4332194

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Literary History vs. Criticism Author(s): Cleanth Brooks, Jr. Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Autumn, 1940), pp. 403-412Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332194Accessed: 11-10-2015 11:52 UTC

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LITERATURE AND TITE PROFESSORS

I. Literary History vs. Criticism By CLEANTH BROOKS, JR.

THE modern English department is notoriously easy to attack; and it is most obviously exposed to attack by the stupid,

or trifling, or plainly muddle-headed books, articles, dissertations, and theses which its machinery commits it to turn out. Even random quotation from these exhibits allows one to make out a case against it. This is not the attack which I propose to make here - not that I disparage it. I think that it is healthful to re- mind ourselves constantly of the amount of rubbish which we produce. But there is a measure of justice in the obvious reply, that no system is to be condemned by the incidental stupidities of some of its proponents. A certain amount of waste, a certain amount of folly, may be the necessary concomitant of the practical functioning of any plan of English studies. Be that as it may; I am anxious to get at the system itself-and at its best, not only as a matter of fairness but of strategy.

I suppose that it would be generally agreed that the late Pro- fessor Edwin Greenlaw was one of the ablest scholars that the system has produced, and that his Province of Literary History stands as one of the most intelligent defenses of the aims pursued by our best departments. In that work, Greenlaw undertakes to



404 KENYON REVIEW

assess the rival claims of the critics and the literary historians. The following passage is typical of his position:

One looks upon the building of a modern cathedral such as St. John the Divine in New York or Mount St. Alban in Washington. To it he brings whatever gifts he may possess of interpretation. It may seem merely an enormous church. That is the fact. He may compare, if more instructed, its architecture with that of the cathedral of medieval Europe. That is the role of the critic. But he may also, if he is instructed in minor personalities and out of the way bits of history, remembering how few, after all, have sur- vived in the memories of men, think of Raoul Glaber who nine centuries ago looked upon the outburst of ecclesiastical building in France and wrote that the world seemed everywhere to be dis- carding its old garments in order to put on a white vestment of new churches. Thus through eyes long turned to dust one becomes aware of that white vestment through which men have sotught to express brief human experience, and our contemplation of St. John's or Mount St. Alban gives a new sense of the continuity of human experience. . .

To provide such a vision through eyes long turned to dust, then, is the function of the historian. The critic's function is to compare the architecture with that of other churches. It is obvious that in terms of this distinction the critic occupies a rather piddling role. One notes also that, though the critic must be "more instructed" than the mere observer of the brute fact, the historian must be further instructed still-to the point of famili- arity with "out of the way bits of history." The historian stands at the top of an ascending scale.

It is amusing to observe that Allen Tate, in a recent article in which he too attempts to define the critic's function, also uses architecture for his illustration, though presumably unaware of Greenlaw's prior reference to it. For Tate, the critic's function is to understand the cathedral as an architect understands it, to perceive the function and meaning of the various parts in rela-



HISTORY VS. CRITICISM 405

tion to the whole fabric, to know the cathedral as an integrated organism.

Mr. Tate writes as a poet and critic but presumably he would not demand that the student demonstrate his knowledge by building a cathedral of his own, human capabilities being what they are. Rather, he evidently means to suggest that the student of the cathedral should try to see it as the architect would see it, and indeed, can only understand it as architecture by seeing it in these terms.

Now I do not intend to drive either Tate or Greenlaw into an absurd antithesis of the other's position. Obviously, Mr. Tate would not deny the value of being able to place the object in its historical context, just as Greenlaw does not deny the value of critical comparisons. But it is perfectly apparent that the critical discipline for Professor Greenlaw is far more limited and dry than it is for Mr. Tate. Criticism deals with comparisons; the architect's vision does not appear in his scheme at all. Evidently, he assumes either that such knowledge of inner structure is perfectly obvious or that it comes as a matter of course from a thor- ough acquaintance with history. But the inner structure of a great deal of literature is not obvious; and it does not come of itself from a study of literary history.

The average English professor bears living testimony to this. He has been trained (if he comes from one of our better uni- versities) in linguistics and the history of literature. He pos- sesses a great deal of information, valuable and interesting in its own right, and of incalculable value for the critic. But he himself is not that critic. He has little or no knowledge of the inner structure of a poem or a drama (this is not to say that he does not know the past critical generalizations on it!); he is ig- norant of its architecture; in short, he often does not know how to read. The charge is a grave one and ought to be documented up to the hilt. Unfortunately, until one of the larger foundations is willing to equip a sufficiently determined party of explorers



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and to furnish them with sufficient credentials, it probably cannot be documented, at least in a fashion sufficiently objective to satis- fy the hard-bitten sceptic.

Short of this, and for the purpose in hand, one may be content with a more modest point: namely, whatever his own attainments in the art of reading literature, the average professor has not been able to teach his students how to read. (This has been documented up to the hilt.) I hasten to disavow for the English professor the good offices of the teachers colleges of the country. It is not out of their armories of psychological gadgets and contri- vances that he is likely to be equipped. I suggest that this is to be accomplished by critical training in the architectonics of literature rather than by mere training in literary history.

The location of the "mere" is important; for it is hardly possible to have training in criticism without training in literary history. Literature cannot be taught in a vacuum. Literary history we shall scarcely avoid if we are to read the literature of the past at all. On the other hand, it is possible to have literary history and no critical discipline; as a matter of fact, that is what we now have.

The real question, then, is not whether we shall study the history of literature, but rather: about what center will this history be organized? About the study of literature as an art? Or will the history be a history of social customs, or of literary fash- ions, or of literary personalities, or even of particular editions? There are many histories.

We may be sure that scholarly conscience will see to it that the facts gathered are facts and that the presentation is objective. But the scholarly conscience of the historian qua historian can hardly guarantee that they will be referred to any center; and the center of reference is all-important. A few years ago one of our learned journals printed a scholarly article on animals in modern poetry. The animals were there, and were duly classified and counted, the wolf, the stallion, the beaver, and even the fabulous




unicorn. But the elaborate statistics functioned in a void. How each animal got into each poem and what he did there - whether the poems were good, bad, or indifferent, and what mite each animal contributed to the sum - these questions, perhaps wisely, were not raised. The article is typical of hundreds which in their subjects are not so patently ludicrous. (I believe that in the social sciences such studies are sometimes referred to as exercises in man-hole-cover counting.)

Professor Greenlaw is obviously not interested in counting man-hole-covers. His concept of history provides as a center of reference an interest in the human spirit. But his scheme seems to me at once too wide and too narrow: on the one hand, he proposes nothing less than a history of human culture which will use literature as its material but surely must also make use of philos- ophy, political history, economics, theology, etc. On the other hand, he seems to proceed continually on the assumption that the specific problem of reading and judging literature is completely met in the process of learning the meaning of words, the political and philosophical allusions, the mental climate in which the poem originated, etc., etc. In other words, if I read him correct- ly, Greenlaw would have us "get" an Elizabethan poem by a total recovery of the whole Elizabethan menage of which the poem is a part. This is magnificent. It is a doctrine of perfection, and is thus a tribute to the scholar who insisted upon it. But there is a measure in all things. As a practical matter, few students of literature will be able to recover the whole scene. Moreover, if we grant that the student has recovered much of it, still it is possible that he may know self-consciously much more about the period than Shakespeare or Campion ever knew and yet know nothing about the problems of craft which alone would enable him to understand what Shakespeare and Campion were up to. So much for the best young scholars.

When we come down to the bastardizations of the method, we find, of course, man-hole-cover counting in plenty. Finally,



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consider the student who is proceeding to his B. A. - who is not to be trained to be an English professor in order to teach other students to be English professors. It is easy to understand why he should learn, even from the best of orthodox instructors, little or nothing about literature. The recovery of past culture becomes spread rather thin in the pages of a "survey course." The literature gets lost in the process; it becomes merely an illustration of certain cultural processes, or survives, if it survives as literature at all, in terms of the instructor's personal enthusiasms. So much for the consequences of teaching literature as history.

This emphasis on history occasionally takes an extreme form by insisting on a completely relativistic position on values. (I do not mean, by the way, to saddle this special variant upon Green- law.) The question: is this a good poem, becomes a nonsense question. Good for whom? The well-accoutered relativist will undertake to explain what the various 18th Century critics thought of the poem and why, what the 19th Century critics thought and why. But he has no opinion of his own. If one asks what the 20th Century thinks of the poem, he is glad to supply the answer by means of the questionnaire and the comptometer. He exhibits all the admired impartiality of the scientist.

But complete relativism is a position at once too heroic and too doctrinaire to appeal to the average member of the profession. He prefers to use relativism primarily as a means of refuge from critical attack. Actually, he cheerfully entertains, though often in the kitchen it is true, whole congeries of literary judgments. For example, he is happy, when discussing the Elizabethan sonnet, to insist that we take into account "the spirit of the age," "the vagaries of Elizabethan taste," etc. But Shelley's poems, for example, are real poetry, with no nonsense about it; and modern poetry, when occasionally it swims into his ken, is judged by Romantic standards quite as a matter of course. If he brought his own unconscious aesthetic up into the light for inspection, he might have a higher regard for training in aesthetics.




I have spoken respectfully of Professor Greenlaw's defense of historical scholarship because I do respect it. But even Green- law has confused the issues in making his case by gratuitous re- ferences to "scientific learning," "minute research," "mastery of fact." For his implied equation of literary history with "science" remains at the level of metaphor. His flirtation with scientific terminology, consequently, has its importance in revealing a sig- nificant state of mind.

The desire to imitate the objectivity of science permeates the whole profession. It dogs even those sporadic attempts to treat literature as an art. For example, consider that remarkable book, New Methods for the Study of Literature. The first chapter states its purpose frankly enough: "We have, then, a curious situation. While the study of the environment of literature is conducted on the most modern scientific principles, the study of literature itself, as distinct from its environment, has not develop- ed." The New Methods, of course, are to be scrupulously scientific. As Professor J. M. Manley explains (in the preface which he contributes): " . . . in all the sciences of organic life analysis is a necessary preliminary and an indispensable aid to the understanding of the complete functioning of the organism as a whole. Certainly we shall never learn the secrets of style by merely mooning over them or by ejaculating admiration." This is true enough; but the effort to shy away from "mooning" has been so violent that it has carried the book over into a fake scientific methodology of the most elaborate kind. We get plans for statistical graphs of thought patterns, correlations of the use of monosyllables by Shakespeare and by Marlowe, methods for cataloguing the kin- aesthetic images in Shelley and the thermal images in Keats. Method for method's sake is here completely out of control. For Professor Greenlaw's history of the cathedral, the New Methods proposes nothing less than a molecular analysis of the limestone and glass of which the cathedral is built.

Here, for example, is an illustration of the machinery provided



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to treat the disposition of vowels and consonants in the line, "So all day long the noise of battle rolled." (I dispense with the chart.)

s u Total L 4 b......1 ........S

N . 2.... ..--..-----0-. ..-------2 M....0....1 . .1

C -- - -- - - - 2 ( 1 ) ------ ----- ------ ----- ----- 2 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 4 F -- - - -- - - 3 --- --- --- --- -- --- --- --- --- -- 0 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- - 3 S . ... ..4(.).... ... 4 . -- - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - 1 ( 1 ) -------- -------- ------- 5

26

V 8---------------- 2 10 ------------------ V 40 per cent (high) Cn 12(2) ..2--- 4(1) 16 .2.4.--- Cii 19 per cent

Dominance: B; SL .----------------.-C-. . ..... B; SL

Distribution of Stressed and Unstressed Patterns

2 2 2 3/ 4 3 4 20 R R R F/ r PR f Pr DF

/2 2 2 6

Summary

Vocalic quality is high; and 60 per cent of the vowels are back vowels.

Voiceless consonants are low; one of the two being used to give propulsive force at the beginning. Of the consonants, liquids and voiced stops make up 62 per cent. The combination of back vowels with sound movement from voiced stop to liquid gives sonority.

The stressed sounds are more than three times the unstressed, which are only three slight interruptions by groups of two. The symmetry of grouping is interesting: S,2 2 2; 3 4 3 4; U, 2 2 2.

The patterns are not balanced but massed: a group of three "R"

followed by "F" in the first speech group, all stressed; in the second, "P R" and "P r." separated only by "f" and then "D F."




Taking each speech group as a unit, we find in the first most of the sounds in the upper half of the clef; in the second, more in the lower. The inverted symmetry in the last three groups is curious.

The high-stressed sounds are massed in threes and twos in the first speech group and one at the end of the second.

Now no one knows better than myself (who have been guilty of some rather extended analysis of eight-line poems) that it requires a good deal of space to try to point out in prose the ways in which a poem gets its effects. What troubles me here, there- fore, is not the bulk of the analysis but the trifling quality of the results gained - and more important, sought. Surely one is justified in feeling that this is monstrous; but one half-penny- worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!

In fairness to the profession I do not think that these New Methods for the study of literature are much practised. But the book - it could have been produced only in an American Uni- versity - is eloquent of two things which are typical enough of the average English department: a cheerful sacrifice of imagination to objectivity and a fond over-confidence in the virtues of method. Suppose we do correlate the auditory images of Toornai of the Elephants with the gustatory images of that work. Perhaps we shall have difficulty in showing the relevance of our statistics to the "meanings" of the story. But never mind; at least we shall have gathered facts. Humble though they be, we have added to the ever-increasing pyramid of knowledge.

It is my considered opinion that the English department will have to forego the pleasures of being "scientific." (This does not mean that it has to divorce itself from intelligence or collapse into impressionistic "mooning.") But it is high time for it to give up its search for an easy way out of its problems. There is no substitute for the imagination (tainted with subjectivity though it may be); and there is no substitute for the inculcation of the discipline of reading (a discipline that involves active critical



412 KENYON REVIEW

judgment). The uncritical pursuit of "facts," the piling up of verified knowledge, the gathering of historical data - these things, however laudable in themselves, are essentially sidelines. If the profession lacks an interest in literature as literature, they may become blind alleys. Some of us feel that is what they have already become.

II. Scholars as Critics By ARTHUR MIZENER

THE basic function of the literary scholar was clearly indi- cated by Dr. Johnson when he remarked that "all works

which describe manners require notes in sixty or seventy years" if they are to be understood. The significance of a remark of this kind depends almost entirely on the conception of understanding which lies behind it. For Dr. Johnson undestanding was a serious and adult act involving the whole man, an act of evaluation and judgment. "The truth is," he said, "that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the relig- ious and moral knowledge of right and wrong . . . . Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance."

It is largely this involvement of the whole man which has given Dr. Johnson his reputation for a kind of perverse critical blindness. For him a work of art was a serious representation of the human world; it had to be true. It is far more important, for example, that he sought thus earnestly to evaluate the world of Milton's poetry than that the judgment which resulted was, as



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