The Art of Reading

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ART is not like mathematics or philosophy. It is a subjective, sensual, and highly personal activity in which facts and ideas are the servants of fancy and feeling; and the artist’s first aim is not truth but delight. Even when, like Spenser, he wishes to instruct, he seeks to do so by delighting. It follows that the primary object of a reader is to be delighted. His duty is to enjoy himself: his efforts should be directed to developing Ids faculty of appreciation.

To enjoy literature as it should be enjoyed is a task of immense difficulty; requiring, in addition in common sense and uncommon sensibility, faith, hope, charity, humility, patience, and most of the other Christian virtues. It also involves a long and unhurried process of self-training. To begin with we must learn to start from the right place, to get the right line of approach. This means understanding what it is that we are approaching. We must have a right notion of the nature of a work of art; and, more particularly, must we realize that it is the result of two impulses. First of all, it is the record of a personal vision. Some aspect of the artist’s experience strikes him with such freshness and intensity that he feels impelled to communicate it to other people. Gray wants to write down what he felt and thought when he look a stroll in Stoke Poges churchyard one twilit evening in 1742. This, however, was not his only motive in writing his poem. People do not become painters simply because they want to paint some particular object. They do it because they like painting; because the creative instinct in them finds fulfillment in constructing a pleasing pattern in line and color. It is the same with writers. If Gray had only wanted to put down the facts about his feelings in the churchyard, he could have done it with less trouble in prose. But he also liked writing verses. The creative writer is always partly inspired by his desire to construct a pleasing object in his chosen medium. This double impulse — to express the individual vision and to work in a particular medium— actuates every true artist. It is the union of the two that produces the phenomenon that we call a work of art.

The reader’s first aim, then, must be to see the work as it is. This means accepting the limitations by which its individuality is defined. There is the limitation of the personal vision. I have said that the artist is inspired by his experience: but no artist, not even Shakespeare or Tolstoy, is so receptive as to be inspired by all his experience. Only certain things will strike deep enough into the fundamental stratum of his personality to fertilize his genius: only to a certain amount of what he sees and hears will he respond strongly enough for his record of if to be colored and energized by his individual vitality. As a consequence, every write has, inevitably, a limited creative range. Th reader should a I wavs be on the lookout to note the scope of this range. Nor should he blame the writer for remaining within it. On the contrary, he should realize that only in so far as he does so is he a successful artist. It was foolish of Charlotte Bronte to condemn Jane Austen for not depicting the full fury of the passions. It would have been equally foolish if Jane Austen had criticized Charlotte Brontë for a morbid preoccupation with personal emotion. Charlotte Bronte was not a cool and healthy-minded person; and the spectacle of the passions in violent action did not kindle Jane Austen’s creative spark. It is no use blaming a writer for failing to do something he never intended to do; and, most likely, would not have made a success of if he had.

Equally must the reader accept the limitations imposed by form. There are critics who have condemned Ben Jonson’s comedies because they lack the delicate sentiment and lyrical grace they find so agreeable in Shakespeare’s; and who have argued from this that Ben Jonson was a coarse and prosaic person. In fact he was nothing of the kind, as anybody can discover by reading The Sad Shepherd. But the satirical type of comedy which Ben Jonson chose to write could not admit sentiment and lyrical grace without destroying that unity of hard glittering tone and slackening that unrelenting intellectual tension which are necessary conditions of its characteristic effect; and he therefore rightly left them out. Equally is it silly to blame Milton for describing the garden of Eden in Paradise Lost without that vivid particularity of detail that is so delightful in L’Allegro. The effect of sublime grandeur he aimed at, and the classical, generalized style by which he sought to convey it, alike excluded such detail. Form conditions matter as much as the artist’s personality does. The reader must learn not to quarrel with this conditioning.

The fact that any genuine work of art is unique should also discourage us from the seductive practice of ranking writers; drawing up a neat class list of the mighty dead, with firsts, seconds, and thirds judiciously awarded. No doubt, some writers are greater than others. Milton is a greater poet than Herrick because his creative imagination embraced a far wider and more important area of human experience in the field of its operation. But he is not a better poet in the sense that he succeeds more perfectly in his object. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may would not have been improved if Herrick had tried to make it more like Lycidas. It would have been totally different.

When we come to considering writers of more comparable powers, ranking appears even more futile and irrelevant. Who shall say with any certainty whet her Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard ranks above or below Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind? Each is a sincere and profoundly felt comment on matter of equally serious moment to mankind; each is executed with a supreme accomplishment. Which one happens to prefer depends surely on the bias of personal temperament. Anyway, Milton and Herrick, Gray and Shelley, are, as artists, all much more like each other than any of them is like a bad writer.

Critics love dividing literature up into categories, distinguishing between major art and minor art, primitive art and decadent art, light art and serious art, healthy art and morbid art. There is no harm in their doing this it can even be illuminating — as long as they remember that the only really important distinction is that between good and bad art.

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GENIUS — the distinguishing quality of the individual genius, that is what matters. There are as many different kinds of good book as there are different kinds of good writer. Each has something to give us. We should admire each in so far as he strikes us as good in his particular kind.

Books can be regarded as social documents, as moral lessons, or as pieces of biography, and grouped together accordingly; often with confusing results for the reader who is seeking to estimate them as works of art. Thomas Hardy, for instance, like the realistic novelists who were his contemporaries, was a rebel against the old-fashioned orthodox ideas of his age about sex and religion. In consequence he has often been taken to be the same kind of author; and as such has been rightly judged a failure. The man who opens Jude the Obscure expecting a sober, documented study of nineteenth-century working-class life, like Esther Waters, will naturally be disappointed. But, aesthetically, Hardy was a very old-fashioned writer. His conception of a good novel, formalized, romantic, and sensational, was much more like Sir Walter Scott’s than it was like that of the young George Moore. It is only when we realize this and adjust our angle of vision accordingly—looking for similar qualities and making similar allowances, as we should when reading the Waverley novels — that Hardy’s genius reveals itself in its full magnificence.

Again I have noticed that some admirers of Pope do not like Tennyson. And it is true that the moral and intellectual opinions of these two authors are very different. That characteristic Victorian blend of doubt and aspiration, high-mindedness and muddle-headedness, which Tennyson voiced so melodiously, is at the very opposite pole from Pope’s elegant, Augustan rationality. This intellectual difference, however, does not alter the fact that, aesthetically, Pope and Tennyson are akin. Neither was an original thinker — that is why each reflects so exactly the mind of his period — and both were possessed of a delicate sensibility to the beautiful and an extraordinary natural talent for writing, which they deliberately cultivated to the highest pitch of exquisite virtuosity. They should appeal to the same taste in art. Put to realize this the reader must be looking, first of all, for artistic satisfaction. A writer can easily belong to one school intellectually and morally, and to another aesthetically. It is towards his aesthetic character that our eves should be directed.

So much for the right approach; but our apprenticeship in literary appreciation is not over when we have achieved the right approach. We must also learn to understand the language in which the work is presented. This means first of all the language of form, the eon vent ion he uses. Failure to understand this has led critics otherwise distinguished and discriminating to say very silly things. Matthew Arnold, for example, calls Pope “a classic of prose,”because he has never adjusted his mind to accept the rigid formality of the Augustan couplet as a vehicle for that serious passion and imaginative sensibility which he rightly thought essential qualities of great poetry. Again,

the pundits of nineteenth-century conservative dramatic criticism refused to recognize Ibsen as a tragic dramatist because, unlike Shakespeare, he wrote about contemporary middle-class life and made his characters speak in modern colloquial language. At the very same time William Archer, who did know how to appreciate Ibsen, was denying any merit to Webster, because his plots were, from the realist’s point of view, fantastic and incoherent. Inability to grasp a convention different from that to which they were accustomed prevented both from recognizing that in their different modes Ibsen and Webster were great dramatists of essentially the same type, masters of high and somber tragedy.

Strenuous critics of the psychological and sociological schools often pour scorn on scholars for devoting their time to elucidating the conventions, formal and linguistic, of past ages, instead of occupying themselves in the glorious task of exploring the economic background of authors, or analyzing their repressions. But without the work of the scholars, it is impossible to get near the authors at all. It is they who teach us the language through which their economic and psychological situations are expressed.

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FINALLY, we have to learn to understand and accept the language of the author’s temperament — to school ourselves to look at tlie world from his point of view while we are reading his books. This is much the hardest part of our training; for our own personal feelings are so much involved in it. A reader with a temperamental preference for the sober and restrained will find it hard to persuade himself into a mood to appreciate the grotesque extravagance of phrase with which Browning so admirably expresses his natural idiosyncrasy. Someone who instinctively responds to the bold splendor of Hopkins’s verbal invention may scarcely notice, let alone enjoy, the subtle and unobtrusive felicity with which Bridges uses the English language. Or our antipathy may be moral. The puritan will recoil instinctively from Sterne, the pacifist from Kipling, the man of faith from Gibbon, the infidel from Bunyan. Yet Hopkins and Bridges, Bunyan and Gibbon, Kipling and Sterne, are all in their different manners and degrees genuine artists. He who aspires to he a man of taste should suffer from a sense of failure if he does not enjoy them all. To do so, however, may mean subjecting himself to a stern course of selfdiscipline and self-effacement: he may have to learn to subdue his tenderly cherished prejudices, silence his garrulous self-important opinions, if he is to attain to that receptive state of mind in which he can freely and spontaneously surrender himself to the book which he has chosen to study.

Of course, human beings are of their nature imperfect; and our temperamental inclination will, whatever we do, always impair in some degree our capacity for appreciation. Myself, I fear I shall never enjoy George Meredith’s novels as much as they deserve. It is not just that Meredith’s faults jar on me; twenty years’ conscientious, if intermittent, effort has proved me unable to view his works in a focus in which the beauty and intellectual penetration, whose presence I do genuinely perceive, is not somehow fogged and distorted by my temperamental distaste for his particular brand of stylistic Acridity. On the other hand, Jane Austen’s genius and personality are so intensely sympathetic to me that it is possible, though I think improbable, that I overrate her. But the fact that a man can never hope to be perfectly virtuous is no reason for him not to try to he as virtuous as he can. Nor should the consciousness that we shall never completely attain our ideal stop us from striving as far as possible to achieve a perfectly just and catholic taste.

Nor does our taste grow undiscriminating as it grows catholic. Greater breadth of sympathy makes us more detached, less partisan, readier to recognize that even our favorites are fallible. The more we are alive to remark the presence of the aesthetic quality the more certainly do we perceive its absence. How few authors, we note, perfectly fulfill either their personal or their formal impulses! Some stray outside their creative range, choose to write about experience which does not stimulate their imaginations; as Scott does when he leaves that Scottish life which he understood so intimately, in order to try re-creating the world of the English Middle Ages which he did not know at all. Or the vision itself may be confused by inconsistency. Thackeray urges us to admire Lady Castlewood for her noble character at the same moment that he is vividly representing her as selfish, petty, and jealous: Byron proclaims his indifference to public opinion with a loudness of tone that only betrays his secret anxiety that everybody should be impressed by him. In the works of both the trained taste is quick to detect a false note.

It also becomes skilled to notice when an author’s formal impulse does not find satisfactory fulfillment; to remark, for example, that many minor Elizabethan dramatists come to grief for wart of some central principle of composition with which to integrate the varying elements of their play into a unity. The subplot has no organic relation to the main plot: the comic characters are drawn in a realistic convention, the serious in a wildly poetic one, so that it is impossible to believe in a world in which they are represented as existing side by side.

Then there are the authors who do not recognize the nature of their inspiration; and in consequence try to express it in a radically unsuitable form. Hardy does this in Two on a Tower, where he takes a theme appropriate to a concentrated and lyrical verse tale, and then attempts, by filling it up with a clutter of conventional intrigue, to swell it out to the length required for a Victorian three-volume novel.

Other authors again fail to perceive the limitations of their medium. This is the chief cause of Wordsworth’s notorious inequality. He did not realize that to put a statement into verse form gives it emphasis, and that therefore it must be a statement that will bear emphasizing. As a result there is sometimes a comical incongruity between the prosaic flatness of what ho says and the lilting song rhythm in which he says it:

Scott, Hardy, Wordsworth — these are all writers of the highest quality of genius. To be able to appreciate them is almost the test of a fine taste. But our capacity to do so will not make us notice their lapses less. On the contrary, the habit of disengaging the aesthetic element makes us the more acutely aware of the mass of lifeless and anaesthetic matter, in which it is all too often embedded.

However, the gain is immensely greater than the loss. To train our taste is to increase our capacity for pleasure: for it enables us to enter into such a variety of experience. This indeed is the special precious power of literature. In actual life our experience is inevitably restricted both by the limitations imposed by circumstances and by our own character. No one person can ever know in practice what it is like to be both a man and a woman, a mystic and a materialist, a criminal and a pillar of society, an ancient Roman and a modern Russian. But books can teach us to be all these things in imagination. Every reader is a Lady of Shalott, who, secluded in his secret chamber, forgets the hours, as he sits watching the endless procession of human thought and passion and action, as it passes, motley and tumultuous, across the gleaming mirror of literature.

And, like the Lady of Shalott’s, it is a magic mirror. For all that it reflects is transmuted by the alchemy of art into matter for delight. This is very odd, considering how little delightful experience often is; how dull or trivial or painful, or unedifving! So also is the experience which forms the material of much great literature. In actual life it would be boring to live at Middlemareh, shocking to behave like the characters in Love for Love. depressing to look at mankind as Gulliver learned to do, horrifying to find the story of King Lear occurring among one’s acquaintance. Yet one enjoys them all in literature. Indeed the worst is the most enjoyable. King Lear provides the most satisfying experience of the lot. How can this be?

This is a dark and paradoxical mystery, in whose shadow lurks the whole question of the fundamental significance of art. It is not for me to propose a final answer to a riddle from which some of the wisest of mankind have recoiled baffled. Apart from anything else, any such answer must Inevitably differ according as people differ in their interpretation of the significance of human life as a whole; and so can never satisfy everyone. But since the ultimate purpose and value of that art of appreciation which is my subject are involved in 1 he issue, I feel impelled to offer you a few tentative and incomplete thoughts on the matter. Surely the answer is to he found in the fact that the soul is born instinctively desiring order, harmony, beauty, but finds herself in a world disorderly, dissonant, and in great part ugly. In eon sequence she is for ever unsatisfied.

The very best of our experience is not as good as our dreams: our most exquisite moments are flawed and fragmentary. And they are ephemeral. Even as we gaze the sunset fades, the apple blossom sheds itself and scatters. It is the peculiar virtue of art to present us with an image of perfection incarnate, to show us some aspect of earthly experience, circumstantial, concrete, and recognizable, yet mysteriously free from the imperfections which mar it in the real world. The fleeting is apparently arrested in mid-flight. “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" cries Keats ecstatically as he looks at the figures of the lovers graven on the Grecian Urn.

And even the ugly elements in life are made by the artist a means to beauty. Grief and horror, drabness and deformity —these are, as often as not, necessary strands in the web of enchantment which he weaves to take us captive. So that, when contemplating a work of art, our desire for perfection and our sense of reality are reconciled. We feel ourselves relieved, if only for a moment, from the wearisome burden of our daily dissatisfaction. For once we accept an experience unresentedly— and with joy. Further, our joy is deeper in proportion as we are induced to accept what we normally find unacceptable, in proportion as the vision, presented to us by the artist, includes aspects of life which in our everyday existence distress us. For then his achievement represents a more signal and extraordinary victory over the ills of our modal condition. Then is a greater spiritual triumph in accepting Cordelia’s sufferings than in accepting Viola’s happiness. Thus tragedy is the most profoundly exhilarating of all literary forms. For tragedy brings glory out of the very stuff of despair; in it we are made to face life at its most baffling and dreadful, and yet to see it as a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.