at most a few lines, an aphorism may enclose
enough matter for the plot of a novel. It may trounce the prejudices of snobbery
more vigorously than a long, meandering novel of manners. The greatest of the
19th-century poets, Goethe, Novalis, Leopardi, Vigny, and Baudelaire, as well as
painters such as Delacroix, Cézanne, Degas, and later Braque, cherished
the epigrammatic, incisive form of expression. One of the advantages of the
aphorism or pensée is that it
can easily produce an impression of depth when it may be only a commonplace
pungently expressed. Another is that it allows several approaches to a subject
by the skilled prose writer. If he is of a fiery temperament, prone to
enthusiasms and lashing out in wrath against what he deems to be false, he can,
like Nietzsche, embrace contradictions and sponsor opposed attitudes. If
Epictetus, Pascal, and Nietzsche had expressed their reflections consistently
and systematically, their works would probably be forgotten. Nonetheless, as
Pascal shrewdly remarked, the aphoristic prose style is, of all the manners of
writing, the one that engraves itself most lastingly in the memories of men.
That form, in verse and in prose,
probably constitutes the most widespread form of literature. It is found in many
nations that long lived without fiction, epics, or even popular poetry. It is
found in ancient sayings that interlard the speeches of the 20th-century leaders
both of the U.S.S.R. and of China; in the book of Proverbs of the Bible; in the
Qur`an; in the Afrikaans language of South Africa in the 20th-century
writings of J. Langenhoven. Proverbs, maxims, riddles, and even conundrums make
up a large part of black African folklore. The animal tales of these people also
provide lessons in the form of aphorisms that are neither as platitudinous nor
as didactic as Aesop's fables.
Portraits and sketches are a form of
literature that thrives in cultures in which the court, the salon, or the café
plays an important role. The few examples left by the ancient Greeks, such as by
Theophrastes, pale beside the vivid portraits of real individuals drawn by the
ancient Roman historian Tacitus and by the impassioned orator Cicero. In the
Classical age of 17th-century France, the character sketch was cultivated in the
salons and reached its summit with La Bruyère. That form of writing,
however, suffered from an air of artificiality and of virtuosity. It lacked the
ebullience and the imagination in suggesting telltale traits that characterize
the portraits of the duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755). Collections of sketches and
characters, however, tend to strike the reader as condescending and ungenerous
insofar as the writer exempts himself of the foibles he ridicules in others.
(see also biography)
The humorous
article or essay, on the other hand, is a blend of sympathy and gentle pity with
irony, a form of criticism that gently mocks not only others but the mocker
himself. Humour strikes deep roots in the sensibility of a people, and each
nation tends to feel that its own brand of humour is the only authentic one. Its
varieties of humorous writing are endless, and few rules can ever be formulated
on them. Humorous literature on the highest literary level includes that of
Cervantes in Spain, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray in England, of Jean Paul in
Germany, and of Rabelais, Montaigne, and Voltaire in France. Romantic authors
have, as a rule, been too self-centred and too passionate to acquire the
distance from their own selves that is essential to humour. In the 20th century,
some of the most original examples of what has been called the
"inner-directed smile" are in the works of the Argentine Jorge
Luis Borges and by one of the writers he admires most, the English
essayist G.K. Chesterton
(1874-1936). In both writers, and in other virtuosos of the intellectual
fantasy, there is a persistent refusal to regard themselves as being great,
though greatness seems to be within their reach. The humorist will not take
himself seriously. Chesterton hides the depth of his religious convictions,
while Borges facetiously presents his prodigious erudition and indulges in
overelaborate and flowery prose. Borges likes to put on and take off masks, to
play with labyrinths and mirrors, but always with a smile. By sketching what
appear to be fanciful portraits rather than overtly fictional stories, he
creates a half-imaginary character whose presence haunts us in all his
writings--that of the author himself.
The dialogue form has long been used as
a vehicle for the expression of ideas. It is especially cherished by authors
eager to eschew the forbidding tone of formality that often accompanies the
expression of serious thought. The writer of a dialogue does not directly
address his public, but instead revels in the multiple facets of ideas. By
playing this dialectical game he can appear to present contrary views as their
respective proponents might and then expose the errors of those he opposes,
leading the readers to accept his own conclusions. The advantages of the
dialogue are clear: ideas that might have remained abstruse and abstract become
concrete and alive. They assume dramatic force. A constant element in the
dialogue is irony;
etymologically, the term derives from a form of interrogation in which the
answer is known beforehand by the questioner. The earliest models of the genre,
by the ancient Greeks Plato
and Lucian, have never been excelled. Sophistry is another element of the
dialogue. In Plato and in the dialogues of Pascal's
Provinciales(1656-57; "Provincial Letters"), the protagonist plays
with the naiveté of his opponents, who always end by surrendering. The
writer of a dialogue cannot affect the same casual and self-indulgent attitude
as the author of a personal essay since the characters and their statements must
be plausible. Nor can he pursue an argument consistently, as he might in a
critical, historical, or philosophical essay. Something must persist in the
dialogue of the spontaneity and the versatility of an actual conversation among
witty and thoughtful people.
There was much seriousness and
occasionally some pedantry in early dialogues in several literatures. The
dialogues of Bardesanes
(154-222) in Syriac, rendered into English as On
Fate, are on the subject of the laws of the country. A hundred years
earlier, Lucian, who was also
Syrian, proved himself a master of flowing and ironical Greek prose in his
satirical dialogues. The Italian Renaissance writer Pietro
Aretino (1492-1556) proved himself the equal of Lucian in verve in his Dialogues
using the same mold and the same title as Lucian. Others who used the dialogue
form included Castiglione and Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) in Italy; and in Spain
Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), León Hebreo (1460-c. 1521), and Juan de Valdés (c.
1500-41), who treated questions of faith and of languages in dialogues. The
genre flourished in the 18th century: Lessing, Diderot,
and the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Diderot's works largely consist of
sprightly, rambling, and provocative discussions between the various aspects of
his own remarkable mentality. Bold conjectures, determined onslaughts on
prejudices, insights into physiology and biology, and erotic fantasies all enter
into his dialogues. In the 19th century a number of complex literary
personalities, who were capable of accepting the most diverse, and even
conflicting points of view, such as Renan and Valéry, had a predilection
for the dialogue. Among the devices used by authors of dialogue--many of whom
lacked the sustained inventiveness required by fiction--was to attribute their
words to the illustrious dead. The French prelate Fénelon,
for example, composed Dialogues des morts (1700-18),
and so did many others, including the most felicitous master of that prose form,
the English poet Walter Savage Landor, in his Imaginary
Conversations(1824)
and Pentameron (1837). (see also
Italian literature, Spanish
literature)
The literature of travel
has declined in quality in the age when travel has become most common--the
present. In this nonfictional prose form, the traveller himself has always
counted for more than the places he visited, and in the past, he tended to be an
adventurer or a connoisseur of art, of landscapes, or of strange customs who was
also, occasionally, a writer of merit. The few travel books by ancient Greek
geographers, such as Strabo and Pausanias of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, are
valuable as a storehouse of remarks on ancient people, places, and creeds.
Travel writing of some literary significance appears in the late-13th-century
writings of Marco Polo. Works of a similar vein appeared in the 17th century in
the observations of Persia two French Huguenots, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and
Jean Chardin, whose writings were lauded by Goethe.
Many books of documentary value were later written by English gentlemen on their
grand tour of the Continent. The 18th-century Italian egotist Casanova and his
more reliable and sharper compatriot Giuseppe Baretti (1719-89) also produced
significant travel writings. (see also travel literature)
The form comprises many of the finest
writings in prose during the Romantic age. Not only were the Romantics
more alive to picturesqueness and quaintness but also they were in love with
nature. They were eager to study local colours and climates and to depict them
in the settings for their imaginative stories. Also, travel gave the Romantic
writer the illusion of flight from his wearied self. The leisurely record of
Goethe's journey to Italy in 1786-88 counts more readers than most of his
novels. Pismo russkogu puteshestvennika (1791-92;
Eng. trans., Letters
of a Russian Traveler1957) by Nikolay
Karamzin is one of the earliest documents in the development of Russian
Romanticism. Ivan Goncharov
(1812-91), the Russian novelist who stubbornly limited his fiction to his own
geographical province, recorded in Frigate
Pallas his experience of a tour around the world. Nowhere else in the whole
range of literature is there anything comparable to Peterburg (1913-14), by a virtuoso of poetic style, Andrey Bely; it
is a travel fantasy within a city that is both real and transfigured into a
myth. Neither James Joyce's Dublin nor Balzac's Paris is as vividly recreated as
the former Russian capital in Bely's book. Other travel writers of note include
the multinational Lafcadio Hearn
(1850-1904), who interpreted Japan with sensitivity and insight. Earlier, two
other Westerners wrote on Asia, the English historian Alexander W. Kinglake
(1809-91), in Eothen (1844), and, more
incisively, the French diplomat Joseph-Arthur,
comte de Gobineau (1816-82); both blended a sense of the picturesqueness
of the East with shrewdness in the interpretation of the people. One of the most
thoughtful and, in spite of the author's excessive self-assurance, most profound
books on Asia is Das Reisetagebuch eines
Philosophen (1919; Travel Diary of a
Philosopher), by the German thinker Hermann
Keyserling (1880-1946). With an insatiable interest in countries,
Keyserling also interpreted the soul of South America and, less perceptively,
analyzed the whole spectrum of European nations. Among the thousands of travel
books on Italy, there are a few masterpieces of rapturous or humorous prose: in
English, the writings of D.H.
Lawrence on Sardinia, on Etruscan Italy, and on the Italian character are
more lucid and less strained than other of his prose cogitations. Venice,
"man's most beautiful artifact," as Bernard Berenson called it,
inspired Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Maurice Barrès, Anatole France, and
hundreds of other Frenchmen to write some of their finest pages of prose. After
World War I, there was a distinct yearning for new possibilities of salvation
among war-ridden Europeans, dimly descried in Asia, in Russia, or in America,
and travel literature assumed a metaphysical and semireligious significance. The
mood of the writers who expressed this urge was somewhat Byronic; they were
expert at poetizing the flight from their own selves. Blaise
Cendrars (1887-1961) in his novel Emmène-moi
au bout du monde (1956; "Take Me Away to the End of the World"),
epitomizes the urge to seek adventures and a rediscovery of oneself through
strange travels. The very theme of travel, of the protagonist being but a
traveller on this earth, has been, from Homer's Odyssey
onward, one of the most laden with magical, and symbolical, associations in
literature. Countless authors have played moving and delicate variations on it.
(see also German
literature)
Of all the branches of nonfictional
prose, none is less amenable to critical definition and categorization than letter
writing. The instructions of the ancient grammarians, which were repeated a
thousand times afterward in manuals purporting to teach how to write a letter,
can be reduced to a few very general platitudes: be natural and appear
spontaneous but not garrulous and verbose; avoid dryness and declamatory pomp;
appear neither unconcerned nor effusive; express emotion without lapsing into
sentimentality; avoid pedantry on the one hand and banter and levity on the
other. Letters vary too much in content, however, for generalizations to be
valid to all types. What is moving in a love letter might sound indiscreet in a
letter of friendship; an analysis of the self may fascinate some readers, while
others prefer anecdotes and scandal. La
Bruyère, at the end of the 17th century, remarked that women
succeed better than men in the epistolary form. It has also been claimed that a
feminine sensibility can be seen in the letters of the most highly acclaimed
male masters of this form, such as Voltaire, Mirabeau, Keats, and Baudelaire.
Advice to practitioners of the art of letter writing usually can be expressed in
the often-quoted line in Shakespeare's Hamlet:
"To thine own self be true." The English biographer Lytton
Strachey (1880-1932), a copious and versatile letter writer himself,
wrote: "No good letter was ever written to convey information, or to please
its recipient: it may achieve both those results incidentally; but its
fundamental purpose is to express the personality of the writer." There
are, however, numerous and even contradictory ways of expressing that
personality. (see also epistolary
literature)
Although critics have issued endless
disquisitions on the craft of fiction and other genres, they have generally
remained silent on the epistolary genre, though it has sometimes been the form
of prose that outlives all others. Ever since the expression of the writer's
personality became one of the implicit purposes of writing in the 18th century,
the letters of such eminent authors as Diderot, Rousseau, Byron, and Flaubert
have probably offered at least as much delight as any of their other writings.
Impressive monuments of scholarship have been erected on the presentation of the
complete letters of Thackeray, George Eliot, Swinburne, and Henry James. The
literatures of France and England are notably richer in letter writing of the
highest order than are the literatures of the United States and Germany.
Contrary to many pessimistic predictions regarding the effect on letter writing
of modern means of communication, such as the telephone, together with an
apparently increasing penchant for haste, some of the richest, most revealing,
and most thoughtful letters of all times have been written in the 20th century;
those of the English writers Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence are paramount
among them. (see also literary
criticism)
The cult of the ego (that is, a
preoccupation with self-analysis) is a late development in the history of
literature. There were, to be sure, men in ancient times who were absorbed in
their own selves, but there is almost no autobiographical
literature from ancient Greece and, in spite of Cicero and Pliny the Younger,
there is little from ancient Rome. The confession, made as humble as possible
and often declamatory in the exposition of the convert's repented sins, was an
outgrowth of Christianity; masters of confessional literature were Saint
Augustine, Petrarch, and the English Puritans. Autobiographical writing took a
different form in the 18th century in the work of men who would have agreed with
Goethe that personality is the most precious possession. After the publication
of Rousseau's Confessions in France in
1781, the passion for looking into one's heart (and other organs as well) spread
to other literatures of western Europe. Many a novelist thereafter kept a
precise record of his cogitations, anxieties, and harrowing moments of inability
to create. Poets and painters, including Delacroix, Constable, and Braque, have
often done the same. There is only a very tenuous separation between fiction of
this sort from nonfiction; the introspective novel in the first person singular
has much in common with a diary, or a volume of personal reminiscences. In his
long novel À la recherche du temps perdu,
Proust revealed himself in three ways--as the author, as the narrator, and
as the characters who are projections of his own self. An autobiography once was
ordinarily written toward the end of a life, as a fond recollection or an
impassioned justification of a lifetime's deeds. More and more, it has come to
be written also by men and women in their prime. The names of writers whose
autobiographical writings have become classics is legion. Henry Adams
(1838-1918) owes his place in American letters chiefly to his book on his
education; in 20th-century English letters, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell,
Leonard Woolf, and Stephen Spender may similarly survive in literature through
autobiographical works. André Gide, always uncertain of his novelist's
vocation, felt more at ease laying bare the secret of his life in
autobiographies and journals. (see also French
literature, American
literature)
Although imaginative fiction has
probably suffered from excesses of introspection and of analyses of the author's
own artistic pangs, knowledge of man's inner life has been enriched by such
confessions. The most profound truths on human nature, however, have been
expressed not in the form of autobiography but in its transposition into
fiction. Readers generally have found more truth in literature created from the
possibilities of life than from the personal record of the one life that the
author has lived.
In conclusion, the variety of
nonfictional prose is prodigious. It can be written on almost any conceivable
subject. Almost any style may be used, from casual digressions or sumptuous and
sonorous sentences to sharp maxims and elliptical statements. But nonfictional
prose seldom gives the reader a sense of its being inevitable, as does the best
poetry or fiction. Nonfictional prose seldom can answer positively the question
that Rilke and D.H. Lawrence suggest that any potential writer should ask: Would
I die if I were prevented from writing? (H.M.P.)
One of the oldest forms of literary
expression, biographical literature seeks to recreate in words the life of a
human being, that of the writer himself or of another person, drawing upon the
resources, memory and all available evidences--written, oral, pictorial.
Biography is sometimes regarded as a
branch of history, and earlier biographical writings--such as the 15th-century Mémoires
of the French councellor of state, Philippe de Commynes, or George
Cavendish's 16th-century life of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey--have often been treated
as historical material rather than as literary works in their own right. Some
entries in ancient Chinese chronicles included biographical sketches; imbedded
in the Roman historian Tacitus'
Annals is the most famous biography of
the emperor Tiberius; conversely, Sir Winston Churchill's magnificent life of his
ancestor John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, can be read as a history
(written from a special point of view) of Britain and much of Europe during the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). Yet there is general recognition today
that history and biography are quite distinct forms of literature. History
usually deals in generalizations about a period of time (for example, the
Renaissance), about a group of people in time (the English colonies in North
America), about an institution (monasticism during the Middle Ages). Biography
focusses upon a single human being and deals in the particulars of his life.
(see also historiography,
"Marlborough: His Life and
Times")
Both biography and history, however, are
concerned with the past, and it is in the hunting down, evaluating, and
selection of sources that they are akin. In this sense biography can be regarded
as a craft rather than an art: techniques of research and general rules for
testing evidence can be learned by anyone and thus need involve comparatively
little of that personal commitment associated with art.
A biographer in pursuit of an individual
long dead is usually hampered by a lack of sources: it is often impossible to
check or verify what written evidence there is; there are no witnesses to
cross-examine. No method has yet been developed by which to overcome such
problems. Each life, however, presents its own opportunities as well as specific
difficulties to the biographer: the ingenuity with which he handles gaps in the
record--by providing information, for example, about the age that casts light
upon the subject--has much to do with the quality of his resulting work. James
Boswell knew comparatively little about Dr. Johnson's earlier years; it is one
of the greatnesses of his Life of Samuel
Johnson LL.D. (1791) that he succeeded, without inventing matter or
deceiving the reader, in giving the sense of a life progressively unfolding.
Another masterpiece of reconstruction in the face of little evidence is A.J.A.
Symons' biography of the English author and eccentric Frederick William
Rolfe, The
Quest for Corvo(1934).
A further difficulty is the unreliability of most collections of papers,
letters, and other memorabilia edited before the 20th century. Not only did
editors feel free to omit and transpose materials, but sometimes the authors of
documents revised their personal writings for the benefit of posterity, often
falsifying the record and presenting their biographers with a difficult
situation when the originals were no longer extant.
The biographer writing the life of a
person recently dead is often faced with the opposite problem: an abundance of
living witnesses and a plethora of materials, which include the subject's papers
and letters, sometimes reports of telephone conversations and conferences
transcribed from tape, as well as the record of interviews granted the
biographer by his subject's friends and associates. Frank Friedel, for example,
in creating a biography of the United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt
(1882-1945), has had to wrestle with something like 40 tons of paper. But
finally, when writing the life of any man, whether long or recently dead, the
biographer's chief responsibility is vigorously to test the authenticity of his
materials by whatever rules and techniques are open to him.
Assembling a string of facts in
chronological order does not constitute the life of a person, it only gives an
outline of events. The biographer therefore seeks to elicit from his materials
the motives for his subject's actions and to discover the shape of his
personality. The biographer who has known his subject in life enjoys the
advantage of his own direct impressions, often fortified by what the subject has
himself revealed in conversations, and of his having lived in the same era (thus
avoiding the pitfalls in depicting distant centuries). But on the debit side,
such a biographer's view is coloured by the emotional factor almost inevitably
present in a living association. Conversely, the biographer who knows his
subject only from written evidence, and perhaps from the report of witnesses,
lacks the insight generated by a personal relationship but can generally command
a greater objectivity in his effort to probe his subject's inner life.
Biographers of the 20th century have had
at their disposal the psychological theories and practice of Sigmund
Freud and of his followers and rivals. The extent to which these new
biographical tools for the unlocking of personality have been employed and the
results of their use have varied greatly. On the one hand, some biographers have
deployed upon their pages the apparatus of psychological revelation--analysis of
behaviour symbols, interpretation based on the Oedipus complex, detection of
Jungian archetypal patterns of behaviour, and the like. Other biographers,
usually the authors of scholarly large-scale lives, have continued to ignore the
psychological method; while still others, though avoiding explicit psychological
analysis and terminology, have nonetheless presented aspects of their subjects'
behaviours in such a way as to suggest psychological interpretations. In
general, the movement, since World War I, has been toward a discreet use of the
psychological method, from Katherine Anthony's
Margaret Fuller (1920) and Joseph
Wood Krutch's study of Edgar Allan Poe (1926), which enthusiastically
embrace such techniques, through Erik
Erikson's Young
Man Luther(1958)
and Gandhi's
Truth on the Origins of Militant Nonviolence(1969), where they are adroitly and sagaciously used by a
biographer who is himself a psychiatrist, to Leon
Edel's vast biography of Henry James (5 vol., 1953-72), where they are
used with sophistication by a man of letters. The science of psychology has also
begun to affect the biographer's very approach to his subject: a number of
20th-century authors seek to explore their own involvement with the person they
are writing about before embarking upon the life itself. (see also
Freudian criticism)
The biographer, particularly the
biographer of a contemporary, is often confronted with an ethical problem: how
much of the truth, as he has been able to ascertain it, should be printed? Since
the inception of biographical criticism in the later 18th century, this somewhat
arid--because unanswerable--question has dominated both literary and popular
discussion of biographical literature. Upon the publication of the Life
of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell was bitterly accused of slandering his
celebrated subject. More than a century and a half later, Lord Moran's Winston
Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (1966), in which Lord Moran used the Boswellian techniques of
reproducing conversations from his immediate notes and jottings, was attacked in
much the same terms (though the question was complicated by Lord Moran's
confidential position as Churchill's physician). In the United States, William
Manchester's Death of a President (1967),
on John F. Kennedy, created an even greater stir in the popular press. There the
issue is usually presented as "the public's right to know"; but for
the biographer it is a problem of his obligation to preserve historical truth as
measured against the personal anguish he may inflict on others in doing so.
Since no standard of "biographical morality" has ever been agreed
upon--Boswell, Lord Moran, and Manchester have all, for example, had eloquent
defenders--the individual biographer must steer his own course. That course in
the 20th century is sometimes complicated by the refusal of the custodians of
the papers of important persons, particularly national political figures, to
provide access to all the documents.
Biography, while related to history in
its search for facts and its responsibility to truth, is truly a branch of
literature because it seeks to elicit from facts, by selection and design, the
illusion of a life actually being lived. Within the bounds of given data, the
biographer seeks to transform plain information into illumination. If he invents
or suppresses material in order to create an effect, he fails truth; if he is
content to recount facts, he fails art. This tension, between the requirements
of authenticity and the necessity for an imaginative ordering of materials to
achieve lifelikeness, is perhaps best exemplified in the biographical problem of
time. On the one hand, the biographer seeks to portray the unfolding of a life
with all its cross-currents of interests, changing emotional states, events; yet
in order to avoid reproducing the confusion and clutter of actual daily
existence, he must interrupt the flow of diurnal time and group his materials so
as to reveal traits of personality, grand themes of experience, and the actions
and attitudes leading to moments of high decision. His achievement as a
biographical artist will be measured, in great part, by his ability to suggest
the sweep of chronology and yet to highlight the major patterns of behaviour
that give a life its shape and meaning.
Biographies are difficult to classify.
It is easily recognizable that there are many kinds of lifewriting, but one kind
can easily shade into another; no standard basis for classification has yet been
developed. A fundamental division offers, however, a useful preliminary view:
biographies written from personal knowledge of the subject and those written
from research.
The biography that results from what
might be called a vital relationship between the biographer and his subject
often represents a conjunction of two main biographical forces: a desire on the
part of the writer to preserve "the earthly pilgrimage of a man," as
the 19th-century historian Thomas
Carlyle calls it (Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays, 1838), and an awareness that he has the special
qualifications, because of direct observation and access to personal papers, to
undertake such a task. This kind of biography is, in one form or another, to be
found in most of the cultures that preserve any kind of written biographical
tradition, and it is commonly to be found in all ages from the earliest
literatures to the present. In its first manifestations, it was often produced
by, or based upon the recollections of, the disciples of a religious
figure--such as the biographical fragments concerning Buddha, portions of the
Old Testament, and the Christian gospels. It is sometimes called "source
biography" because it preserves original materials, the testimony of the
biographer, and often intimate papers of the subject (which have proved
invaluable for later biographers and historians--as exemplified by Einhard's
9th-century Vita Karoli imperatoris ["Life
of Charlemagne"] or Thomas
Moore's Letters and Journals of
Lord Byron [1830]). Biography based on a living relationship has produced a
wealth of masterpieces: Tacitus' life of his father-in-law in the Agricola,
William Roper's life of his father-in-law Sir Thomas More (1626), John
Gibson Lockhart's biography (1837-38) of his father-in-law Sir Walter
Scott, Johann Peter Eckermann's
Conversations with Goethe (1836; trans. 1839), and Ernest Jones's Life
and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-57). Indeed, what is generally acknowledged
as the greatest biography ever written belongs to this class: James Boswell's Life
of Samuel Johnson. (see also scripture)
Biographies that are the result of
research rather than firsthand knowledge present a rather bewildering array of
forms. First, however, there should be mentioned two special kinds of
biographical activity.
Since the late 18th century, the Western
world--and, in the 20th century, the rest of the world as well--has produced
increasing numbers of compilations of biographical facts concerning both the
living and the dead. These collections stand apart from literature. Many nations
have multivolume biographical dictionaries such as the Dictionary
of National Biographyin
Britain and the Dictionary
of American Biographyin
the United States; general encyclopaedias contain extensive information about
figures of world importance; classified collections such as Lives
of the Lord Chancellors (Britain) and biographical manuals devoted to
scholars, scientists, and other groups are available in growing numbers;
information about living persons is gathered into such national collections as Who's
Who?(Britain), Chi
è? (Italy), and Who's
Who in America?
The short life, however, is a genuine
current in the mainstream of biographical literature and is represented in many
ages and cultures. Excluding early quasi-biographical materials about religious
or political figures, the short biography first appeared in China at about the
end of the 2nd century BC, and two centuries later it was a fully developed
literary form in the Roman Empire. The Shih-chi("Historical Records"), by Ssu-ma
Ch'ien (145?-c. 85 BC), include
lively biographical sketches, very short and anecdotal with plentiful dialogue,
grouped by character-occupation types such as "maligned statesmen,"
"rash generals," "assassins," a method that became
established tradition with the Han shu (History
of the Former Han Dynasty), by Ssu-ma Ch'ien's successor and
imitator, Pan Ku (AD 32-92).
Toward the end of the first century AD, in the Mediterranean world, Plutarch's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which
are contrasting pairs of biographies, one Greek and one Roman, appeared; there
followed within a brief span of years the Lives
of the Caesarsby
the Roman emperor Hadrian's librarian Suetonius. These works established a quite subtle
mingling of character sketch with chronological narrative that has ever since
been the dominant mark of this genre. Plutarch, from an ethical standpoint
emphasizing the political virtues of man as governor, and Suetonius, from the
promptings of sheer biographical curiosity, develop their subjects with telling
details of speech and action; and though Plutarch, generally considered to be
the superior artist, has greatly influenced other arts than biographical
literature--witness Shakespeare's Roman plays, which are based on his Lives--Suetonius created in the Life
of Nero one of the supreme examples of the form. Islamic literature,
from the 10th century, produced short "typed" biographies based on
occupation--saints, scholars, and the like--or on arbitrarily chosen personal
characteristics. The series of brief biographies has continued to the present
day with such representative collections as, in the Renaissance, Giorgio
Vasari's Lives
of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and ArchitectsThomas Fuller's History
of the Worthies of Englandin the 17th century, Samuel Johnson's Lives
of the English Poets in the 18th, and, in more recent times, the
"psychographs" of the American Gamaliel Bradford (Damaged
Souls, 1923), Lytton Strachey's Eminent
Victorians (1918) and the "profiles" that have become a hallmark
of the weekly magazine The
New Yorker. (see also literary
sketch, Chinese literature,
Ancient Greek literature, Latin
literature, "Parallel
Lives," , Islamic arts)
Further classification of biographies
compiled by research can be achieved by regarding the comparative objectivity of
approach. For convenience, six categories, blending one into the other in
infinite gradations and stretching from the most objective to the most
subjective, can be employed.
This, the first category, is the most
objective and is sometimes called "accumulative" biography. The author
of such a work, avoiding all forms of interpretation except selection--for
selection, even in the most comprehensive accumulation, is inevitable--seeks to
unfold a life by presenting, usually in chronological order, the paper remains,
the evidences, relating to that life. This biographer takes no risks but, in
turn, seldom wins much critical acclaim: his work is likely to become a prime
source for biographers who follow him. During the 19th century, the Life
of Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and
Literary History of his Time (7 vol., 1859-94), by David Masson, and Abraham
Lincoln: A History (10 vol., 1890), by John G. Nicolay and John
Hay, offer representative samples. In the 20th century such works as
Edward Nehls's, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite
Biography (1957-59) and David Alec Wilson's collection of the life records
of Thomas Carlyle (1923-29), in six volumes, continue the traditions of this
kind of life writing.
This second category, scholarly and
critical, unlike the first, does offer a genuine presentation of a life. These
works are very carefully researched; sources and "justifications" (as
the French call them) are scrupulously set forth in notes, appendixes,
bibliographies; inference and conjecture, when used, are duly labelled as such;
no fictional devices or manipulations of material are permitted, and the life is
generally developed in straight chronological order. Yet such biography, though
not taking great risks, does employ the arts of selection and arrangement. The
densest of these works, completely dominated by fact, have small appeal except
to the specialist. Those written with the greatest skill and insight are in the
first rank of modern life writing. In these scholarly biographies--the
"life and times" or the minutely detailed life--the author is able to
deploy an enormous weight of matter and yet convey the sense of a personality in
action, as exemplified in Leslie Marchand's Byron
(1957), with some 1,200 pages of text and 300 pages of notes, Dumas Malone's
Jefferson and his Time (4 vol.,
1948-70), Churchill's Marlborough (1933-38), Douglas S. Freeman's George Washington (1948-57). The critical biography aims at
evaluating the works as well as unfolding the life of its subject, either by
interweaving the life in its consideration of the works or else by devoting
separate chapters to the works. Critical biography has had its share of
failures: except in skillful hands, criticism clumsily intrudes upon the
continuity of a life, or the works of the subject are made to yield doubtful
interpretations of character, particularly in the case of literary figures. It
has to its credit, however, such fine biographies as Arthur S. Link, Wilson
(5 vol., 1947-65); Richard Ellmann, James
Joyce (1959); Ernest Jones, The Life
and Works of Sigmund Freud; Douglas S. Freeman, Lee
(1934-35); and Edgar Johnson, Charles
Dickens (1952).
This third, and central, category of
biography, balanced between the objective and the subjective, represents the
mainstream of biographical literature, the practice of biography as an art. From
antiquity until the present--within the limits of the psychological awareness of
the particular age and the availability of materials--this kind of biographical
literature has had as its objective what Sir Edmund Gosse called "the
faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life." It seeks to
transform, by literary methods that do not distort or falsify, the truthful
record of fact into the truthful effect of a life being lived. Such biography
ranges in style and method from George Cavendish's 16th-century life of Cardinal
Wolsey, Roger North's late-17th-century lives of his three brothers, and
Boswell's life of Johnson to modern works like Lord David Cecil's Melbourne,
Garrett Mattingly's Catherine of
Aragon, Andrew Turnbull's Scott
Fitzgerald, and Leon Edel's Henry
James.
This fourth category of life writing is
subjective and has no standard identity. At its best it is represented by the
earlier works of Catherine Drinker Bowen,
particularly her lives of Tchaikovsky, "Beloved
Friend"(1937),
and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from
Olympus (1944). She molds her sources into a vivid narrative, worked up into
dramatic scenes that always have some warranty of documentation--the dialogue,
for example, is sometimes devised from the indirect discourse of letter or
diary. She does not invent materials; but she quite freely manipulates
them--that is to say, interprets them--according to the promptings of insight,
derived from arduous research, and with the aim of unfolding her subject's life
as vividly as possible. (Mrs. Bowen, much more conservative in her later works,
clearly demonstrates the essential distance between the third and fourth
categories: her distinguished life of Sir Edward Coke, The
Lion and the Throne[1957],
foregoes manipulation and the "recreation" of dialogue and limits
interpretation to the artful deployment of biographical resources.) Very many
interpretative biographies stop just short of fictionalizing in the freedom with
which they exploit materials. The works of Frank
Harris (Oscar Wilde, 1916) and Hesketh
Pearson (Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind, 1937; Beerbohm Tree, 1956) demonstrate this kind of biographical latitude.
The books in this fifth category belong
to biographical literature only by courtesy. Materials are freely invented,
scenes and conversations are imagined; unlike the previous category, this class
often depends almost entirely upon secondary sources and cursory research. Its
authors, well represented on the paperback shelves, have created a hybrid form
designed to mate the appeal of the novel with a vague claim to authenticity.
This form is exemplified by writers such as Irving
Stone, in his Lust for Life (on van Gogh) and The
Agony and the Ecstasy (on Michelangelo). Whereas the compiler of
biographical information (the first category) risks no involvement, the
fictionalizer admits no limit to it.
The sixth and final category is outright
fiction, the novel written as biography or autobiography. It has enjoyed
brilliant successes. Such works do not masquerade as lives; rather, they
imaginatively take the place of biography where perhaps there can be no genuine
life writing for lack of materials. Among the most highly regarded examples of
this genre are, in the guise of autobiography, Robert
Graves's books on the Roman emperor Claudius, I,
Claudius and Claudius the God and His
Wife Messalina; Mary Renault's
The King Must Die on the legendary
hero Theseus; and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs
of Hadrian. The diary form of autobiography was amusingly used by George and
Weedon Grossmith
to tell the trials and tribulations of their fictional character, Charles
Poster, in The Diary of a Nobody (1892).
In the form of biography this category includes Graves's Count Belisarius and Hope Muntz's Golden Warrior (on Harold II, vanquished at the Battle of Hastings,
1066). Some novels-as-biography, using fictional names, are designed to evoke
rather than re-create an actual life, such as W.
Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence (Gauguin) and Cakes
and Ale (Thomas Hardy) and Robert
Penn Warren's All the King's Men (Huey
Long). (see also historical
novel)
In addition to these six main
categories, there exists a large class of works that might be denominated
"special-purpose" biography. In these works the art of biography has
become the servant of other interests. They include potboilers (written as
propaganda or as a scandalous exposé) and "as-told-to"
narratives (often popular in newspapers) designed to publicize a celebrity. This
category includes also "campaign biographies" aimed at forwarding the
cause of a political candidate (Nathaniel
Hawthorne's Life of Franklin Pierce
[1852] being an early example); the weighty commemorative volume, not
infrequently commissioned by the widow (which, particularly in Victorian times,
has usually enshrouded the subject in monotonous eulogy); and pious works that
are properly called hagiography, or lives of holy men, written to edify the
reader.
Autobiography,
like biography, manifests a wide variety of forms, beginning with the intimate
writings made during a life that were not intended (or apparently not intended)
for publication. (see also epistolary
literature)
Broadly speaking, the order of this
category represents a scale of increasingly self-conscious revelation. Collected
letters, especially in carefully edited modern editions such as W.S. Lewis' of
the correspondences of the 18th-century man of letters Horace Walpole (34 vol.,
1937-65), can offer a rewarding though not always predictable experience: some
eminent people commit little of themselves to paper, while other lesser figures
pungently re-create themselves and their world. The 15th-century Paston
Lettersconstitute an invaluable chronicle of the web of daily life woven
by a tough and vigorous English family among the East Anglian gentry during the
Wars of the Roses; the composer Mozart and the poet Byron, in quite different
ways, are among the most revealing of letter writers. Diarists have made great
names for themselves out of what seems a humble branch of literature. To mention
only two, in the 20th century the young Jewish girl Anne
Frank created such an impact by her recording of narrow but intense
experience that her words were translated to stage and screen; while a
comparatively minor figure of 17th-century England, Samuel
Pepys--he was secretary to the navy--has immortalized himself in a diary
that exemplifies the chief qualifications for this kind of writing--candour,
zest, and an unselfconscious enjoyment of self. The somewhat more formal journal
is likewise represented by a variety of masterpieces, from the notebooks, which
reveal the teeming, ardent brain of Leonardo da Vinci, and William Wordsworth's
sister Dorothy's sensitive
recording of experience in her Journals (1897),
to French foreign minister Armand de
Caulaincourt's recounting of his flight from Russia with Napoleon
(translated as With Napoleon in Russia, 1935) and the Journals of the brothers Goncourt,
which present a confidential history of the literary life of mid-19th-century
Paris.
These are autobiographies that usually
emphasize what is remembered rather
than who is remembering; the author,
instead of recounting his life, deals with those experiences of his life,
people, and events that he considers most significant. (The extreme contrast to
memoirs is the spiritual autobiography, so concentrated on the life of the soul
that the author's outward life and its events remains a blur. The artless res
gestae, a chronology of events, occupies the middle ground.)
In the 15th century, Philippe
de Commynes, modestly effacing himself except to authenticate a scene by
his presence, presents in his Mémoires a life of Louis XI, master of statecraft, as witnessed by one of the most
sagacious counsellors of the age. The memoirs of Giacomo
Casanova boast of an 18th-century rake's adventures; those of Hector
Berlioz explore with great brilliance the trials of a great composer, the
reaches of an extraordinary personality, and the musical life of Europe in the
first part of the 19th century. The memoir form is eminently represented in
modern times by Sir Osbert Sitwell's
polished volumes, presenting a tapestry of recollections that, as has been
observed, "tells us little about what it feels like to be in Sir Osbert's
skin"--a phrase perfectly illustrating the difference between memoirs and
formal autobiography.
This category offers a special kind of
biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection's
conscious and unconscious omissions and distortions. The novelist Graham
Greene says that, for this reason, an autobiography is only "a sort
of life" and uses the phrase as the title for his own autobiography (1971).
Any such work is a true picture of what, at one moment in a life, the subject
wished--or is impelled--to reveal of that life. An event recorded in the
autobiographer's youthful journal is likely to be somewhat different from that
same event recollected in later years. Memory being plastic, the autobiographer
regenerates his materials as he uses them. The advantage of possessing unique
and private information, accessible to no researching biographer, is
counterbalanced by the difficulty of establishing a stance that is neither
overmodest nor aggressively self-assertive. The historian Edward
Gibbon declares, ". . . I must be conscious that no one is so well
qualified as myself to describe the service of my thoughts and actions."
The 17th-century English poet Abraham
Cowley provides a rejoinder: "It is a hard and nice subject for a
man to write of himself; it grates his own heart to say anything of
disparagement and the reader's ears to hear anything of praise from him."
There are but few and scattered examples
of autobiographical literature in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 2nd
century BC the Chinese classical historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien included a brief
account of himself in the Shihchi, "Historical
Records." It is stretching a point to include, from the 1st century BC, the
letters of Cicero (or, in the early Christian era, the letters of St. Paul); and
Julius Caesar's Commentaries
tell little about Caesar, though they present a masterly picture of the
conquest of Gaul and the operations of the Roman military machine at its most
efficient. The Confessions of St.
Augustine, of the 5th century AD, belong to a special category of autobiography
discussed below; the 14th-century Letter
to Posterity of the Italian poet Petrarch
is but a brief excursion in the field.
Speaking generally, then, it can be said
that autobiography begins with the Renaissance in the 15th century; and,
surprisingly enough, the first example was written not in Italy but in England
by a woman entirely untouched by the "new learning" or literature. In
her old age Margery Kempe, the
sobbing mystic, or hysteric, of Lynn in Norfolk, dictated an account of her
bustling, far-faring life, which, however concerned with religious experience,
racily reveals her somewhat abrasive personality and the impact she made upon
her fellows. This is done in a series of scenes, mainly developed by dialogue.
Though calling herself, in abject humility, "the creature," Margery
knew, and has effectively transmitted the proof, that she was a remarkable
person.
The first full-scale formal
autobiography was written a generation later by a celebrated Humanist publicist
of the age, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, after he was elevated to the papacy, in
1458, as Pius II--the result
of an election that he recounts with astonishing frankness spiced with malice.
In the first book of his autobiography--misleadingly named Commentarii, in evident imitation of Caesar--Pius II traces his
career up to becoming pope; the succeeding 11 books (and a fragment of a 12th,
which breaks off a few months before his death in 1464) present a panorama of
the age, with its cruel and cultivated Italian tyrants, cynical condottieri
(professional soldiers), recalcitrant kings, the politics and personalities
behind the doors of the Vatican, and the urbane but exuberant character of the
Pope himself. Pius II exploits the plasticity of biographical art by creating
opportunities--especially when writing of himself as the connoisseur of natural
beauties and antiquities--for effective autobiographical narration. His
"Commentaries" show the art of formal autobiography in full bloom in
its beginnings; they rank as one of its half dozen greatest exemplars. (see also
Italian literature)
The neglected autobiography of the
Italian physician and astrologer Gironimo Cardano, a work of great charm, and the
celebrated adventures of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto
Cellini in Italy of the 16th century; the uninhibited autobiography of
the English historian and diplomat Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, in the early 17th; and Colley
Cibber's Apologyin the early 18th--these
are representative examples of biographical literature from the Renaissance to
the Age of Enlightenment. The
latter period itself produced three works that are especially notable for their
very different reflections of the spirit of the times as well as of the
personalities of their authors: the urbane autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the
great historian; the plainspoken, vigorous success story of an American who
possessed all the talents, Benjamin
Franklin; and the somewhat morbid introspection of a revolutionary
Swiss-French political and social theorist, the Confessionsof J.-J. Rousseau--the
latter leading to two autobiographical explorations in poetry during the Romantic
Movement (flourished 1798-1837) in England, Wordsworth's Prelude
and Byron's Childe
Haroldcantos III and IV. Significantly, it is at the end of the 18th
century that the word autobiography apparently first appears in print, in The
Monthly Review1797.
(see also "Prelude,
or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, The")
These might roughly be grouped under
four heads: thematic, religious, intellectual, and fictionalized. The first
grouping includes books with such diverse purposes as Adolf Hitler's Mein
Kampf (1924), The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), and Richard Wright's Native
Son (1940). Religious autobiography claims a number of great works, ranging
from the Confessions of St. Augustine
and Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum (The
Story of My Misfortunes) in the Middle Ages to the autobiographical chapters
of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus ("The
Everlasting No," "Centre of Indifference," "The Everlasting
Yea") and Cardinal John Newman's beautifully wrought Apologia in the 19th century. That century and the early 20th saw
the creation of several intellectual autobiographies. The Autobiography of the philosopher John
S. Mill, severely analytical, concentrates upon "an education which
was unusual and remarkable." It is paralleled, across the Atlantic, in the
bleak but astringent quest of The
Education of Henry Adams(printed privately 1906; published 1918). Edmund
Gosse's sensitive study of the difficult relationship between himself and
his Victorian father, Father
and Son(1907), and George
Moore's quasi-novelized crusade in favour of Irish art, Hail
and Farewell(1911-14),
illustrate the variations of intellectual autobiography. Finally, somewhat
analogous to the novel as biography (for example, Graves's I,
Claudius) is the autobiography thinly disguised as, or transformed into, the
novel. This group includes such works as Samuel Butler's Way
of All Flesh (1903), James Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), George Santayana's Last
Puritan (1935), and the gargantuan novels of Thomas Wolfe (Look
Homeward, Angel [1929], Of Time and
the River [1935]).
In the Western world, biographical
literature can be said to begin in the 5th century BC with the poet Ion of
Chios, who wrote brief sketches of such famous contemporaries as Pericles and
Sophocles. It continued throughout the classical period for a thousand years,
until the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Broadly
speaking, the first half of this period exhibits a considerable amount of
biographical activity, of which much has been lost; such fragments as remain of
the rest--largely funeral elegies and rhetorical exercises depicting ideal types
of character or behaviour--suggest that from a literary point of view the loss
is not grievous. (An exception is the life of the Roman art patron Pomponius
Atticus, written in the 1st century BC by Cornelius Nepos.) Biographical works
of the last centuries in the classical period, characterized by numerous
sycophantic accounts of emperors, share the declining energies of the other
literary arts. But although there are few genuine examples of life writing, in
the modern sense of the term, those few are masterpieces. The two greatest
teachers of the classical Mediterranean world, Socrates
and Jesus Christ, both
prompted the creation of magnificent biographies written by their followers. To
what extent Plato's life of
Socrates keeps to strict biographical truth cannot now be ascertained (though
the account of Socrates given by Plato's contemporary the soldier Xenophon,
in his Memorabiliasuggests a reasonable faithfulness) and he does not offer a full-scale
biography. Yet in his two consummate biographical dialogues--The
Apology (recounting the
trial and condemnation of Socrates) and the Phaedo(a portrayal of Socrates' last hours and death)--he brilliantly re-creates
the response of an extraordinary character to the crisis of existence. Some 400
years later there came into being four lives of Jesus, the profound religious
significance of which has inevitably obscured their originality--their homely
detail, anecdotes, and dialogue that, though didactic in purpose, also evoke a
time and a personality. The same century, the first of the Christian era, gave
birth to the three first truly "professional" biographers--Plutarch
and Suetonius (discussed above) and the historian Tacitus,
whose finely wrought biography of his father-in-law, Agricolaconcentrating on the administration rather than the man, has something of
the monumental quality of Roman architecture. The revolution in thought and
attitude brought about by the growth of Christianity is signalled in a
specialized autobiography, the Confessions
of St. Augustine; but the biographical opportunity suggested by Christian
emphasis on the individual soul was, oddly, not to be realized. If the blood of
the martyrs fertilized the seed of the new faith, it did not promote the art of
biography. The demands of the church and the spiritual needs of men, in a
twilight world of superstition and violence, transformed biography into hagiography.
There followed a thousand years of saints' lives: the art of biography forced to
serve ends other than its own. (see also Ancient
Greek literature)
This was a period of biographical
darkness, an age dominated by the priest and the knight. The priest shaped
biography into an exemplum of
other-worldliness, while the knight found escape from daily brutishness in
allegory, chivalric romances, and broad satire (the fabliaux). Nevertheless,
glimmerings can be seen. A few of the saints' lives, like Eadmer's
Life
of Anselmcontain
anecdotal materials that give some human flavour to their subjects; the
13th-century French nobleman Jean,
sire de Joinville's life of St. Louis (Louis IX of France), Mémoires,
offers some lively scenes. The three most interesting biographical
manifestations came early. Bishop Gregory
of Tours' History
of the Franksdepicts
artlessly but vividly, from firsthand observation, the lives and personalities
of the four grandsons of Clovis and their fierce queens in Merovingian Gaul of
the 6th century. Bede's Ecclesiastical
History of the English Peopleof the 8th century, though lacking the immediacy and exuberance--and the
violent protagonists--of Gregory, presents some valuable portraits, like those
of "the little dark man," Paulinus, who converted the King of
Northumbria to Christianity.
Most remarkable, however, a
self-consciously wrought work of biography came into being in the 9th century:
this was The Life
of Charlemagne, written by a cleric at his court named Einhard.
He is aware of his biographical obligations and sets forth his point of view and
his motives:
I have been careful not to omit any
facts that could come to my knowledge, but at the same time not to offend by a
prolix style those minds that despise everything modern . . . . No man can write
with more accuracy than I of events that took place about me, and of facts
concerning which I had personal knowledge. . . .
He composes the work in order to ensure
that Charlemagne's life is not "wrapped in the darkness of oblivion"
and out of gratitude for "the care that King Charles bestowed upon me in my
childhood, and my constant friendship with himself and his children."
Though Einhard's biography, by modern standards, lacks sustained development, it
skillfully reveals the chief patterns of Charlemagne's character--his constancy
of aims, powers of persuasion, passion for education. Einhard's work is far
closer to modern biography than the rudimentary poetry and drama of his age are
to their modern counterparts.
Like the other arts, biography stirs
into fresh life with the Renaissance in the 15th century. Its most significant
examples were autobiographical, as has already been mentioned. Biography was
chiefly limited to uninspired panegyrics of Italian princes by their court
Humanists, such as Simonetta's life of the great condottiere, Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan.
During the first part of the 16th
century in England, now stimulated by the "new learning" of Erasmus,
John Colet, Thomas More, and others, there were written three works that can be
regarded as the initiators of modern biography: More's
History of Richard III, William
Roper's Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly
Greatness; or, the life of Syr Thomas More, and George
Cavendish's Life of Cardinal
Wolsey. The History of Richard III (written
about 1513 in both an English and a Latin version) unfortunately remains
unfinished; and it cannot meet the strict standards of biographical truth since,
under the influence of classical historians, a third of the book consists of
dialogue that is not recorded from life. However, it is a brilliant work,
exuberant of wit and irony, that not only constitutes a biographical landmark
but is also the first piece of modern English prose. With relish, More thus
sketches Richard's character:
He was close and secret, a deep
dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable
where he inwardly hated, not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill.
Worked up into dramatic scenes, this
biography, as reproduced in the Chronicles
of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, later provided both source and
inspiration for Shakespeare's rousing melodramatic tragedy, Richard
IIIThe lives
written by Roper and Cavendish display interesting links, though the two men
were not acquainted: they deal with successive first ministers destroyed by that
brutal master of politics, Henry VIII; they are written from first hand
observation of their subjects by, respectively, a son-in-law and a household
officer; and they exemplify, though never preach, a typically Renaissance theme:
Indignatio principis mors est--"the
Prince's anger is death." Roper's work is shorter, more intimate, and
simpler; in a series of moving moments it unfolds the struggle within Sir Thomas
More between his duty to conscience and his duty to his king. Cavendish offers a
more artful and richly developed narrative, beautifully balanced between
splendid scenes of Wolsey's glory and vanity and ironically contrasting scenes
of disgrace, abasement, and painfully achieved self-knowledge. (see also
"Life of Cardinal
Wolsey")
The remaining period of the Renaissance,
however, is disappointingly barren. In Russia, where medieval saints' lives had
also been produced, there appears a modest biographical manifestation in the Stepennaya
Kniga ("Book of Degrees," 1563), a collection of brief lives of
princes and prelates. Somewhat similarly, in France, which was torn by religious
strife, Pierre Brantôme
wrote his Lives of Famous Ladies and Lives
of Famous Men. The Elizabethan Age in England, for all its magnificent
flowering of the drama, poetry, and prose, did not give birth to a single
biography worthy of the name. Sir Fulke
Greville's account of Sir Philip Sidney (1652) is marred by tedious
moralizing; Francis Bacon's
accomplished life of the first Tudor monarch, The
Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh(1622), turns out to be mainly a history of the reign. But Sir
Walter Raleigh suggests an explanation for this lack of biographical
expression in the introduction to his History
of the World(1614): "Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow
truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth"--as Sir John
Hayward could testify, having been imprisoned in the Tower of London because his
account (1599) of Richard II's deposition, two centuries earlier, had aroused
Queen Elizabeth's anger.
In the 17th century the word biography
was first employed to create a separate identity for this type of writing. That
century and the first half of the 18th presents a busy and sometimes bizarre
biographical landscape. It was an era of experimentation and preparation rather
than of successful achievement. In the New World, the American Colonies began to
develop a scattered biographical activity, none of it of lasting importance.
France offers the celebrated Letters of
the Marquise de Sévigné;
to her daughter, an intimate history of the Age of Louis XIV; numerous memoirs,
such as those of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, and the acerbic ones of
the Cardinal de Retz (1717); and the philosopher and critic Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire
historique et critique (1697), which was followed by specialized
biographical collections and reference works. England saw an outpouring,
beginning in the earlier 17th century, of Theophrastan "characters"
(imaginary types imitated from the work of Theophrastus, a follower of
Aristotle), journals, diaries, the disorganized but vivid jottings of John
Aubrey (later published in 1898 as Brief
Lives); and in the earlier 18th century there were printed all manner of
sensational exposés, biographical sketches of famous criminals, and the
like. In this era women appear for the first time as biographers. Lady Fanshawe
wrote a life of her ambassador-husband (1829); Lucy Hutchinson, one of her
Puritan warrior-husbands (written after 1664, published 1806); and Margaret
Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, produced a warm, bustling life--still good
reading today--of her duke, an amiable mediocrity (The
Life of the thrice Noble Prince William Cavendishe, Duke Marquess, and Earl of
Newcastle, 1667). This age likewise witnessed the first approach to a
professional biographer, the noted lover of angling, Izaak
Walton, whose five lives (of the poets John Donne [1640] and George
Herbert [1670], the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton [1651], and the ecclesiastics
Richard Hooker [1665] and Robert Sanderson [1678]) tend to endow their diverse
subjects with something of Walton's own genteel whimsicality but nonetheless
create skillful biographical portraits. The masterpieces of the age are
unquestionably Roger North's
biographies (not published until 1742, 1744) of his three brothers: Francis, the
lord chief justice, "my best brother"; the lively merchant-adventurer
Sir Dudley, his favourite; and the neurotic scholar John. Also the author of an
autobiography, Roger North likewise produced, as a preface to his life of
Francis, the first extensive critical essay on biography, which anticipates some
of the ideas of Samuel Johnson
and James Boswell. (see also
French literature, character
writer)
The last half of the 18th century
witnessed the remarkable conjunction of these two remarkable men, from which
sprang what is generally agreed to be the world's supreme biography, Boswell's Life
of Samuel Johnson LL.D.(1791).
Dr. Johnson, literary dictator of his age, critic and lexicographer who turned
his hand to many kinds of literature, himself created the first English
professional biographies in The Lives of the English PoetsIn essays and in conversation, Johnson set forth principles for biographical
composition: the writer must tell the truth--"the business of the
biographer is often to . . . display the minute details of daily life," for
it is these details that re-create a living character; and men need not be of
exalted fame to provide worthy subjects. (see also
Augustan Age)
For more than one reason the somewhat
disreputable and incredibly diligent Scots lawyer James Boswell can be called
the unique genius of biographical literature, bestriding both autobiography and
biography. Early in his acquaintance with Johnson he was advised by the Doctor
"to keep a journal of my [Boswell's] life, full and unreserved."
Boswell followed this advice to the letter. His gigantic journals offer an
unrivalled self-revelation of a fascinatingly checkered character and
career--whether as a young rake in London or thrusting himself upon the aged
Rousseau or making his way to Voltaire's seclusion at Ferney in Switzerland with
the aim of converting that celebrated skeptic to Christianity. Boswell actively
helped to stage the life of Johnson that he knew he was going to write--drawing
out Johnson in conversation, setting up scenes he thought likely to yield rich
returns--and thus, at moments, he achieved something like the novelist's power
over his materials, being himself an active part of what he was to re-create.
Finally, though he invented no new biographical techniques, in his Life
of Samuel Johnson he interwove with consummate skill Johnson's letters and
personal papers, Johnson's conversation as assiduously recorded by the
biographer, material drawn from interviews with large numbers of people who knew
Johnson, and his own observation of Johnson's behaviour, to elicit the living
texture of a life and a personality. Boswell makes good his promise that Johnson
"will be seen as he really was . . . ." The influence of Boswell's
work penetrated throughout the world and, despite the development of new
attitudes in biographical literature, has persisted to this day as a pervasive
force. Perhaps equally important to life writers has been the inspiration
provided by the recognition accorded Boswell's Life
as a major work of literary art. Since World War II there have often been
years, in the United States, when the annual bibliographies reveal that more
books or articles were published about Johnson and Boswell than about all the
rest of biographical literature together.
The Life
of Johnson may be regarded as a representative psychological expression of
the Age of Enlightenment, and it certainly epitomizes several typical
characteristics of that age: devotion to urban life, confidence in common sense,
emphasis on man as a social being. Yet in its extravagant pursuit of the life of
one individual, in its laying bare the eccentricities and suggesting the inner
turmoil of personality, it may be thought of as part of that revolution in
self-awareness, ideas, aspirations, exemplified in Rousseau's Confessions,
the French Revolution, the philosophical writings of the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, the political tracts of Thomas Paine, and the works of such early
Romantic poets as Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth--a revolution that in
its concern with the individual psyche and the freedom of man seemed to augur
well for biographical literature. This promise, however, was not fulfilled in
the 19th century.
That new nation, the United States of
America, despite the stimulus of a robust and optimistic society, flamboyant
personalities on the frontier, a generous share of genius, and the writing of
lives by eminent authors such as Washington Irving and Henry James, produced no
biographies of real importance. One professional biographer, James Parton,
published competent, well-researched narratives, such as his lives of Aaron Burr
and Andrew Jackson, but they brought him thin rewards and are today outmoded. In
France, biography was turned inward, to romantic introspection, a trend
introduced by Étienne Pivert
de Senancour's Obermann (1804).
It was followed by autobiographies thinly disguised as novels such as Benjamin
Constant's Adolphe (1816), La
Vie de Henri Brulard of Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), and similar works by
Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset, in which the emotional malaise of
the hero is subjected to painstaking analysis. In Great Britain the 19th century
opened promisingly with an outburst of biographical-autobiographical production,
much of which came from prominent figures of the Romantic Movement, including
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey.
Thomas Moore's Letters and Journals of
Lord Byron (1830), John Gibson Lockhart's elaborate life (1837-38) of his
father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, and, later, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskells' Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), James Anthony Froude's study of
Carlyle (2 vol. 1882; 2 vol. 1884), John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74) all followed, to some degree, what
may loosely be called the Boswell formula. Yet most of these major works are
marred by evasions and omissions of truth--though Lockhart and Froude, for
example, were attacked as conscienceless despoilers of the dead--and, before the
middle of the century, biography was becoming stifled. As the 20th century
biographer and critic Sir Harold
Nicolson wrote in The Development
of English Biography (1927), "Then
came earnestness, and with earnestness hagiography descended on us with its
sullen cloud . . . ." Insistence on respectability, at the expense of
candour, had led Carlyle to observe acridly, "How delicate, how decent is
English biography, bless its mealy mouth!" and to pillory its productions
as "vacuum-biographies." (see also
American literature)
The period of modern biography was
ushered in, generally speaking, by World War I. All the arts were in ferment,
and biographical literature shared in the movement, partly as a reaction against
19th-century conventions, partly as a response to advances in psychology, and
partly as a search for new means of expression. This revolution, unlike that at
the end of the 18th century, was eventually destined to enlarge and enhance the
stature of biography. The chief developments of modern life writing may be
conveniently classified under five heads: (1) an increase in the numbers and
general competence of biographies throughout the Western world; (2) the
influence on biographical literature of the counterforces of science and
fictional writing; (3) the decline of formal autobiography and of biographies
springing from a personal relationship; (4) the range and variety of
biographical expression; and (5) the steady, though moderate, growth of a
literature of biographical criticism. Only the first three of these developments
need much elaboration.
Little has been said about biography
since the Renaissance in Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Slavic
countries because, as in the case of Russia, there had been comparatively little
biographical literature and because biographical trends, particularly since the
end of the 18th century, generally followed those of Britain and France. Russian
literary genius in prose is best exemplified during both the 19th and 20th
centuries in the novel. In the 19th century, however, Leo
Tolstoy's numerous autobiographical writings, such as Childhood
and Boyhood, and Sergey
Aksakov's Years of Childhood and
A Russian Schoolboy, and in the 20th
century, Maksim Gorky's
autobiographical trilogy (Childhood; In
the World; and My Universities, 1913-23)
represent, in specialized form, a limited biographical activity. The close
control of literature exercised by the 20th-century Communist governments of
eastern Europe has created a wintry climate for biography. The rest of Europe,
outside the iron curtain, has manifested in varying degrees the fresh
biographical energies and practices illustrated in British-American life
writing: biography is now, as never before, an international art that shares a
more or less common viewpoint.
The second characteristic of modern
biography, its being subject to the opposing pressures of science and fictional
writing, has a dark as well as a bright side. Twentieth-century fiction, boldly
and restlessly experimental, has, on the one hand, influenced the biographer to
aim at literary excellence, to employ devices of fiction suitable for
biographical ends; but, on the other, fiction has also probably encouraged the
production of popular pseudobiography, hybrids of fact and fancy, as well as of
more subtle distortions of the art form. Science has exerted two quite different
kinds of pressure: the prestige of the traditional sciences, in their emphasis
on exactitude and rigorous method, has undoubtedly contributed to a greater
diligence in biographical research and an uncompromising scrutiny of evidences;
but science's vast accumulating of facts--sometimes breeding the worship of fact
for its own sake--has helped to create an atmosphere in which today's massive,
note-ridden and fact-encumbered lives proliferate and has probably contributed
indirectly to a reluctance in the scholarly community to take the risks
inevitable in true biographical composition.
The particular science of psychology, as
earlier pointed out, has conferred great benefits upon the responsible
practitioners of biography. It has also accounted in large part, it would
appear, for the third characteristic of modern biography: the decline of formal
autobiography and of the grand tradition of biography resulting from a personal
relationship. For psychology has rendered the self more exposed but also more
elusive, more fascinatingly complex and, in the darker reaches, somewhat
unpalatable. Since honesty would force the autobiographer into a
self-examination both formidable to undertake and uncomfortable to publish,
instead he generally turns his attention to outward experiences and writes
memoirs and reminiscences--though France offers something of an exception in the
journals of such writers as André Gide (1947-51), Paul Valéry
(1957), François Mauriac (1934-50), Julien Green (1938-58). Similarly,
psychology, in revealing the fallacies of memory, the distorting power of an
emotional relationship, the deceits of observation, has probably discouraged
biography written by a friend of its subject. Moreover, so many personal papers
are today preserved that a life-long friend of the subject scarcely has time to
complete his biography.
After World War I, the work of Lytton
Strachey played a somewhat similar role to that of Boswell in heading a
"revolution" in biography. Eminent
Victorians and Queen Victoria (1921),
followed by Elizabeth and Essex (1928),
with their artful selection, lacquered style, and pervasive irony, exerted an
almost intoxicating influence in the 1920s and '30s. Writers seeking to
capitalize on Strachey's popularity and ape Strachey's manner, without
possessing Strachey's talents, produced a spate of "debunking"
biographies zestfully exposing the clay feet of famous historical figures. By
World War II, however, this kind of biography had been discredited; Strachey's
adroit detachment and literary skill were recognized to be his true value, not
his dangerously interpretative method; and, since that time, biography has
steadied into an established, if highly varied, form of literature.
Biography as an independent art form,
with its concentration upon the individual life and its curiosity about the
individual personality, is essentially a creation of Western man. In the Orient,
for all its long literary heritage, and in Islam, too, biographical
literature does not show the development, nor assume the importance, of Western
life writing. In China, until comparatively recently, biography had been an
appendage, or by-product, of historical writing and scholarly preoccupation with
the art of government, in the continuing tradition of the "Historical
Records" of Ssu-ma Ch'ien and Pan Ku. In India it has been the enduring
concern for spiritual values and for contemplation or mystical modes of
existence that have exerted the deepest influence on literature from the first
millennium BC to the present, and this has not provided a milieu suitable to
biographical composition. Generally speaking, the literary history of Japan,
too, offers only fragmentary or limited examples of life writing. (see also
Indian literature)
It was not until the beginning of the
20th century in China that biography began to appear as an independent form (and
this was evidently the result of western influence), when Liang
Ch'i-ch'ao (1873-1929) wrote a number of lives, including one of
Confucius, and was followed by Hu
Shih (1891-1962), who, like his predecessor, worked to promote
biographical composition as an art form. Except for China after the
establishment of the Communist state in 1949, biography in the Orient--notably
in India and Japan--has shared, to a limited extent, the developments in
biographical literature demonstrated in the rest of the world.
In the United States, Great Britain, and
the rest of the Western world generally, biography today enjoys a moderate
popular and critical esteem. In the year 1929, at the height of the biographical
"boom," there were published in the United States 667 new biographies;
in 1962 exactly the same number appeared, the population in the meantime having
increased by something like 50 percent. On the average, in the English-speaking
world, biographical titles account for approximately 5 percent of the annual
output of books. Yet they have won their share of literary prizes and for their
authors a considerable degree of literary eminence; if few universally acclaimed
masterpieces are being produced, it is probably true that the art of biography
is seeing a higher general level of achievement than ever before. The recreation
of a life is also now being attempted in other media than that of prose.
Biographical drama has of course been staged from before the time of
Shakespeare; it continues to be popular, whether translated from narrative to
the theatre (as the Diary of Anne Frank) or written specifically for the stage, like
Jean Anouilh's Becket and Robert
Bolt's study of Sir Thomas More, A Man for
All Seasons (which nonetheless owes a great deal to William Roper). The
cinema often follows with its versions of such plays; it likewise produces
original biographical films, generally with indifferent success. Television,
too, offers historical "recreations" of various sorts, and with
varying degrees of responsibility, but has achieved only a few notable examples
of biographical illumination, for the conflict between gripping visual
presentation and the often undramatic, but important, biographical truth is
difficult to resolve. Biography, indeed, seems less innovative, less rewarding
of experiment, and less adaptable to new media, than does fiction or perhaps
even history. Words are no longer the only way to tell a story and perhaps in
time will not be regarded as the chief way; but so far they seem the best way of
unfolding the full course of a life and exploring the quirks and crannies of a
personality. Anchored in the truth of fact, though seeking the truth of
interpretation, biography tends to be more stable than other literary arts; and
its future would appear to be a predictably steady evolution of its present
trends. (P.M.K.) (see also
American literature, dramatic
literature)
Construed loosely, literary criticism is
the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term,
to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are
analyzed. Plato's cautions
against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic
are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary
criticism. More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called
"practical criticism," the interpretation of meaning and the judgment
of quality. Criticism in this narrow sense can be distinguished not only from
aesthetics (the philosophy of artistic value) but also from other matters that
may concern the student of literature: biographical questions, bibliography,
historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method. Thus,
especially in academic studies, "criticism" is often considered to be
separate from "scholarship." In practice, however, this distinction
often proves artificial, and even the most single-minded concentration on a text
may be informed by outside knowledge, while many notable works of criticism
combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature
and the principles of assessing it. Criticism will here be taken to cover all
phases of literary understanding, though the emphasis will be on the evaluation
of literary works and of their authors' places in literary history. One
particular aspect of literary criticism is covered in the article HISTORY,
THE STUDY OF: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Textual criticism .
The functions of literary criticism vary
widely, ranging from the reviewing of books as they are published to systematic
theoretical discussion. Though reviews may sometimes determine whether a given
book will be widely sold, many works succeed commercially despite negative
reviews, and many classic works, including Herman Melville's Moby
Dick (1851), have acquired appreciative publics long after being
unfavourably reviewed and at first neglected. One of criticism's principal
functions is to express the shifts in sensibility that make such revaluations
possible. The minimal condition for such a new appraisal is, of course, that the
original text survive. The literary critic is sometimes cast in the role of
scholarly detective, unearthing, authenticating, and editing unknown
manuscripts. Thus, even rarefied scholarly skills may be put to criticism's most
elementary use, the bringing of literary works to a public's attention.
The variety of criticism's functions is
reflected in the range of publications in which it appears. Criticism in the
daily press rarely displays sustained acts of analysis and may sometimes do
little more than summarize a publisher's claims for a book's interest. Weekly
and biweekly magazines serve to introduce new books but are often more
discriminating in their judgments, and some of these magazines, such as The
(London) Times
Literary Supplementand
The New York Review of Books, are far
from indulgent toward popular works. Sustained criticism can also be found in
monthlies and quarterlies with a broad circulation, in "little
magazines" for specialized audiences, and in scholarly journals and books.
Because critics often try to be
lawgivers, declaring which works deserve respect and presuming to say what they
are "really" about, criticism is a perennial target of resentment.
Misguided or malicious critics can discourage an author who has been feeling his
way toward a new mode that offends received taste. Pedantic critics can obstruct
a serious engagement with literature by deflecting attention toward inessential
matters. As the French philosopher-critic Jean-Paul
Sartre observed, the critic may announce that French thought is a
perpetual colloquy between Pascal and Montaigne not in order to make those
thinkers more alive but to make thinkers of his own time more dead. Criticism
can antagonize authors even when it performs its function well. Authors who
regard literature as needing no advocates or investigators are less than
grateful when told that their works possess unintended meaning or are imitative
or incomplete.
What such authors may tend to forget is
that their works, once published, belong to them only in a legal sense. The true
owner of their works is the public, which will appropriate them for its own
concerns regardless of the critic. The critic's responsibility is not to the
author's self-esteem but to the public and to his own standards of judgment,
which are usually more exacting than the public's. Justification for his role
rests on the premise that literary works are not in fact self-explanatory. A
critic is socially useful to the extent that society wants, and receives, a
fuller understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him. In
filling this appetite, the critic whets it further, helping to create a public
that cares about artistic quality. Without sensing the presence of such a
public, an author may either prostitute his talent or squander it in sterile
acts of defiance. In this sense, the critic is not a parasite but, potentially,
someone who is responsible in part for the existence of good writing in his own
time and afterward.
Although some critics believe that
literature should be discussed in isolation from other matters, criticism
usually seems to be openly or covertly involved with social and political
debate. Since literature itself is often partisan, is always rooted to some
degree in local circumstances, and has a way of calling forth affirmations of
ultimate values, it is not surprising that the finest critics have never paid
much attention to the alleged boundaries between criticism and other types of
discourse. Especially in modern Europe, literary criticism has occupied a
central place in debate about cultural and political issues. Sartre's own What Is Literature? (1947) is typical in its wide-ranging attempt to
prescribe the literary intellectual's ideal relation to the development of his
society and to literature as a manifestation of human freedom. Similarly, some
prominent American critics, including Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth
Burke, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe, began as political radicals in the 1930s
and sharpened their concern for literature on the dilemmas and disillusionments
of that era. Trilling's influential The
Liberal Imagination(1950)
is simultaneously a collection of literary essays and an attempt to reconcile
the claims of politics and art. (see also American
literature)
Such a reconciliation is bound to be
tentative and problematic if the critic believes, as Trilling does, that
literature possesses an independent value and a deeper faithfulness to reality
than is contained in any political formula. In Marxist states, however,
literature has usually been considered a means to social ends and, therefore,
criticism has been cast in forthrightly partisan terms. Dialectical
materialism does not necessarily turn the critic into a mere guardian of
party doctrine, but it does forbid him to treat literature as a cause in itself,
apart from the working class's needs as interpreted by the party. Where this
utilitarian view prevails, the function of criticism is taken to be continuous
with that of the state itself, namely, furtherance of the social revolution. The
critic's main obligation is not to his texts but rather to the masses of people
whose consciousness must be advanced in the designated direction. In periods of
severe orthodoxy, the practice of literary criticism has not always been
distinguishable from that of censorship. (see also
Marxism)
Although almost all of the criticism
ever written dates from the 20th century, questions first posed by Plato and
Aristotle are still of prime concern, and every critic who has attempted to
justify the social value of literature has had to come to terms with the
opposing argument made by Plato in The RepublicThe poet as a man and poetry
as a form of statement both seemed untrustworthy to Plato, who depicted the
physical world as an imperfect copy of transcendent ideas and poetry as a mere
copy of the copy. Thus, literature could only mislead the seeker of truth. Plato
credited the poet with divine inspiration, but this, too, was cause for worry; a
man possessed by such madness would subvert the interests of a rational polity.
Poets were therefore to be banished from the hypothetical republic. (see also
Ancient Greek literature)
In his Poetics--still
the most respected of all discussions of literature--Aristotle countered Plato's
indictment by stressing what is normal and useful about literary art. The tragic
poet is not so much divinely inspired as he is motivated by a universal human
need to imitate, and what he imitates is not something like a bed (Plato's
example) but a noble action. Such imitation
presumably has a civilizing value for those who empathize with it. Tragedy
does arouse emotions of pity and terror in its audience, but these emotions are
purged in the process (katharsis). In this fashion
Aristotle succeeded in portraying literature as satisfying and regulating human
passions instead of inflaming them. (see also
Aristotelian criticism)
Although Plato and Aristotle are
regarded as antagonists, the narrowness of their disagreement is noteworthy.
Both maintain that poetry is mimetic, both treat the arousing of emotion in the
perceiver, and both feel that poetry takes its justification, if any, from its
service to the state. It was obvious to both men that poets wielded great power
over others. Unlike many modern critics who have tried to show that poetry is
more than a pastime, Aristotle had to offer reassurance that it was not socially
explosive.
Aristotle's practical contribution to
criticism, as opposed to his ethical defense of literature, lies in his
inductive treatment of the elements and kinds of poetry. Poetic modes are
identified according to their means of imitation, the actions they imitate, the
manner of imitation, and its effects. These distinctions assist the critic in
judging each mode according to its proper ends instead of regarding beauty as a
fixed entity. The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived them, are best served
by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction,
thought, spectacle, and song. Thanks to Aristotle's insight into universal
aspects of audience psychology, many of his dicta have proved to be adaptable to
genres developed long after his time.
Later Greek and Roman criticism offers
no parallel to Aristotle's originality. Much ancient criticism, such as that of
Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian
in Rome, was absorbed in technical rules of exegesis and advice to aspiring
rhetoricians. Horace's verse epistle The Art of Poetry is an urbane amplification of Aristotle's emphasis
on the decorum or internal propriety of each genre, now including lyric,
pastoral, satire, elegy, and epigram, as well as Aristotle's epic, tragedy, and
comedy. This work was later to be prized by Neoclassicists of the 17th century
not only for its rules but also for its humour, common sense, and appeal to
educated taste. On the Sublimeby the Roman-Greek known as "Longinus,"
was to become influential in the 18th century but for a contrary reason: when
decorum began to lose its sway encouragement could be found in Longinus for
arousing elevated and ecstatic feeling in the reader. Horace and Longinus
developed, respectively, the rhetorical and the affective sides of Aristotle's
thought, but Longinus effectively reversed the Aristotelian concern with
regulation of the passions. (see also Latin
literature, "Ars
poetica," )
In the Christian Middle
Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical
texts and from an antipagan distrust of the literary imagination. Such Church
Fathers as Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the
Platonic argument against poetry. But both the ancient gods and the surviving
classics reasserted their fascination, entering medieval culture in
theologically allegorized form. Encyclopaedists and textual commentators
explained the supposed Christian content of pre-Christian works and the Old
Testament. Although there was no lack of rhetoricians to dictate the correct use
of literary figures, no attempt was made to derive critical principles from
emergent genres such as the fabliau and the chivalric romance. Criticism was in
fact inhibited by the very coherence of the theologically explained universe.
When nature is conceived as endlessly and purposefully symbolic of revealed
truth, specifically literary problems of form and meaning are bound to be
neglected. Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante
appears to have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scriptural
exegesis.
Renaissance criticism grew directly from
the recovery of classic texts and notably from Giorgio Valla's translation of
Aristotle's Poetics into Latin in
1498. By 1549 the Poetics had been
rendered into Italian as well. From this period until the later part of the 18th
century Aristotle was once again the most imposing presence behind literary
theory. Critics looked to ancient poems and plays for insight into the permanent
laws of art. The most influential of Renaissance critics was probably Lodovico
Castelvetro, whose 1570 commentary on Aristotle's Poetics
encouraged the writing of tightly structured plays by extending and
codifying Aristotle's idea of the dramatic unities. It is difficult today to
appreciate that this obeisance to antique models had a liberating effect; one
must recall that imitation of the ancients entailed rejecting scriptural
allegory and asserting the individual author's ambition to create works that
would be unashamedly great and beautiful. Classicism,
individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary asceticism.
Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade--notably
Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay--were simultaneously classicists, poetic
innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue. (see also
Renaissance art, French
literature, Pléiade, La)
The ideas of the Italian and French
Renaissance were transmitted to England by Roger Ascham, George
Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney,
and others. Gascoigne's "Certayne notes of Instruction" (1575), the
first English manual of versification, had a considerable effect on poetic
practice in the Elizabethan Age. Sidney's Defence
of Poesie(1595) vigorously argued the poet's superiority to the philosopher
and the historian on the grounds that his imagination is chained neither to
lifeless abstractions nor to dull actualities. The poet "doth not only show
the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to
enter into it." While still honouring the traditional conception of
poetry's role as bestowing pleasure and instruction, Sidney's essay presages the
Romantic claim that the poetic mind is a law unto itself. (see also
English literature)
The Renaissance in general could be
regarded as a neoclassical period, in that ancient works were considered the
surest models for modern greatness. Neoclassicism, however, usually connotes
narrower attitudes that are at once literary and social: a worldly-wise
tempering of enthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of
propriety and balance. Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in
France, was dominated by these Horatian norms. French critics such as Pierre
Corneille and Nicolas Boileau
urged a strict orthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of
each distinct genre, as if to disregard them were to lapse into barbarity. The
poet was not to imagine that his genius exempted him from the established laws
of craftsmanship.
Neoclassicism had a lesser impact in
England, partly because English Puritanism had kept alive some of the original
Christian hostility to secular art, partly because English authors were on the
whole closer to plebeian taste than were the court-oriented French, and partly
because of the difficult example of Shakespeare,
who magnificently broke all of the rules. Not even the relatively severe
classicist Ben Jonson could bring himself to deny Shakespeare's greatness, and
the theme of Shakespearean genius triumphing over formal imperfections is echoed
by major British critics from John Dryden and Alexander
Pope through Samuel Johnson.
The science of Newton and the psychology of Locke also worked subtle changes on
neoclassical themes. Pope's Essay on Criticism(1711) is a Horatian compendium of maxims, but Pope feels obliged to defend
the poetic rules as "Nature methodiz'd"--a portent of quite different
literary inferences from Nature. Dr. Johnson, too, though he respected
precedent, was above all a champion of moral sentiment and
"mediocrity," the appeal to generally shared traits. His preference
for forthright sincerity left him impatient with such intricate conventions as
those of the pastoral elegy.
The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly
surprising; literary theory had developed very little during two centuries of
artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century's important new
genre, the novel, drew most of
its readers from a bourgeoisie that had little use for aristocratic dicta. A
Longinian cult of "feeling" gradually made headway, in various
European countries, against Neoclassical canons of proportion and moderation.
Emphasis shifted from concern for meeting fixed criteria to the subjective state
of the reader and then of the author himself. The spirit of nationalism
entered criticism as a concern for the origins and growth of one's own native
literature and as an esteem for such non-Aristotelian factors as "the
spirit of the age." Historical consciousness produced by turns theories of
literary progress and primitivistic theories affirming, as one critic put it,
that "barbarous" times are the most favourable to the poetic spirit.
The new recognition of strangeness and strong feeling as literary virtues
yielded various fashions of taste for misty sublimity, graveyard sentiments,
medievalism, Norse epics (and forgeries), Oriental tales, and the verse of
plowboys. Perhaps the most eminent foes of Neoclassicism before the 19th century
were Denis Diderot in France and, in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, Johann von
Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.
Romanticism, an amorphous movement that
began in Germany and England at the turn of the 19th century, and somewhat later
in France, Italy, and the United States, found spokesmen as diverse as Goethe
and August and Friedrich von Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Staël and Victor Hugo in France,
Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the
United States. Romantics tended to regard the writing of poetry as a transcendentally
important activity, closely related to the creative perception of meaning in the
world. The poet was credited with the godlike power that Plato had feared in
him; Transcendental philosophy was, indeed, a derivative of Plato's metaphysical
Idealism. In the typical view of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the
world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its
forms." (see also German
literature)
Wordsworth's
preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800),
with its definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regarded as the opening statement of
English Romanticism. In England, however, only Coleridge
in his Biographia
Literaria(1817)
embraced the whole complex of Romantic doctrines emanating from Germany; the
British empiricist tradition was too firmly rooted to be totally washed aside by
the new metaphysics. Most of those who were later called Romantics did share an
emphasis on individual passion and inspiration, a taste for symbolism and
historical awareness, and a conception of art works as internally whole
structures in which feelings are dialectically merged with their contraries.
Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics
as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical
demands upon literature. The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its
recognition that artistic creations are justified, not by their promotion of
virtue, but by their own coherence and intensity.
The Romantic movement had been spurred
not only by German philosophy but also by the universalistic and utopian hopes
that accompanied the French Revolution. Some of those hopes were thwarted by
political reaction, while others were blunted by industrial capitalism and the
accession to power of the class that had demanded general liberty. Advocates of
the literary imagination now began to think of themselves as enemies or gadflies
of the newly entrenched bourgeoisie. In some hands the idea of creative freedom
dwindled to a bohemianism pitting "art for its own sake" against
commerce and respectability. Aestheticism
characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and
the self-conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar
Wilde in England. At an opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of
literature as an exact record of social truth were developed by Vissarion
Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile
Zola in France, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola's
program, however, was no less anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he
wanted novels to document conditions so as to expose their injustice.
Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in the criticism of Matthew
Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and
for the unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class. (see also
art for art's sake, Symbolist
movement)
Toward the end of the 19th century,
especially in Germany, England, and the United States, literary study became an
academic discipline "at the doctoral level." Philology, linguistics,
folklore study, and the textual principles that had been devised for biblical
criticism provided curricular guidelines, while academic taste mirrored the
prevailing impressionistic concern for the quality of the author's spirit.
Several intellectual currents joined to make possible the writing of systematic
and ambitious literary histories. Primitivism and Medievalism had awakened
interest in neglected early texts; scientific Positivism encouraged a scrupulous
regard for facts; and the German idea that each country's literature had sprung
from a unique national consciousness provided a conceptual framework. The French
critic Hippolyte Taine's History
of English Literature(published
in French, 1863-69) reflected the prevailing determinism of scientific thought;
for him a work could be explained in terms of the race, milieu, and moment that
produced it. For other critics of comparable stature, such as Charles
Sainte-Beuve in France, Benedetto Croce in Italy, and George Saintsbury in
England, historical learning only threw into relief the expressive uniqueness of
each artistic temperament. (see also textual
criticism, French literature)
The ideal of objective research has
continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarship and criticism and has
prompted work of unprecedented accuracy. Bibliographic procedures have been
revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory have
placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important contributions to
literary understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics,
philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Impressionistic method has given way to systematic inquiry from which gratuitous
assumptions are, if possible, excluded. Yet demands for a more ethically
committed criticism have repeatedly been made, from the New Humanism of Paul
Elmer More and Irving Babbitt in the United States in the 1920s, through the
moralizing criticism of the Cambridge don F.R. Leavis and of the American poet
Yvor Winters, to the most recent demands for "relevance."
No sharp line can be drawn between
academic criticism and criticism produced by authors and men of letters. Many of
the latter are now associated with universities, and the main shift of academic
emphasis, from impressionism to formalism,
originated outside the academy in the writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E.
Hulme, largely in London around 1910. Only subsequently did such
academics as I.A. Richards and William Empson in England and John Crowe Ransom
and Cleanth Brooks in the United States adapt the New
Criticism to reform of the literary curriculum--in the 1940s. New
Criticism has been the methodological counterpart to the strain of modernist
literature characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox, and indifference or
outright hostility to the democratic ethos. In certain respects the hegemony of
New Criticism has been political as well as literary; and anti-Romantic
insistence on irony, convention, and aesthetic distance has been accompanied by
scorn for all revolutionary hopes. In Hulme conservatism and classicism were
explicitly linked. Romanticism struck him as "spilt religion," a
dangerous exaggeration of human freedom. In reality, however, New Criticism owed
much to Romantic theory, especially to Coleridge's idea of organic form, and
some of its notable practitioners have been left of centre in their social
thought.
The totality of Western criticism in the
20th century defies summary except in terms of its restless multiplicity and
factionalism. Schools of literary practice, such as Imagism, Futurism, Dadaism,
and Surrealism, have found no want of defenders and explicators. Ideological
groupings, psychological dogmas, and philosophical trends have generated
polemics and analysis, and literary materials have been taken as primary data by
sociologists and historians. Literary creators themselves have continued to
write illuminating commentary on their own principles and aims. In poetry, Paul
Valéry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens; in the theatre, George Bernard Shaw,
Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht; and in fiction, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence,
and Thomas Mann have
contributed to criticism in the act of justifying their art.
Most of the issues debated in
20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, even technical, in
nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of a literary
work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or
only the words themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author's avowed
intention be trusted, or merely taken into account, or disregarded as
irrelevant? How is conscious irony to be distinguished from mere ambivalence, or
allusiveness from allegory? Which among many approaches--linguistic, generic,
formal, sociological,
psychoanalytic, and so forth--is best adapted to making full sense of a text?
Would a synthesis of all these methods yield a total theory of literature? Such
questions presuppose that literature is valuable and that objective knowledge of
its workings is a desirable end. These assumptions are, indeed, so deeply buried
in most critical discourse that they customarily remain hidden from critics
themselves, who imagine that they are merely solving problems of intrinsic
interest. (see also empirical
method)
What separates modern criticism from
earlier work is its catholicity of scope and method, its borrowing of procedures
from the social scienes, and its unprecedented attention to detail. As
literature's place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as
humanistic education has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of
professionals serving as one another's judges, criticism has evolved into a
complex discipline, increasingly refined in its procedures but often lacking a
sense of contact with the general social will. Major modern critics, to be sure,
have not allowed their "close reading" to distract them from certain
perennial questions about poetic truth, the nature of literary satisfaction, and
literature's social utility, but even these matters have sometimes been cast in
"value-free" empirical terms.
Recourse to scientific authority and
method, then, is the outstanding trait of 20th-century criticism. The sociology
of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythological investigations of Sir
James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, Claude
Levi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, and the psychological models
proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G.
Jung have all found their way into criticism. The result has been not
simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespread belief that
literature's governing principles can be located outside literature. Jungian "archetypal"
criticism, for example, regularly identifies literary power with the presence of
certain themes that are alleged to inhabit the myths and beliefs of all
cultures, while psychoanalytic exegetes interpret poems in exactly the manner
that Freud interpreted dreams. Such procedures may encourage the critic, wisely
or unwisely, to discount traditional boundaries between genres, national
literatures, and levels of culture; the critical enterprise begins to seem
continuous with a general study of man. The impetus toward universalism can be
discerned even in those critics who are most skeptical of it, the so-called
historical relativists who attempt to reconstruct each epoch's outlook and to
understand works as they appeared to their first readers. Historical relativism
does undermine cross-cultural notions of beauty, but it reduces the record of
any given period to data from which inferences can be systematically drawn.
Here, too, in other words, uniform methodology tends to replace the intuitive
connoisseurship that formerly typified the critic's sense of his role. (see also
collective unconscious)
The debate over poetic truth may
illustrate how modern discussion is beholden to extraliterary knowledge. Critics
have never ceased disputing whether literature depicts the world correctly,
incorrectly, or not at all, and the dispute has often had more to do with the
support or condemnation of specific authors than with ascertainable facts about
mimesis. Today it may be almost impossible to take a stand regarding poetic
truth without also coming to terms with positivism
as a total epistemology. The spectacular achievements of physical science have
(with logic questioned by some) downgraded intuition and placed a premium on
concrete, testable statements very different from those found in poems. Some of
the most influential modern critics, notably I.A.
Richards in his early works, have accepted this value order and have
confined themselves to behavioristic study of how literature stimulates the
reader's feelings. A work of literature, for them, is no longer something that
captures an external or internal reality, but is merely a locus for
psychological operations; it can only be judged as eliciting or failing to
elicit a desired response. (see also poetry,
science, history of)
Other critics, however, have renewed the
Shelleyan and Coleridgean contention that literary experience involves a complex
and profound form of knowing. In order to do so they have had to challenge
Positivism in general. Such a challenge cannot be convincingly mounted within
the province of criticism itself and must depend rather on the authority of
antipositivist epistemologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer,
and Michael Polanyi. If it is now respectable to maintain, with Wallace Stevens
and others, that the world is known through imaginative apprehensions of the
sort that poetry celebrates and employs, this is attributable to developments
far outside the normal competence of critics.
The pervasive influence of science is
most apparent in modern criticism's passion for total explanation of the texts
it brings under its microscope. Even formalist schools, which take for granted
an author's freedom to shape his work according to the demands of art, treat
individual lines of verse with a dogged minuteness that was previously unknown,
hoping thereby to demonstrate the "organic" coherence of the poem. The
spirit of explanation is also apparent in those schools that argue from the
circumstances surrounding a work's origin to the work itself, leaving an
implication that the former have caused the latter. The determinism is rarely as
explicit or relentless as it was in Taine's scheme of race, milieu, and moment,
but this may reflect the fact that causality in general is now handled with more
sophistication than in Taine's day.
Whether criticism will continue to aim
at empirical exactitude or will turn in some new direction cannot be readily
predicted, for the empiricist ideal and its sanctuary, the university, are not
themselves secure from attack. The history of criticism is one of oscillation
between periods of relative advance, when the imaginative freedom of great
writers prompts critics to extend their former conceptions, and periods when
stringent moral and formal prescriptions are laid upon literature. In times of
social upheaval criticism may more or less deliberately abandon the ideal of
disinterested knowledge and be mobilized for a practical end. Revolutionary
movements provide obvious instances of such redirection, whether or not they
identify their pragmatic goals with the cause of science. It should be evident
that the future of criticism depends on factors that lie outside criticism
itself as a rationally evolving discipline. When a whole society shifts its
attitudes toward pleasure, unorthodox behaviour, or the meaning of existence,
criticism must follow along.
As Matthew Arnold foresaw, the waning of
religious certainty has encouraged critics to invest their faith in literature,
taking it as the one remaining source of value and order. This development has
stimulated critical activity, yet, paradoxically, it may also be responsible in
part for a growing impatience with criticism. What Arnold could not have
anticipated is that the faith of some moderns would be apocalyptic and Dionysian
rather than a sober and attenuated derivative of Victorian Christianity. Thought
in the 20th century has yielded a strong undercurrent of anarchism which
celebrates libidinous energy and self-expression at the expense of all social
constraint, including that of literary form. In the critical writings of D.H.
Lawrence, for example, fiction is cherished as an instrument of
unconscious revelation and liberation. A widespread insistence upon prophetic
and ecstatic power in literature seems at present to be undermining the complex,
irony-minded formalism that has dominated modern discourse. As literary
scholarship has acquired an ever-larger arsenal of weapons for attacking
problems of meaning, it has met with increasing resentment from people who wish
to be nourished by whatever is elemental and mysterious in literary experience.
An awareness of critical history
suggests that the development is not altogether new, for criticism stands now
approximately where it did in the later 18th century, when the Longinian spirit
of expressiveness contested the sway of Boileau and Pope. To the extent that
modern textual analysis has become what Hulme predicted, "a classical
revival," it may not be welcomed by those who want a direct and intense
rapport with literature. What is resisted now is not Neoclassical decorum but
impersonal methodology, which is thought to deaden commitment. Such resistance
may prove beneficial if it reminds critics that rationalized procedures are
indeed no substitute for engagement. Excellent work continues to be written, not
because a definitive method or synthesis of methods has been found, but on the
contrary because the best critics still understand that criticism is an exercise
of private sympathy, discrimination, and moral and cultural reflection.
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