90 Period Criticism
90 PERIOD CRITICISM
Opening The Listener a few days ago I came upon an article on Chesterton by Mr James Stephens (Note: 'The "Period Talent" of G.K. Chesterton,' The Listener (17th October 1946) - an article which seemed to me ungenerous and even unjust. There were two main charges made against Chesterton; the one, that he was too public (for on Mr Stephens's view poetry is a very private affair) and the other, that he was 'dated'. The first need not, perhaps, be discussed here at very great length. Mr Stephens and I find ourselves on opposite sides of a very well-known fence, and Mr Stephens’s side is, I must confess, the popular one at present. It still seems to me that the burden of proof rests on those who describe as 'private' compositions which their authors take pains to have multiplied by print and which are advertised and exposed for sale in shops. It is an odd method of securing privacy. But this question can wait. It certainly would not have worried Chesterton. Nor would the maxim that any poetry which is immediately and widely acceptable (like that of Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Tennyson) must be merely 'peasant' poetry have offended a man who desired nothing so much as the restoration of the peasantry. But the question of 'dating' remains.
It is very difficult here to resist turning the tables, to ask what writer smells more unmistakably of a particular period than Mr Stephens himself. That peculiar mixture of mythology and theosophy - Pan and Aengus, leprechauns and angels, reincarnation and the sorrows of Deirdre - if this does not carry a man back into the world of Lady Gregory, AE, the middle Yeats, and even Mr Algernon Blackwood, then the word 'period' really has no meaning. Hardly any book written in our century could be so nearly dated by internal evidence as The Crock of Gold (Note: James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912), The DemiGods (1914), Here Are Ladies (1913), Deirdre (1923).) Even Mr Stephens's curious suggestion that detective stories (of which Chesterton was notoriously guilty) somehow helped to produce the first German war could be retorted. It would be just as plausible to trace the Nazi ideology to the orgiastic elements in Mr Stephens's own work; to the cult of Pan, the revolt against reason (symbolised by the Philosopher's journey, imprisonment, and rescue) or the figure of the Uglist Man. And it might easily be maintained that the theological background of Chesterton's imaginative books has dated a good deal less than the blend of Celtic Twilight and serious occultism (Yeats claimed to be a practising magician) which we cannot help surmising for Mr Stephens.
But though this would be easy it would not be worth doing. To prove that Mr Stephens had dated would not be to prove that Chesterton was perennial. And there is, for me, another reason for not answering Mr Stephens with this argumentum ad hominem. I still like Mr Stephens's books. He holds in my private pantheon a place inferior to Chesterton's but quite as secure. It is inferior because the proportion of dead wood in The Crock of Gold, The Demi-Gods and Here Are Ladies (there is no dead wood in Deirdre) seems to me higher than in the White Horse, The Man Who Was Thursday, or The Flying Inn (Note: G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Flying Inn (1914)). I think the long paragraphs of what used, at Boston, to be called 'Transcendentalism' which we find in Mr Stephens are bad, sometimes even nonsensical. But then they always were bad: dates have nothing to do with it. On the other hand the gigantic (and, in the proper sense , Rabelaisian) comic effects - the arrest of the Philosopher or the post-mortal adventures of O'Brien and the threepenny bit - are inexhaustible. So is the character of that admirable picaro Patsy MacCann. So is the Ass. So is the painting of nature; the trees that stood holding their leaves tightly in the wind, or the crow that said 'I'm the devil of a crow'. I cannot give up Mr Stephens. If anyone writes a silly, spiteful article to say that Mr Stephens was only a 'period' talent, I will fight on that issue as long as there is a drop of ink in my pen.
The truth is that the whole criticism which turns on dates and periods, as if age-groups were the proper classification of readers, is confused and even vulgar. (I do not mean that Mr Stephens is vulgar. A man who is not a vulgar man may do a vulgar thing: you will find this explained in Aristotle's Ethics.) It is vulgar because it appeals to the desire to be up to date: a desire only fit for dressmakers. It is confused because it lumps together the different ways in which a man can be 'of his period'.
A man may be of his period in the negative sense. That is to say, he may deal with things which are of no permanent interest but only seemed to be of interest because of some temporary fashion. Thus Herbert's poems in the shape of altars and crosses are 'dated'; thus, perhaps, the occultist elements in the Celtic school are 'dated'. A man is likely to become 'dated' in this way precisely because he is anxious not to be dated, to be 'contemporary': for to move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go. On the other hand a man may be 'dated' in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers are often the most dated. No one is more unmistakably ancient Achaean than Homer, more scholastic than Dante, more feudal than Froissart, more 'Elizabethan' than Shakespeare. The Rape of the Lock is a perfect (and never obsolete) period piece. The Prelude smells of its age. The Waste Land has 'Twenties' stamped on every line. Even Isaiah will reveal to a careful student that it was not composed at the court of Louis XIV nor in modern Chicago.
The real question is in which sense Chesterton was of his period. Much of his work, admittedly, was ephemeral journalism: it is dated in the first sense. The little books of essays are now mainly of historical interest. Their parallel in Mr Stephens's work is not his romances but his articles in The Listener. But Chesterton's imaginative works seem to me to be in quite a different position. They are, of course, richly composed. The anti-Germanicism in the Ballad of the White Horse belongs to a silly and transitory historical heresy of Mr Belloc's - always, on the intellectual side, a disastrous influence on Chesterton. And in the romances, the sword-sticks, the hansom cabs, the anarchists, all go back both to a real London and to an imagined London (that of The New Arabian Nights) which have receded from us. But how is it possible not to see that what comes through all this is permanent and dateless? Does not the central theme of the Ballad the highly paradoxical message which Alfred receives from the Virgin - embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are left them and win? Hence in the very nadir of the late war a very different, and exquisite, poet (Miss Ruth Pitter) unconsciously and inevitably struck exactly the same note with the line: All but divine and desperate hopes go down
and are no more.
Hence in those quaking days after the fall of France a young friend of mine (just about to enter the R.A.F.) and I found ourselves quoting to one another stanza after stanza of the Ballad. There was nothing else to say.
So in the stories. Read again The Flying Inn. Is Lord Ivywood obsolete? The doctrinaire politician, aristocratic yet revolutionary, inhuman, courageous, eloquent, turning the vilest treacheries and most abominable oppressions into periods that echo with lofty magnanimity - is this out of date? Are the withers of any modern journalist quite unwrung when he reads of Hibbs However? Or read again The Man Who Was Thursday. Compare it with another good writer, Kafka. Is the difference simply that the one is 'dated' and the other contemporary? Or is it rather that while both give a powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each one of us encounters in his (apparently) single-handed struggle with the universe, Chesterton, attributing to the universe a more complicated disguise, and admitting the exhilaration as well as the terror of the struggle, has got in rather more; is more balanced: in that sense, more classical, more permanent?
I will tell Mr Stephens what that man is like who can see nothing in these stories but an Edwardian 'period' piece. He is like a man who should look into Mr Stephens's Deirdre (the one unmistakably great and almost perfect book among its author's many good books) and having seen the names (Connohar, Deirdre, Fergus, Naoise) should mutter 'All the old Abbey Theatre stuff' and read no more. If Mr Stephens is too modest to reply that such a man would be a fool, I will do it for him. Such a man would be a very notable fool: a fool first for disliking the early Yeats; second, for assuming that any book on the same theme must be like the early Yeats; and a fool thirdly for missing some of the finest heroic narrative, some of the most disciplined pathos, and some of the cleanest prose which our century has seen.