ABC of Reading Page 4

  AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he ‘is a bad linguist’ or that he or she can’t possibly learn all those languages.

  One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

  When it comes to the question of poetry, a great many people don’t even want to know that their own country does not occupy ALL the available surface of the planet. The idea seems in some way to insult them.

  Nevertheless the maximum of phanopoeia [throwing a visual image on the mind] is probably reached by the Chinese, due in part to their particular kind of written language.

  In the languages known to me (which do not include Persian and Arabic) the maximum of melopoeia is reached in Greek, with certain developments in Provençal which are not in Greek, and which are of a different KIND than the Greek.

  And it is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. At any rate, a great deal of false teaching is due to the assumption that poems known to the critic are of necessity the best.

  My lists are a starting-point and a challenge. This challenge has been open for a number of years and no one has yet taken it up. There have been general complaints, but no one has offered a rival list, or put forward particular poems as better examples of a postulated virtu or quality.

  Years ago a musician said to me: ‘But isn’t there a place where you can get it all [meaning all of poetry] as in Bach?’

  There isn’t. I believe if a man will really learn Greek he can get nearly ‘all of it’ in Homer.

  I have never read half a page of Homer without finding melodic invention, I mean melodic invention that I didn’t already know. I have, on the other hand, found also in Homer the imaginary spectator, which in 1918 I still thought was Henry James’ particular property.

  Homer says, ‘an experienced soldier would have noticed’. The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army doctor. (When he describes certain blows and their effect, the wounds are said to be accurate, and the description fit for coroner’s inquest.)

  Another French scholar has more or less shown that the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map, but as it would be in a ‘periplum’, that is, as a coasting sailor would find it.

  The news in the Odyssey is still news. Odysseus is still ‘very human’, by no means a stuffed shirt, or a pretty figure taken down from a tapestry. It is very hard to describe some of the homeric conversation, the irony, etc., without neologisms, which my publishers have suggested I eschew. The only readable translation of this part of Homer known to me was made by Amadis Jamyn, secretaire et lecteur ordinaire du Roy (Henry III of France). He refers to Odysseus as ‘ce rusé personnage’.

  You can’t tuck Odysseus away with Virgil’s Aeneas. Odysseus is emphatically ‘the wise guy’, the downy, the hard-boiled Odysseus. His companions have most of them something that must have been the Greek equivalent of shell-shock.

  And the language of the conversations is just as alive as when one of Edgar Wallace’s characters says, ‘We have lost a client’.

  W. B. Yeats is sufficiently venerated to be cited now in a school book. The gulf between Homer and Virgil can be illustrated profanely by one of Yeats’ favourite anecdotes.

  A plain sailor man took a notion to study Latin, and his teacher tried him with Virgil; after many lessons he asked him something about the hero.

  Said the sailor: ‘What hero?’

  Said the teacher: ‘What hero, why, Aeneas, the hero.’

  Said the sailor: ‘Ach, a hero, him a hero? Bigob, I t’ought he waz a priest.’

  . . . . .

  There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ‘em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every so often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.

  Virgil was the official literature of the middle ages, but ‘everybody’ went on reading Ovid. Dante makes all his acknowledgements to Virgil (having appreciated the best of him), but the direct and indirect effect of Ovid on Dante’s actual writing is possibly greater than Virgil’s.

  Virgil came to life again in 1514 partly or possibly because Gavin Douglas knew the sea better than Virgil had.

  The lover of Virgil who wishes to bring a libel action against me would be well advised to begin his attack by separating the part of the Aeneid in which Virgil was directly interested (one might almost say, the folk-lore element) from the parts he wrote chiefly because he was trying to write an epic poem.

  You have been promised a text-book, and I perhaps ramble on as if we had been taken outdoors to study botany from the trees instead of from engravings in class-room. That is partly the fault of people who complained that I gave them lists without saying why I had chosen such-and-such authors.

  YOU WILL NEVER KNOW either why I chose them, or why they were worth choosing, or why you approve or disapprove my choice, until you go to the TEXTS, the originals.

  And the quicker you go to the texts the less need there will be for your listening to me or to any other long-winded critic.

  A man who has climbed the Matterhorn may prefer Derbyshire to Switzerland, but he won’t think the Peak is the highest mountain in Europe.

  An epic is a poem including history.

  Greek Drama depends greatly on the hearer or reader knowing Homer. It is my firm opinion that there are a great many defects in Greek drama. I should never try to stop a man’s reading Aeschylus or Sophocles. There is nothing in this book that ought in any way to curtail a man’s reading or to prevent his reading anything he enjoys.

  Ultimately, I suppose, any man with decent literary curiosity will read the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, but if he has seriously considered drama as a means of expression he will see that whereas the medium of poetry is WORDS, the medium of drama is people moving about on a stage and using words. That is, the words are only a part of the medium and the gaps between them, or deficiencies in their meaning, can be made up by ‘action’.

  People who have given the matter dispassionate and careful attention are fairly convinced that the maximum charge of verbal meaning cannot be used on the stage, save for very brief instants. ‘It takes time to get it over’, etc.

  This is not a text-book of the drama, or of dramatic criticism. It is unfair to a dramatist to consider his WORDS, or even his words and versification, as if that were the plenum of his performance.

  Taken as READING MATTER, I do NOT believe that the Greek dramatists are up to Homer. Even Aeschylus is rhetorical. Even in the Agamemnon there are quantities of words which do not function as reading matter, i.e., are not necessary to our understanding of the subject.

  SAPPHO

  I HAVE put the great name on the list, because of antiquity and because there is really so little left that one may as well read it as omit it. Having read it, you will be told there is nothing better. I know of no better ode than the POIKILOTHRON. So far as I know, Catullus is the only man who has ever mastered the lady’s metre.

  For the sake of the student’s mental clarity, and for the maintenance of order in his ideas, he will, I think, find it always advantageous to read the oldest poem of a given kind that he can get hold of.

  There may be very, very learned Greek specialists who can find something in Alexandrine epigram that isn’t already in Sappho and Ibycus, but we are here considering the start of our studies.

  For the sake of keeping a proportionate evaluation, it would be well to start by thinking of the different KINDS of expression, the different WAYS of getting meaning
into words, rather than of particular things said or particular comments made.

  The term ‘meaning’ cannot be restricted to strictly intellectual or ‘coldly intellectual’ significance. The how much you mean it, the how you feel about meaning it, can all be ‘put into language’.

  I took my critical life in my hand, some years ago, when I suggested that Catullus was in some ways a better writer than Sappho, not for melopoeia, but for economy of words. I don’t in the least know whether this is true. One should start with an open mind.

  The snobbism of the renaissance held that all Greek poetry was better than ANY Latin poetry. The most intelligent of the Quattrocento Latinists, Basinio of Parma, proclaimed a very different thesis; he held that you couldn’t write Latin poetry really well unless you knew Greek. That is, you see, very different. In the margins of his Latin narrative you can still see the tags of Homer that he was using to keep his melodic sense active.

  I don’t believe that any Latin author is in measurable distance of Homer. I doubt if Catullus is inferior to Sappho. I doubt if Propertius is a millimetre inferior to his Greek antecedents; Ovid is for us a store-house of a vast mass of matter that we cannot NOW get from the Greek.

  He is uneven. He is clear. His verse is as lucid as prose. Metrically he is not a patch on Catullus or Propertius.

  Perhaps the student will now begin to see that I am trying to give him a list of authors who are unsurpassed IN THEIR OWN DOMAIN, whereas the writers whom I omit are demonstrably INFERIOR to one or more of the writers I include, and their inferiority can be computed on some particular basis.

  . . . . .

  HAVE PATIENCE, I am not insisting even now on your learning a multitude of strange languages, I will even tell you, in due course, what you can do if you can read only English.

  To put it another way, I am, after all these years, making a list of books that I still re-read; that I keep on my desk and look into now and again.

  Chapter Five

  1

  The great break in European literary history is the change over from inflected to uninflected language. And a great deal of critical nonsense has been written by people who did not realize the difference.

  Greek and Latin are inflected, that is, nouns, verbs and adjectives have little tags, or wagging tails, and the tags tell whether the noun is subject or predicate; they indicate that which acts and that which is acted upon, directly or indirectly, or that which is just standing around, in more or less causal relation, etc.

  Most of these tags were forgotten as our modern contemporary European languages evolved. German, the least developed, retains most inflection.

  The best way of using a language with these signs and labels attached to the words, is NOT the best way to use a language which has to be written in a certain order if it is to be clear.

  It makes a difference in English whether you say man sees dog [or] dog sees man.

  In Latin either canis or canem, homo or hominem, can come first without the sentence being the least bit ambiguous.

  When Milton writes

  ‘Him who disobeys me disobeys’

  he is, quite simply, doing wrong to his mother tongue. He meant

  Who disobeys him, disobeys me.

  It is perfectly easy to understand WHY he did it, but his reasons prove that Shakespeare and several dozen other men were better poets. Milton did it because he was chock a block with Latin. He had studied his English not as a living language, but as something subject to theories.

  Who disobeys him, disobeys me,

  doesn’t make good verse. The sound is better where the idiom is bad. When the writing is masterly one does NOT have to excuse it or to hunt up the reason for perpetrating the flaw.

  2

  MY list of mediaeval poems is perhaps harder to justify.

  I once got a man to start translating the Seafarer into Chinese. It came out almost directly into Chinese verse, with two solid ideograms in each half-line.

  Apart from the Seafarer I know no other European poems of the period that you can hang up with the ‘Exile’s Letter’ of Li Po, displaying the West on a par with the Orient.

  There are passages of Anglo-Saxon as good as paragraphs of the Seafarer, but I have not found any whole poem of the same value. The Spanish Cid is clear narrative, and the sagas of Grettir and Burnt Nial prove that narrative capacity didn’t die out.

  I don’t know that a contemporary writer could learn anything about writing from the sagas that he couldn’t learn better from Flaubert, but Skarpheddin’s jump and slide on the ice, and the meeting of Grettir, or whoever it was, with the bear do not fade from one’s memory. You can’t believe it is fiction. Some Icelander on a ledge must at some time have saved himself by lopping off the outside paw of a bear, and so making the brute lose its balance. This is in a sense phanopoeia, the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina.

  The defect of earlier imagist propaganda was not in misstatement but in incomplete statement. The diluters took the handiest and easiest meaning, and thought only of the STATIONARY image. If you can’t think of imagism or phanopoeia as including the moving image, you will have to make a really needless division of fixed image and praxis or action.

  I have taken to using the term phanopoeia to get away from irrelevant particular connotations tangled with a particular group of young people who were writing in 1912.

  3

  IT is mainly for the sake of the melopoeia that one investigates troubadour poetry.

  One might almost say that the whole culture of the age, at any rate the mass of the purely literary culture of the age, from 1050 to 1250 and on till 1300, was concentrated on one aesthetic problem, which, as Dante put it, ‘includes the whole art’.

  That ‘whole art’ consisted in putting together about six strophes of poesy so that the words and the tune should be welded together without joint and without wem.

  The best smith, as Dante called Arnaut Daniel, made the birds sing IN HIS WORDS; I don’t mean that he merely referred to birds singing-----

  In the canzone beginning

  L’aura amara

  Fals bruoills brancutz

  Clarzir

  Quel doutz espeissa ab fuoills.

  Els letz

  Becs

  Dels auzels ramencz

  Ten balps e mutz

  etc.

  And having done it in that one strophe he kept them at it, repeating the tune, and finding five rhymes for each of seventeen rhyme sounds in the same order.

  Having done that he constructed another perfect strophe, where the bird call interrupts the verse.

  Cadahus

  En son us

  Mas pel us

  Estauc clus.

  That again for six strophes WITH the words making sense.

  The music of these songs has been lost, but the tradition comes up again, over three centuries later.

  Clement Janequin wrote a chorus, with words for the singers of the different parts of the chorus. These words would have no literary or poetic value if you took the music away, but when Francesco da Milano reduced it for the lute, the birds were still in the music. And when Münch transcribed it for modern instruments the birds were still there. They ARE still there in the violin part.

  That is why the monument outlasts the bronze casting.

  Against this craft, I put, with quite definite intention, the syncopation or the counterpoint of the Syrian Greek Death of Adonis, with, shall we say, Bion’s jazz beat running cross-wise.

  As instance of how the life of a work of art is something that just won’t stay nailed down in a coffin: The Kennedy-Frasers found some music in the outer Hebrides that fits the Beowulf, or at any rate that some of the Beowulf fits. It is the ‘Aillte’. I heard it in concert, and racked my mind to think where it fitted. It wouldn’t go to the Seafarer. Two lines fitted a bit of the Beowulf, then the next wouldn’t fit. I skipped a line of the Beowulf, and went on. The Kennedy-Frasers had omitted a line of the music at that point
because it didn’t seem to them to have an inherent musical interest.

  The point of the foregoing strophes, or at least one dimension of their workmanship, can be grasped by anyone, whether they know Provençal or not.

  What is to be said for the quality of Ventadour in the best moments, or of Sordello, where there is nothing but the perfection of the movement, nothing salient in the thought or the rhyme scheme? You have to have known Provençal a long time perhaps before you perceive the difference between this work and another.

  Nevertheless, if you are to know the dimensions of English verse melody a few centuries later, you must find your measures or standards in Provence. The Minnesingers were contemporary; you can contrast the finesse of the south Latin, with the thicker pigment of Heinrich von Morungen or Von der Vogelweide.

  Germans claim that German poetry has developed since the middle ages. My own belief is that Goethe and Stefan George at their lyric best are doing nothing that hadn’t already been done better or as well. Borchardt’s best verse to-day is in his translations of the Vita Nuova.

  During seven centuries a lot of subject matter of no great present interest has been stuffed into German verse that is not very skilful. I can see no reason why a foreign writer should study it.

  I see every reason for studying Provençal verse (a little of it, say thirty or fifty poems) from Guillaume de Poictiers, Bertrand de Born and Sordello. Guido and Dante in Italy, Villon and Chaucer in France and England, had their root in Provence: their art, their artistry, and a good deal of their thought.