1

UNIT – I
THE MORAL APPROACH
IRVING BABBITT : “GENIUS AND TASTE”

UNIT – II
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH
KENNETH BURKE : THE POETIC PROCESS

UNIT- III
THE SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH
GEORGE ORWELL : “RUDYARD KIPLING

UNIT – IV
THE FORMALISTIC APPROACH
JAMES SMITH : AS YOU LIKE IT

UNIT – V
THE ARCHETYPAL APPROACH
GILBERT MURRAY : HAMLET AND ORESTES
 2

UNIT - I
1.1 THE MORAL APPROACH
STRUCTURE
1.1.1 Objectives
1.1.2 Introduction
1.1.3 Contents
1.1.4 Revision Point
1.1.5 In text Question
1.1.6 Summary
1.1.7 Terminal Exercises
1.1.8 Supplementary materials
1.1.9 Assignments
1.1.10 Suggested Readings
1.1.11 Learning Activities
1.1.12 Key Words
1.1.1 OBJECTIVES
To introduce our learners to the critical approaches to literature is the prime objective
of this course. The present lesson aims to familiarize them with the moralistic approach.
1.1.2 INTRODUCTION
The Moral Approach: Literature and Moral Ideas
Of the various types of criticism practiced today, the moral approach has
undoubtedly the longest history. Plato was concerned with the moral effects the poet might
have in his ideal Republic; Horace gave great weight to the usefulness as well as the beauty
of poetry; Renaissance figures, like Sir Philip Sidney, were similarly concerned. Dr.
Johnson, the great champ of eighteenth century “common sense” fortified by intellectual
power, did not hesitate to judge the moral content of the writers whom he discussed in The
Lives of the Poets. Mathew Arnold argued the importance of the “high seriousness of art.”
All of these are thoughtful spokesmen of the conviction that the importance of
literature is not merely in its way of saying, but also in what it says. The dichotomy – often
expressed as “form and content” – has been for our time an important one since the
Formalists have argued for the heavy emphasis, in the practice of criticism, upon the way
of saying, the arrangement of the parts, the “how” of a poem’s meaning, while moral critics
have attended to the “what” of meaning.
In the twentieth century, the impulse toward moral evaluation has been expressed
chiefly by writers who are grouped by the label, Neo-Humanist. Their chief interest lies in
literature as a “criticism” of life. To them, the study of the technique of literature is a study
of means, whereas they are concerned with the ends of literature as affecting man, with
literature as it takes place in the human forum of ideas and attitudes.
Their analysis of man is traditional, going back to that of the Renaissance Humanists.
Accordingly, man is a being who may be distinguished from the animal by his reason and
his possession of ethical standards. He stands as a free being, prone to animalistic urges
or egocentric yawps; but is responsible to place these tendencies, insofar as he wishes to
 3

cultivate his peculiarly human nature, under the control of reason. Freedom is thus not
only liberation from circumstances, but subjection to “inner law.” So the watchwords of
Humanism are: order, restraint, and discipline.
The twentieth century literary movement which associated itself with this
philosophical position was originally American. Paul Elmer More had been writing since
1904, when the first of his Shelburne Essays appeared, and Irving Babbitt took a parallel
position with Literature and the American College in 1908. At first, there was a very small
audience, even less a sympathetic one. The growing assault on the past naturally included
an attack on those who, like Babbitt and More, defended the past. It was difficult for them
to make headway in a time of scepticism toward traditional values, and of self-expressive
experiments in arts. In short, they were for a while overshadowed by the debunkers,
iconoclasts, and experimenters who were having their day. But in the twenties, more
respectful attention was given them, and they were joined by a number of writers like
Norman Foerster, Harry Hayden Clark, G.R. Elliot, Robert Shafer, Frank Jewett Mather,
Gorham Munson, and, for a time, Stuart Sherman Pratt. These were enough to make a
school, and the name “Neo-Humanist” became current as a term to describe their position
in literary criticism.
In practice, they tended to oppose two literary tendencies: Naturalism, with its
debased view of man, denying him fee will and responsibility; and Romanticism, with its
excessive cultivation of the ego and sympathy with comparatively unrestrained expression.
These tendencies, of course, included much of the contemporaneous literature, so that to
some opponents the Neo-Humanists seemed reactionary in taste, while their strong sense
of morality led to a change of ethical hyperorthodoxy. Yet many of these Neo-Humanists
strove chiefly to unite moral earnestness, based on a thoughtful and dignified concept of
man’s nature, with aesthetic sensitivity.
Something like the end of the movement occurred in the early thirties. The newer
ontological and sociological approaches (the latter often offering its own kind of moral
dogmatism) attracted many of the younger critics. Babbitt’s death in 1933 and More’s in
1937 took the strongest defenders of Humanism from the ranks. But from our present point
of view, it is possible to see that Humanism did not die, so much as it underwent a rebirth
with modification, into Religious Humanism.
Early in the century, T.E.Hulme had expressed a division between his own position
and that of the Neo-Humanists, although he was strongly as opposed as they to the softness
and confusion of Romanticism. The difference came down to this: whether the moralist
would or would not acknowledge supernatural sanction for the moral standards he held up
to the arts. The Neo-Humanists themselves were unsettled about the question: Paul Elmer
More became associated with institutional religion and G.R.Elliot declared positively the
necessity of an alliance between religion and morality; but by and large, the group followed
Babbitt’s lead in remaining secular or religiously noncommittal. In 1927 and 1929, T.S.Eliot
forcefully criticized both Babbitt and Foerster for this central weakness as he saw it: morality
that has no vindication outside of itself cannot compel reasonable belief.
The result of this intramural turmoil was, finally, to incorporate the warrant of
religious persuasion into the recommendation of moral standards. So, when the movement
died in its early form, the values survived, and still survive, chiefly in alliance with religion.
The term “Christian Humanist,” for example, may just be applied to T.S.Eliot, and is frankly
 4

accepted by a number of scholars and critics, like Edmund Fuller and Hyatt Waggoner, as
indicating the focus of their critical view.
The moral approach to literature is too basic to human interests to exist only within
the confines of group. F.R.Leavis, among English critics, and Yvor Winters, among
Americans, express the traditional concern for the moral ends of literature, although the
critical activities of both are too various to permit the term “Humanist” to define their
approach. Winters, for example, has been described as making “the same inveterate defense
of classical virtues , the same condemnation of eccentric individualism, the same stress on
moral values that literature should exemplify, the same adherence to a system of
absolutism.” (Charles J. Glicksbeg American Literary Criticism 1990-1950: 42).
Furthermore, much of the criticism of Marxists is at base moral, though the image of man
they propose differs from that of the Humanists, and is related to so special a theory of
human forces that the Marxists are best understood as exemplars of “The Social Approach.”
Even among some of the formalistic critics, the moral view is retained. In “Religion and
Literature” T.S.Eliot enunciated an interesting split of judgment: “The ‘greatness’ of
literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that
whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.” This distinction
makes it possible for some, like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, who have the moralist’s
interest in the “greatness” of literature, to concentrate in their critical explications on the
“solely literary standards.”
1.1.3 CONTENTS
Text of Irving Babbitt’s “Genius and Taste”
I
IN "Roderick Random" (1748), the poet Melopoyn, confined in the Marshal Sea for
debt, stalks forth "wrapped in a dirty rug tied about his loins with two pieces of list of
different colors," and, making a profound bow to the assembled prisoners, pronounces
before them "with great significance of voice and gesture a very elegant and ingenious
discourse upon the difference between genius and taste." Dr. Spingam's views on
genius and taste, like so many other views that are being put forth as ultramodern,
take us back to this period in the eighteenth century. A new movement began to gain
head about this time, a movement in the midst of which we are still living,
and the opposition between this movement and traditional conceptions appears
nowhere more clearly, perhaps, than in its reinterpretation of such words as genius
and taste. In one of his most conservative moods Voltaire defined genius as "only
judicious imitation"; which meant in practice the imitation of the approved models according
to certain rules and conventions. But to imitate thus is to be merely orthodox, and Voltaire
maintains after all that mere orthodoxy, though necessary, does not suffice. In any one who
hopes to achieve literary salvation good works must
be supplemented by grace, and grace is accorded to but few. If Voltaire is to the last
degree astringent and restrictive in his attitude towards literary genius, he is hardly less so
in his attitude towards taste. The critic, too, he holds, must have a special tact and intuition
that cannot be acquired. Voltaire estimates that in the whole world there
 5

are only a few thousand men of taste—mainly settled about Paris. In short, genius
and taste as Voltaire views them are very vivid and vital things, but operate within the limits
imposed by the neo-classic doctrine of imitation, a doctrine that suffered from the start from
a taint of formalism.
Those who sought to purge literature of this taint began towards the middle of the
eighteenth century to oppose to the neo-classical harping on judgment and imitation a plea
for imagination and originality. The enthusiast and original genius who emerged at this time
and arrayed himself against the wit and man of the world had from the outset a strong
leaning towards primitivism. For example, Edward Young's "Conjectures on Original
Composition" (1759) will be found in its attacks on imitation, and its exaltation of
spontaneity and free expression, to anticipate surprisingly the gospel of recent primitivists
like Dr. Spingarn and his master, Benedetto Croce. According to the older school, art aims
not at the expression of the individual, but at the universal—the "grandeur of generality."
On the contrary, says Young, genius resides in one's ultimate idiosyncrasy, that ineffable
something that makes every man different from his fellows. If one wishes to be a creator and
not a mechanical imitator, one should simply be one's temperamental self, and above all
submit to no constraint upon one's imagination. "In the fairyland of fancy genius may
wander wild; there it has a creative power and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of
chimeras." (The empire of chimeras was later to become the tower of ivory.)
If one is not to be contaminated by imitation, it is an advantage. Young insinuates,
to be ignorant and brainless. "Many a genius probably there has been which could neither
write nor read." This advantage, the primitivist soon came to argue, was enjoyed especially
in the early stages of society before originality had been crushed beneath a superincumbent
weight of artificial culture, and before critics had begun their pernicious activities. This
primitivistic view of genius received a great stimulus from the publication of the Ossianic
poems. "Genius," says Diderot, summing up a whole movement, "calls for something
enormous, primitive and barbaric."
If genius, according to the primitivist, is something purely expressive, a spontaneous
temperamental overflow, taste, as he views it, is likewise at the opposite pole from the taste
of the neo-classicist. Voltaire failed to do justice to certain writers -- Shakespeare, for
example -- who were outside the strict neo-classical convention. According to the new
doctrine, the critic should cease to be thus exclusive and become comprehensive and
sympathetic. This is an important half-truth, though perhaps no half-truth since' the
beginning of the world has ever been so overworked.
For it is not enough, as Dr. Spingarn would have us believe, that the critic should
ask what the creator aimed to do and whether he has fulfilled his aim; he must also ask
whether the aim is intrinsically worth while. He must, in other words, rate creation
with reference to some standard set both above his own temperament and that of the creator.
According to the primitivist, on the contrary, the genius has simply to let himself go both
imaginatively and emotionally, and the whole business of the critic is to receive so keen an
impression from the resulting expression that when passed through his temperament it
issues forth as a fresh expression. By thus participating in the creative thrill of genius, the
critic becomes creative in turn, and in so far genius and taste are one.
Now taste has been defined as a man's literary conscience. The transformation of
the literary conscience that took place in the eighteenth century is only one aspect of
 6

the transformation that took place during that period in the conscience in general.
Instead of being looked upon, as it always had been traditionally, as an inner check upon
impulse and emotion, the conscience came to be regarded as itself an expansive emotion.
Once discredit the veto power in human nature, once identify the spirit that says no with
the devil, and the rest—for example, the tendency of genius and taste to run together in a
common expansiveness, a common eagerness for expression — follows rather quickly. "The
identity of genius and taste," says Dr. Spingarn, "is the final achievement of modem thought
on the subject of art; and it means that fundamentally the creative and critical instincts are
one and the same." In that case the credit of this discovery belongs to critics who antedate
by at least a century Signer Croce. For example, A, W. Schlegel protests in his Berlin lectures
(1803) against a "fault-finding criticism that looked upon what is truly positive in poetry—
genius—as the evil principle, and wished to subordinate it to the negative principle—so-
called good taste; an unreal and purely fanciful contrast. These two things (i. e., genius and
taste) are indivisibly one."

II

If the creator has merely to get his own genius, i. e., his own uniqueness, expressed,
it is hard to see why the critic should be more disinterested, why he should not be less
concerned with the faithfulness of the impression he receives from the work of the creator
than with the temperamental modifications he gives this impression, with his remoulding of
it into a fresh creation so that it may become expressive of his genius. These ultimate
implications of the expressionistic-impressionistic view have been worked out by no one
more consistently, perhaps, than by Oscar Wilde in his dialogue "The Critic as Artist."
"Criticism," Wilde concludes, "is the only civilized form of autobiography." Except that he
falls somewhat short of this last affirmation. Dr. Spingarn runs very closely parallel to Wilde,
to whom indeed he makes due acknowledgment. What underlies this whole movement from
the original genius of the eighteenth century down to Wilde and Dr.Spingarn is the craving
for an indeterminate vagabondage of imagination and emotion; and far more significant than
the emotional emancipation is the emancipation of the imagination from any allegiance to
standards, from any central control. The neo-classicists had forgotten in their devotion to
what they conceived to be truth and nature, by which they meant normal human nature,
the supreme role of the imagination, or, if one prefers, of illusion in both art and life. They
hoped, as we have seen, to achieve their grandeur of generality by a merely judicious
imitation. Yet Voltaire himself had declared that "illusion is the queen of the human heart."
The original genius opposed to the unimaginative neo-classic notion of normality an
imagination that is subject to no norm whatsoever, that is, in Young's phrase, free to wander
wild in its own empire of chimeras. Wilde has the supreme effrontery to put this cult of pure
illusion under the patronage of Aristotle. But this should at least serve to remind us that
Aristotle, unlike the neo-classicists, recognizes the all-important role of illusion. The poet,
he says, gives us a truth superior to that of the historian—superior because it is more
representative. But in order to give us this representative truth, he goes on to say, the poet
must be a master of illusion. In Goethe's phrase, the best art gives us "the illusion of a
higher reality"; and this has the advantage of being strictly experimental, of being only a
statement of what one actually experiences on reading a great poem or seeing a great picture.
 7

Imitation, in the theory of an Aristotle and the practice of a Sophocles or a Phidias, is not
merely judicious, but creative, and creative because it is imaginative. For the Greek, genius
consists not in getting one's uniqueness uttered, but in the imaginative perception of the
universal. Homer, says Aristotle, is the greatest of poets because he never entertains us
with his own person, but is the most constantly an imitator. Homer still remains the greatest
of poets for this very reason. He paints with his eye on the object, and that object is human
nature.
The opposite pole is reached when Lamartine tells us that he wrote solely for "the
relief of his heart." The fact that the poet who overflows in this way is widely acclaimed is no
sure proof that he has attained the universal. Many men may go queer at the same time and
in the same way. A whole generation saw itself reflected in "Rene." "Rene" is already more
remote from us than Homer; and that is because the quality of the imagination displayed is,
from the point of view of normal human experience, highly eccentric. It has been said, on
the other hand, that Shakespeare dwells at the very centre of human nature. This is only
another way of saying that Shakespeare is one of the most imaginative of men. His
imagination, however, is not irresponsible like that of the original genius, but is disciplined
to reality. At his best he is ethical in the Greek sense. To be ethical in the Greek sense is not
to preach or to agitate problems, but to see life with imaginative wholeness. It is only too
plain that the original genius, in his break with the neo-classic formalist, did not rise to
ethical standards—to do this he would have needed to work out a sound view of the
imagination and of imaginative imitation—but merely fell from legalism into anarchy. One
should add—and this again is a fact that every one can verify for himself—that the creator
of the first class gets his general truth without any sacrifice of his peculiar personal note;
he is at once unique and universal. But the original genius tends to identify—here is his
underlying error—the normal with the commonplace. What he sees at the centre is academic
routine, and he gets as far away from this centre as he can by inbreeding idiosyncrasy. And
then somebody finds that the eccentric position thus assumed is still too central and
proceeds to fly off from it; whereupon still another comes along and secedes from this
seceder from a secessionist, and so on indefinitely. The extremists in painting have got so
far beyond Cezanne, who was regarded not long ago as one of the wildest of innovators, that
Cezanne is in a fair way, we read, to "achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic."
One should indeed not forget that in the house of art are many mansions. The
imagination that is more or less free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras has its
place on the recreative side of life. The question of truth and reality is not in this sort of
creation primary. But it is right here that the primitivist is guilty of the gravest confusions.
Dr. Spingarn holds that the would-be creator should submit to no test of truth and reality,
but should simply "let himself go" emotionally and imaginatively;
should get rid of "inner or outer inhibitions," and the result, one is to believe, will not
be something more or less recreative; on the contrary, one will presently find Dr. Spingarn
crediting the creator of this type with a "vision of reality" and "spiritual exaltation." Dr.
Spingarn promises us that if we follow his prescription, we shall not only have genius—
which will turn out to be identical with taste —but that we shall also go mad. One may agree
with him that the man who puts no check on his imagination, and is at the same time
convinced of his “spiritual exaltation,"
 8

is in a fair way to go mad, but one may disagree with him in deeming this madness
a divine madness. In its mildest forms this whole theory of genius and taste encourages
conceit; in its more advanced forms megalomania. Once eliminate the high impersonal
standard, the ethical norm that sets bounds to the eagerness of the creator to express
himself, and the eagerness of the creator to thrill to this expression, and it is hard to see
what measure of a man's merit is left save his intoxication with himself; and this measure
would scarcely seem to be trustworthy. Virgil we are told, wished to burn the AEneid. The
undergraduate' on the other hand, often has a considerable conceit of his own genius m
writing his daily theme. "Every ass that's romantic," says Wolseley in his preface to
"Valentinian" (1685), "believes he's inspired."
After all, the doctrine of imitation merely means that one needs to look up to some
standard set above one's ordinary self. Any one who looked up to the standards established
by the two great traditions, the classical and the Christian, tended to acquire in some
measure the supreme Christian virtue, humility, and the supreme classical virtue, decorum,
or, if one prefers, a sense of proportion. To repudiate the traditional Christian and classical
checks and at the same time fail to work out some new and more vital control upon impulse
and temperament is to be guilty of high treason to civilization.
If, on the one hand, the "spiritual exaltation" of the primitivist makes against the two
virtues that sum up in a way all civilization, humility, and decorum, on the other hand it
encourages the two root diseases of human nature, conceit and laziness. Dr. Spingarn's
exhortation to get rid of both inner and outer inhibitions and let ourselves go amounts in
effect to this: follow the line of least resistance —and be a genius. It is easy to be an
unchained temperament, difficult to attain to a proportionate and disciplined view of life. By
preaching sheer imaginative and emotional unrestraint in the name of expression. Dr.
Spingarn is tending to discredit that very modern spirit for which he professes to stand. If
to be modern means anything, it means to be positive and experimental in one's attitude
towards life. Now if such a phrase as a "vision of reality" is to have any experimental
content—if it is to be anything more than a mask for egotism—the reality of which one has
a vision will serve to set bounds to the expansion of one's ordinary self; will be known
practically, in short, as an inner inhibition. It should be clear to any one who considers the
case of those who have viewed life with some degree of centrality and wholeness that they
have won their restraining ethical insight with the aid of the imagination. If a sound type of
individualism is to be achieved, and this is the specifically modem problem, it is scarcely
possible to stress too strongly the role of the ethical or generalizing imagination. Such vision
of reality as is vouchsafed to finite man must ever come to him through a veil of illusion.
This inseparableness of reality and illusion may embarrass the metaphysician, but not the
positivist who discriminates between the sham vision and the true, not on metaphysical
grounds, but by their fruits.
Now the fruits of the primitivistic theory of genius and originality have had time to
become manifest. If this theory was incubated in eighteenth-century England, it received its
chief developments in eighteenth-century Germany, where it was applied by Herder, Fichte,
and others, not merely to individuals, but to nations. When an individual becomes unduly
exalted over his own "genius," there are various ways in which he may be relieved of his
excess of conceit. But when a whole nation gets into a similar state of exaltation and is
consumed by the ardor for selfexpression, when instead of submission to genuine ethical
standards there is a collective inbreeding of temperament and idiosyncrasy, then the case
 9

is well-nigh hopeless. One may then properly raise the question that Bishop Butler is said
to have debated with himself, whether a whole nation may not go mad. National conceit runs
into national megalomania, and the intoxication of a whole people with itself finally comes
to be felt by it as an ecstatic "idealism." A nation of this kind may count upon having its
"creative" critics, who will hope to show their taste by simply sharing this intoxication and
their genius by giving it fresh expression.

III
This whole conception of genius and taste has about it the flavor of a decadent
aestheticism. The term creative critic, in particular, seems destined to remain a noteworthy
example of what Arnold calls the grand name without the grand thing; and this is a pity, for
there is an important sense in which the critic should be creative, especially in an age like
the present, which has cut loose from its traditional moorings. Before determining what this
sense is, let us consider for a moment the true relation between creator and critic, between
genius and taste. Not to speak of other and minor differences, the creator differs above all
from the critic, not merely in having genius in general, but a mysterious and
incommunicable gift. Dr. Johnson goes too far when he defines genius as "only a mind of
large general powers accidentally determined to some particular direction," The musical
genius of a Mozart, for example, cannot be accounted for in any such fashion, Dr. Johnson
was nevertheless right in condemning the whole primitivistic notion of genius and the lazy
drifting with temperament that it encouraged. As a seventeenth-century Frenchman put it,
it is not enough to have great gifts, one must also know how to manage them. Though a
man's genius may not be in his power, the control of this genius to some human end largely
is. To determine this end, he must look to standards, standards which, if he is not to be a
mere traditionalist, he must create with the aid of the ethical imagination. If he does not
seek to humanize
his gift, if he is content to be a mere unchained force of nature, he may have genius,
almost any amount of it, and yet remain, as Tennyson said of Hugo, only a "weird Titan."
The critic, for his part, cannot afford any more than the creator simply to let himself
go. If he is merely content to partake of the creative thrill of genius, he may have gusto, zest,
relish, what you will, but he will not have taste. He will begin to have taste only when he
refers the creative expression and his impression of it to some standard that is set above
both. And if this standard is to be purified of every taint of formalism, it must not be merely
traditional or rationalistic, but must rest on an immediate perception of what is normal and
human, a perception that the critic, like the creator, can win in its fulness only with the aid
of the ethical or generalizing imagination. The best type of critic may therefore be said to be
creative in the sense that he creates standards. It is in their common allegiance to standards
that critic and creator really come together. They ascend, and not, as in the primitivistic
theory, descend, to meet. With the elimination of the restrictive and selective principle—and
the presence of standards is always felt as such a principle—what is left is the most
dangerous of all forms of anarchy—anarchy of the imagination. This is what Goethe meant
when he said that "nothing is so horrible as imagination without taste."
To acquire a true literary conscience, to mediate between the restrictive and selective
principle and one's vivid personal impression, to have standards and then to apply them
flexibly and intuitively, is not easy. It is to be feared that Voltaire is nearer the truth when
 10

he discourses on the small number of the elect in matters of taste than Dr. Spingarn when
he utters his facile assurance, so agreeable to democratic ears, that "we are all geniuses; we
are all possessed of taste." Dr Spingarn's message would seem to
be the very opposite of what we need in America at the present time. For though we
no doubt have "ideals"—at least we seem very certain on this point—we lack standards; and
the pathway to standards would scarcely seem to lie through the glorification of impulse
and unrestraint. Because certain barriers imposed by neo-classic good taste were found to
be arbitrary and artificial, the primitivist assumes that all barriers are arbitrary and
artificial; and the consequences of this assumption, if worked out consistently, should give
us pause. Civilization, at bottom, rests on the recognition of the fact that man shows his
true liberty by resisting impulse, and not by yielding to it, that he grows in the perfection
proper to his own nature not by throwing off but by taking on limitations. As a matter of
fact, not much is left of the values of civilized life when Dr. Spingarn has finished
enumerating the things that must be thrown overboard if the creator is to express himself
adequately, and the "new" or "aesthetic" critic is to partake of the creator's thrill and
reexpress it. Dr. Spingarn says that the opening night of the International Exhibition (1913)
was one of the most "exciting adventures" that he had ever experienced. Many of the pictures
that have been appearing in this and similar exhibitions of late years, far from being so
excitingly novel, would suggest rather that our American partisans of pure expression are
coming in at a late stage of a movement that from its rise in the eighteenth century was
unable to distinguish between the original and the aboriginal. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser,
author of "The Genius," had set forth his views of originality in Germany
about 1775 (die Geniezeit), they would have been wrong, but they would at least have
had the semblance of novelty. As it is, it is hard for a person even moderately versed in
literary history to read these views without yawning. Nothing is more tiresome than stale
eccentricity. Is this country always to be the dumping ground of Europe? Americans who
wish to display real virility and initiative will scarcely be content to fall in at the end of the
procession, especially when the procession is moving, as in this case, towards the edge of a
precipice. They will see that we must begin by creating standards, if our other attempts at
creation are to have any meaning, and they will not underestimate the difficulty of the task.
Primitivism leads to affirmations that are repugnant to the most elementary common-
sense—for example, to Dr. Spingarn's affirmation that the "art of a child is art quite as much
as that of Michelangelo." But it is not enough to oppose to such aberrations mere common-
sense or reason or judgment. The strength of the primitivist is that he recognizes in his own
way the truth proclaimed by Napoleon—that imagination governs the world. But those who
believe in the need the genius of common-sense. Those who believe in the need of a
humanistic reaction at present should be careful not to renew the neo-classical error. Thus
Dryden attributes the immortality of the AEneid to its being "a well-weighed, judicious poem.
Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them
at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond: the more they
are polished the more lustre they receive." But what is preeminent in Virgil, what gives the
immortalizing touch to his work, is not the judgment he displays, but the quality of his
imagination. It is no doubt inevitable, in speaking and writing, to divide man up into
faculties and contrast judgment with imagination. But one should at the same time recollect
that this division of man into more or less water-tight compartments has about it nothing
positive and experimental. What is positive and experimental, let me repeat, is that in
 11

creation of the first order, creation that has high seriousness in the Aristotelian sense, the
imagination does not wander aimlessly, but is at work in the service of a super-sensuous
truth that it is not given to man to seize directly; and that the result is "the illusion of a
higher reality." Creation of this order, one may report from actual observation, is something
more than the intense expression of some expansive ego, whether individual or national; it
has a restrained and humanized intensity—intensity on a background of calm. Our whole
modern experiment, not only in art and literature, but in life, is threatened with breakdown,
because of our failure to work out new standards with the aid of this type of imagination.
And this breakdown of the modern experiment is due to its not having lived up to its own
programme. Those who have put aside the discipline of outer authority have professed to do
so because of their thirst for immediacy, of their wish to face unflinchingly the facts of nature
and of human nature. But the veto power in human nature is nothing abstract, nothing that
one needs to take on hearsay, but a matter of immediate perception. It is this fact, the
weightiest of all, that the corrupters of the conscience in general have failed to face in making
of the imagination the irresponsible accomplice of the unchained emotions.
1.1.4 REVISION POINT
1. Of all the critical approaches to literature, Moral approach is the oldest.
2. The importance of literature is not merely in its way of saying, but also in what it
says.
3. Moral Critics give more importance to ‘content’ than ‘form.’
4. New Humanists considered literature as criticism of life.
5. The watchwords of Humanism are: order, restraint, and discipline
6. the poet Melopoyn pronounces discourse upon the difference between genius and
taste
7. A new movement gained head in the 18th Century.
8. Reinterpretation of words such as genius and taste clearly established the
opposition between the new movement and the traditional concepts.
9. Voltaire defined genius as ‘judicious imitation’.
10. Spingarn and Edward Young emphasized the need for granting absolute freedom to
the creative genius
11. Irving Babbitt is against allowing the creator to roam wild in the realm of fancy.
12. Babbitt attacks the writer who flies off from the inner and outer inhibitions.
13. In the final section of the essay, Babbitt examines the duties of the critic

1.1.5 IN TEXT QUESTION

1. What is Moral approach?
2. What is the duty of the critic?
3. How does Spingarn view genius?
4. What is Babbitt’s remark on genius?
5. How did the premitivists view genius?
6. How does moral approach differ from the other approaches?
1.1.6 SUMMARY
Irving Babbitt is acclaimed as a great moral critic. In Roderick Random(1748) the poet
Melopoyn pronounces with great significance of voice and gesture a very elegant and
resourceful speech upon the different between genius and taste. Mr. Spingarn in his Creative
Criticism views on genius and taste as ultramodern which takes us back to the 18 th century.
A new movement began to gain head and there was opposition between this ultramodern
 12

and traditional conceptions appear clearly in its reinterpretation of words like genius and
taste. Voltaire defined genius as ‘Judicious imitation’ that is the imitation of the approved
modals according to certain rules and conventions. If Voltaire is astringent and restrictive
is his attitude towards literary genius means he is hardly less in his attitude towards taste.
Voltaire says that in the whole world a few men of genius are mostly found in Paris. Voltaire
views genius and taste as very vivid and vital things, but they both operate within the limits
imposed by the neo-classic doctrine of imitation, a doctrine which suffered from flaw of
formalism. Some sought to purge literature from this flaw began to oppose the neoclassical
harping judgment and imitation as a plea for imagination and originality. The genius who
emerged at this time had a strong leaning towards primitivism.
According to the Older School, art aims not at the expression of the individual, but
at the universal the “grandeur generality”. On the contrary, Edward Young says genius
resides in one’s ultimate idiosyncrasy which makes every man different from his fellows. If
one wishes to be a creator and not a mechanical imitator, one should simply be one’s
temperamental self and submit to no constraint upon one’s imagination. If one is not to be
contaminated by imitation it is an advantage. Young hints that many genius are those who
could neither write nor read.
Diderot says “Genius calls for something enormous, primitive and barbaric”.
According to the primitivist “If genius is something purely expressive, a spontaneous
temperamental overflow then taste according to Babbitt is at the opposite pole from the taste
of the neo-classicist. Mr. Spingarn says that critic should ask what the creator aimed to do
and whether the aim is intrinsically worthwhile. He should value the creation with reference
to some standard set both above his own temperament and that of the creator. On the
contrary, According to the primitivist, the genius has simply to let himself go both
imaginatively and emotionally and says that the whole business of the critic is to perceive
so keen an impression from the resulting expression, which passed through his
temperament issues forth as a fresh expression. Thus taking part in the creative thrill of
genius, the critic in turn becomes creative hence Genius and taste are one.
Taste has been defined as a man’s literary conscience. Mr. Spingarn says that the
identity of genius and taste is the final achievement of modern thought on the subject of art;
and it means that fundamentally the creative and critical instincts are one and the same.
A.W.Schlegal in his Berlin Lectures protests against a fault-finding criticism that looked
upon genius as the evil principle and wished to subordinate it to the negative principle. So
called good taste So Genius and Taste are indivisibly one.
If the creator has merely to get his own genius i.e. his own uniqueness expressed, it
is hard to see why the critic should be more disinterested and why should not be less
concerned with the faithfulness of the impression that he receives from the work. The
ultimate implications of the expressionistic impressionistic view have been worked out by
no one more consistently than Oscar wild in his dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ states that
“Criticism is the only civilized form of Autobiography”.
Mr. Spingarn is craving for an indeterminate vagabondage of imagination and
emotion. The neo-classicist hoped to gain their grandeur of generality by judicious imitation.
Yet Voltaire declared that “illusion is the queen of the human heart”. Aristotle says the poet
are superior to historians. They reveal the actual truth in their poems. So he strongly accepts
that the poet must be a master of illusion. Goethe points out that the best art gives “the
 13

illusion of a higher reality”. Imitation, in the theory of Aristotle and the practice of Sophocles
or Phidias, is not merely judicious, but creative, and creative because it is imaginative. For
the Greek, genius should have imaginative perception with a universal point of view. Homer
praises Aristotle as the greatest of poets because he never entertains reader but he is merely
an imitator.Shakespeare, is one of the most imaginative of men. His imagination is not
irresponsible like an original genius but is disciplined to reality. At his best he is ethical in
the Greek sense. Greek sense is not to preach or to agitate problems, but to see life with
imaginative wholeness. Mr. Spingarn holds that a creator should not submit to truth and
reality but should simply “let himself go” emotionally and imaginatively. He should get rid
of “inner and outer inhibitions”.
On the contrary Mr. Spingarn credit the creator of this type with a ‘vision of reality’
and ‘spiritual exaltation’. He says that if one puts no check on his imagination and at the
same time convinced of his spiritual exaltation is in a fair to go mad, but one may disagree
with him in considering the madness as a divine madness. In its mildest form this whole
theory of genius and taste encourage conceit in its more advanced forms Megalomania. Mr.
Spingarn’s exhortation to get rid of both inner and outer inhibitions and let oneself follow
the lines of least resistance and be a genius.
The doctrine of imitation means that one needs to look up to some standard set above
one’s ordinary self. Mr. Spingarn is tending to discredit the very modern spirit. He says that
if to be modern means it should be positive and experimental in one’s attitude towards life.
The whole conception of genius and taste is to have a flavor of a decadent aestheticism. Dr.
Johnson defines genius as ‘only mind of large general power accidentally determined to some
particular direction’. The critic cannot afford any more than the creator simply to let himself
go. He will begin to have taste only when he refers the creative expression and impression
of it to some standard. If this standard is to be purified, it must not be merely traditional
but must be ethical. Mr. Spingarn says that the opening night of the International Exhibition
(1913) was one of the most adventures that he had ever experienced. Many of the pictures
that have been appearing in this and similar exhibitions of late years.
Napoleon proclaims that imagination governs the world. Those who believe in the
need of a humanistic reaction at present should be careful to renew the neoclassical error
Aristotelian sense, the imagination does not wander aimlessly but is at work in the service
of a supersensuous truth that it is not given to man to seize directly; and that the result is
“the illusion of a high reality.”
Babbitt establishes the opinion that literature must help us recognize the reality of
evil and the necessity of controlling our impulses and argues that literature that does not
abide by standards leads to Self-indulgence and moral degeneration.
1.1.7 TERMINAL EXERCISES
1. Analyze Babbitt’s remarks on genius.
2. How does Babbitt distinguish genius and taste?
3. Examine the moralistic approach of Babbitt.
4. What are the basic tenets of moral approach?
5. What are all needed to acquire a true literary conscience?
6. Analyze Babbitt’s distinction of creator and critic.
1.1.8. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
 14

1.1.8.1 Irving Babbitt, the Critic

Irving Babbitt was a renowned American academic and literary critic, noted for his
founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant
influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 and
1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and a consistent opponent
of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can,
without serious distortion, be called a follower of Aristotle and Edmund Burke. He was an
advocate of classical humanism but also offered an ecumenical defense of religion. His
humanism implied a broad knowledge of various moral and religious traditions. His book
Democracy and Leadership (1924), is regarded as a classic text of political conservatism.
Babbitt is regarded as a major influence over American cultural and political conservatism.
He met with increasing criticism down the years: those provoked into announcing
their opposition included R. P. Blackmur, Oscar Cargill, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Laski,
Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joel Elias Spingarn, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson. In the
case of Mencken, at least, Babbitt gave as good as he got; he branded Mencken's writing as
"intellectual vaudeville."
He had an early influence on T. S. Eliot, a student of his at Harvard. Eliot in his 1926
essay The Humanism of Irving Babbitt, a review of Democracy and Leadership, had become
equivocal, finding Babbitt's humanism not sufficiently receptive to Christian dogma; his
position vis-à-vis religion is still debated.
It was in the early 1890s that he first allied himself with Paul Elmer More in
developing the core doctrines that were to constitute what he called the "New Humanism".
In 1895 he gave a lecture What is Humanism?, which announced his attack on Rousseau.
At the time, Babbitt had switched out of classical studies. He would later declare his
opposition to contemporary textual and philological scholarship, associated with German
scholarship, as a finite task, which he was unhappy to see placed above teaching based on
what he felt was the "eternal" moral and spiritual content of literary masterpieces. His ideas,
and More's, were characteristically written as short pieces or essays that were later gathered
into books. Babbitt's Literature and the American College, although assembled from writings
already circulated, caused a stir when published in 1908.
He continued to publish in the same vein, often denouncing authors from his avowed
specialty, French literature. He also criticized Francis Bacon and denounced literary
naturalism and utilitarianism.
His central emphasis was on the individual moral character and human reason. He
put stress on self-discipline and the need to control impulses seeking liberation from all
restraints. He opposed naturalism on the grounds that it emphasizes the dominance of
external natural forces over the strength of character and individual conscience. He
denounced romanticism; and especially its chief propagator, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He
warned that Rousseau was the chief negative influence over modern culture. He opposed
overt sentimentalism, celebration of human perfection and utopian thinking of romanticism.
His views were in the tradition of classical pre-romantic literature.
The identifiable figures of the New Humanist movement, besides Babbitt and More,
were mostly influenced by Babbitt on a personal level and included G. R. Elliott (1883-1963),
Norman Foerster (1887-1972), Frank Jewett Mather (1868-1953), Robert Shafer (1889-
 15

1956) and Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926). Of these, Sherman moved away early, and
Foerster, a star figure, later reconsidered and veered towards the New Criticism.
More peripherally, Yvor Winters and the Great Books movement are supposed to have
taken something from New Humanism. Scholars influenced by Babbitt include Milton
Hindus, Russell Kirk, Nathan Pusey, Peter Viereck, Richard M. Weaver, Claes G. Ryn, and
George Will. A relationship has been traced between Babbitt and Gordon Keith Chalmers,
Walter Lippmann, Louis Mercier, and Austin Warren; however, claims of influence where it
is not acknowledged are not easy to sustain, and Babbitt was known to advise against public
tributes.
From a position of high prominence in the 1920s, having the effective but
questionable support of The Bookman, New Humanism experienced a drop from fashionable
status after Babbitt died in 1933 and modernist and progressive currents became
increasingly dominant in American intellectual, cultural and political life. By the 1940s its
enemies pronounced it nearly extinct, but Babbitt continued to exercise a partly hidden
influence, and a marked revival of interest was seen in the 1980s and ensuing decades.
Babbitt is often name-checked in discussions on cultural conservatism. Babbitt's influence
in China, which was notable in the 1930s and 40s, is again on the rise with the publication
of many books by or about Babbitt.
1.1.8.2 Major Tenets of Moral Approach:
 Investigates the effects of literature has on readers as moral beings
 Based on what improves and enriches human lives
 Concerned with human character and behaviour
 Looks at texts as combinations of various moral qualities
 Questions how literature is influenced by plot, character, ideas, and style
 Views the work through a particular philosophy or discerns/interprets a work in the
philosophy in which it is based
 Looks at how the work influenced or was influenced by the ideas of the time
 Views the ideas in a work in relation to ideas found elsewhere
 Considers individual morality and social morality
 Takes into account various factors like individual relativism, situational relativism,
cultural relativism, and moral absolutism
 Emphasizes due respect for others in all grounds
 Evaluates the goodness of human beings which result in good life
 Elaborates that everything in nature has a purpose
 Points out that everyone comprising society has or should have a purpose of fulfil a
contributory role
 Validates that God, as the Creator of human beings, is the ultimate source of morality
1.1.8.3 Short Questions with Answers
1. What is moral approach?
 16

A moral approach focuses individuals, couples, families, and professionals on

a moralistic definition of relationship, life, and family processes that presumes a
moral ascendancy of one value system over others. Or, as the individual or partner
or family member's idealized model demands.
2. What is the debate over moral approach?
The debate over the purpose of literature stretches back to ancient days. Plato
wrote in Republic that literature's purpose is to instruct the audience in morality;
Aristotle, although Plato's student, resolutely disagreed and believed literature was
an experience for the audience (for example, feeling catharsis through a hero's tragic
downfall). These ancient approaches to literature are still debated today.
3. What is the duty of the critic?
It is the critic’s duty, to determine the moral tendency of literary works and to
judge them on that basis. The greatest critics are “discriminators between the false
and the true, the deformed and the normal; preachers of harmony and proportion
and order, prophets of the religion of taste.
4. What is the strong opinion of Babbitt in “Genius and Taste”/
Babbitt establishes the opinion that literature must help us recognize the
reality of evil and the necessity of controlling our impulses and argues that literature
that does not abide by standards leads to Self-indulgence and moral degeneration.
5. How do critics attach significance to moral approach?
Critics taking a moral or philosophical approach usually describe or evaluate
a work in terms of the ideas and values it contains. This often means examining a
work’s ideas and values – both those expressed directly by the narrator or character
and those implied by the overall design and content – in relation to a particular
ethical, philosophical, or religious system.
6. How does Spingarn view genius?
If genius, according to the primitivist, is something purely expressive, a
spontaneous temperamental overflow, taste, as he views it, is likewise at the opposite
pole from the taste of the neo-classicist. Voltaire failed to do justice to certain writers
-- Shakespeare, for example -- who were outside the strict neo-classical convention.
According to the new doctrine, the critic should cease to be thus exclusive and
become comprehensive and sympathetic. This is an important half-truth, though
perhaps no half-truth since' the beginning of the world has ever been so overworked.
For it is not enough, as Spingarn wants to believe, that the critic should ask what
the creator aimed to do and whether he has fulfilled his aim; he must also ask
whether the aim is intrinsically worthwhile.
1.1.9 ASSIGNMENT
Write in about 400 words on the following topics
1. The importance of Literary Approaches
2. Babbitt’s Distinction of Genius and Talent
3. Moral Approach to Literature.
1.1.10 SUGGESTED READINGS
 17

1. Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory

2. Literary Theory and Criticism by Patricia Waugh: Routledge
3. A History of Literary Criticsm by Habib
1.1.11 LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Questions for further learning activities
1. Analyze the imaginative wholeness that Babbitt highlights.
2. What qualities make a genius?
3. How genius and taste are sharply compared and contrasted?
4. How does moral approach differ from other approaches?
5. Analyze Babbitt’s distinction of genius and taste.
6. Examine Babbitt’s interpretation of genius and taste.
7. How does Babbitt establish his objectives on genius and taste?
8. How does Babbitt look at the Neo-classicists’ view of genius and taste?
9. Discuss the uniqueness of moral approach.
1.1.12 KEY WORDS
1. Plato: Greek Philosopher of the fourth century B.C.
2. Horace: A Latin Writer
3. Neo-Humanism: The moral critics of the twentieth century with the watch-words,
order, restraint and discipline
4. Christian Humanism: A new brand of humanism enunciated by T.S Eliot to
compensate the limitations and deficiencies of the secular humanism.
5. Vagabondage: Idle wandering
 18

UNIT - II
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH
STRUCTURE
2.1 Objectives
2.2 Introduction
2.3 Contents
2.4 Revision Point
2.5 Intext Question
2.6 Summary
2.7 Terminal Exercises
2.8 Supplementary materials
2.9 Assignments
2.10 Suggested Readings
2.11 Learning Activities
2.12 Key Words

2.1 OBJECTIVES
The main purpose of this unit is to familiarize the students with one of the most influential
approaches to literature namely the psychological approach.
2.2 INTRODUCTION
Kenneth Burke is considered a great American critic, philosopher, translator, poet, and
short story writer. Burke has been considered a very difficult critic to classify. Because of
his advocacy of a close reading of the text and his strong interest in the theories of I. A.
Richards, Burke has been associated with many of the New Critics. However, believing that
the "main idea of criticism … is to use all that there is to use," Burke draws upon his
knowledge of linguistics, psychology, theology, and sociology to produce a diverse body of
literary criticism. Burke's perceptive and complex reading of a text has brought him great
acclaim from his fellow literary theorists. Yet his audience has been limited to this select
group due to the eclectic and erudite nature of his approach. Burke's kind of poetic analysis
has the effect of making ambiguities per se (the into), the whole source of esthetic interest,
leaving out of account the indicative order (the out of) into which the poem finally decides
that they shall fall.
Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in
fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author.
This approach emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as part of the
romantic replacement of earlier mimetic and pragmatic views by an expressive view of the
nature of literature. . By 1827 Thomas Carlyle could say that the usual question "with the
best of our own critics at present" is one "mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by
discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry." During the
Romantic Period, we find widely practiced all three variants of the critical procedures (still
current today) that are based on the assumption that a work of literature is correlated with
its author's distinctive mental and emotional traits: (1) reference to the author's personality
in order to explain and interpret a literary work; (2) reference to literary works in order to
 19

establish, biographically, the personality of the author; and (3) the mode of reading a literary
work specifically in order to experience the distinctive subjectivity, or consciousness, of its
author (see critics of consciousness). It is even found that John Keble, in the series of Latin
lectures On the Healing Power of Poetry—published in 1844, but delivered more than ten
years earlier—proposed a thoroughgoing proto-Freudian literary theory. "Poetry," Keble
claimed, "is the indirect expression… of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or
feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed"; this repression is imposed by
the author's sentiments of "reticence" and "shame"; the conflict between the need for
expression and the compulsion to repress such self-revelation is resolved by the poet's ability
to give "healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve" by
a literary "art which under certain veils and disguises… reveals the fervent emotions of the
mind"; and this disguised mode of self-expression serves as "a safety valve, preserving men
from madness." In the present era many critics make at least passing references to the
psychology of an author in discussing works of literature, with the notable exception of those
whose critical premises invalidate such reference; mainly formalism, New Criticism,
structuralism, deconstruction.
Since the 1920s, a very widespread form of psychological literary criticism has come
to be psychoanalytic criticism, whose premises and procedures were established by
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he
called psychoanalysis as a means of analysis and therapy for neuroses, but soon expanded
it to account for many developments and practices in the history of civilization, including
warfare, mythology, and religion, as well as literature and the other arts. Freud's brief
comment on the workings of the artist's imagination at the end of the twenty-third lecture
of his Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), supplemented by relevant passages in the other
lectures in that book, set forth the theoretical framework of what is sometimes called
"classical" psychoanalytic criticism: Literature and the other arts, like dreams and neurotic
symptoms, consist of the imagined, or fantasied, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied
by reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety. The forbidden,
mainly sexual ("libidinal") wishes come into conflict with, and are repressed by, the "censor"
(the internalized representative within each individual of the standards of society) into the
unconscious realm of the artist's mind, but are permitted by the censor to achieve a
fantasized satisfaction in distorted forms.
“The Poetic Process” by Kenneth Burke suggests the climatic, style, Poet`s perspective
and intellectual concepts. This also suggests the consciousness and mood, judgment or any
writer through a psychological aspects, “feeling for such arrangements of subject matter as
produce crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure, reversal,
contraction, expansion, magnification, series and so on..” As a methodology it can provide
us with great insights if, but only if, we are already agreed that poetry is valuable and that
we already know which poems are good and which are bad. But as a war strategy this is
not enough, for one cannot deny the enemy's conclusions and at the same time accept his
premises. Accept the logician's premise that there is no semantic truth in poetry and you
must subscribe to ideal verbal anarchy and the thoroughly anti-authoritarian esthetic
which, as Burke himself warns us, "ends by accepting any authority."

2.3 CONTENT
Text of Kenneth Burke’s “The Poetic Process”
 20

IF WE WISH to indicate a gradual rise to a crisis, and speak of this as a climax, or a

crescendo, we are talking in intellectualistic terms of a mechanism which can often be highly
emotive. There is in reality no such general thing as a crescendo. What does exist is a
multiplicity of individual art-works each of which may be arranged as a whole, or in some
parts, in a manner which we distinguish as climactic. And there is also in the human brain
the potentiality for reacting favourably to such a climactic arrangement. Over and over
again in the history of art, different material has been arranged to embody the principle of
the crescendo; and this must be so because we “think” in a crescendo, because it parallels
certain psychic and physical processes which are at the roots of our experience. The
accelerated motion of a falling body, the cycle of a storm, the procedure of the sexual act,
the ripening of crops growth here is not merely a linear progression, but fruition. Indeed,
natural processes are, inevitably, “formally” correct, and by merely recording the symptoms
of some physical development we can obtain an artistic development. Thomas Mann's work
has such natural forms converted into art forms, as, in Death in Venice, his charting of a
sunrise and of the progressive stages in a cholera epidemic. And surely, we may say without
much fear of startling anyone, that the work of art utilises climactic arrangement because
the human brain has a pronounced potentiality for being arrested, or entertained, by such
an arrangement.
But the concept “crescendo” does not have the emotive value of a crescendo. To arouse
the human potentiality for being moved by the crescendo, I must produce some particular
experience embodying a crescendo, a story, say, about A and B, where A becomes more and
more involved in difficulties with B and finally shoots him. Here I have replaced the concept
by a work of art illustrating it, and now for the first time I have an opportunity of making
the crescendo play upon the human emotions.
In this way the work of art is seen to involve a principle of individuation. A shoots B in
a crescendo, X weathers a flood and rescues Y in a crescendo – the artist may particularize,
or individuate, the crescendo in any of the myriad aspects possible to human experience,
localizing or channelizing it according to the chance details of his own life and vision. And
similarly, throughout the permutations of history, art has always appealed, by the changing
individuations of changing subject matter, to certain- potentialities of appreciation which
would seem to be inherent in the very germ-plasm of man, and which, since they are
constant, we might call innate forms of the mind. These forms are the “potentiality for being
interested by certain processes or arrangements,” or the “feeling for such arrangements of
subject matter as produce crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure,
reversal, contraction, expansion, magnification, series, and so on.” Such “forms of the mind”
might be listed at greater length. But I shall stop at the ones given, as I believe they illustrate
to the extent of being a definition of my meaning. At bottom these “forms” may be looked
upon as minor divisions of the two major “forms,” unity and diversity. In any case, both
unity and diversity will be found intermingling in any example of such forms. Contrast, for
instance: is the use of elements which conflict in themselves but are both allied to a broader
unity (as laughter on one page, tears on the next, but each involving an incident which
furthers the growth of the plot). But the emotions cannot enjoy these forms or laws
(naturally, since, they are merely the conditions of emotional response) except in their
concreteness, in their quasi-vitiating material incorporation, in their specification or
individuation.
 21

This statement can be made clearer by comparing and contrasting it with the doctrines
of Plato. Plato taught that the world of our senses is the manifestation of divine law through
material. Thus, he supposed certain archetypes, or pure ideas, existing in heaven, while
the objects of sensuous experience were good, true, and beautiful in proportion as they
exemplified the pure form or idea behind them. Physical, or sensuous beauty, is valuable
in so far as it gives us glimpses of the divine beauty, the original form, of which it is an
imperfect replica.
Scholastic philosophy concerned itself principally with the problems raised by this
teaching. The divine forms were called universals, and the concept of a principle of
individuation was employed to describe the conditions under which we could experience
these divine forms. “Universale intelligitur, singulare sentitur,” their position was finally
stated: “We think in terms of universals, but we feel particulars.” Or, to illustrate, “We may
make an intellectual concept of goodness, but we can experience only some particular good
thing.”
Thus, the Platonic teaching was gradually reversed, and finally became branded as
representative of a typically erroneous attitude. To say that an object is good in that it
reflects the divine idea, or archetype, of goodness is, according to the nominalists, the
mistake of hypostatization, of mistaking a _linguistic convenience for a metaphysical reality.
What really happens, they say, is that we find certain objects appealing in one way or
another (tasty, beneficial, mild, obedient) and in the economy of speech use the word “good”
for all these aspects of appeal. And since another economy of speech is the conversion of
adjectives into nouns, we next turn “good” into “goodness” and suppose that there is some
actual thing, sitting somewhere, which corresponds to this word. This is to misunderstand
the nature of language, they assert: and this misunderstanding results from the naïve
supposition that, since each object has a word to designate it, so each word designates an
object. Thus, they see no need for going from the particular to the universal; and they might,
rather define goodness as a complex of conditions in the human mind, body, and
environment which make some objects, through a variety of ways, more appealing than
others.
So eager were the nominalists to disavow Plato in detail, that they failed to discover the
justice of his doctrines in essence. For we need but take his universals out of heaven and
situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical,
but psychological. Instead of divine forms, we now have “conditions of appeal.” There need
not be a “divine contrast” in heaven for me to appreciate a contrast; but there must be in my
mind the sense of contrast. The researches of anthropologists indicate that man has
“progressed” in cultural cycles which repeat themselves in essence (in form) despite the
limitless variety of specific details to embody such essences, or forms. Speech, material
traits (for instance, tools), art, mythology, religion, social systems, property, government,
and war—these are the nine “potentials” which man continually reindividuates into specific
cultural channels, and which anthropologists call the “universal pattern.” And when we
speak of psychological universals, we mean simply that just as there is inborn in the germ-
plasm of a dog the potentiality of barking, so there is inborn in the germ-plasm of man the
potentiality of speech, art, mythology, and so on. And while these potentialities are
continually changing their external aspects, their “individuations,” they do not change in
essence. Given the potentiality for speech, the child of any culture will speak the language
which it hears. There is no mental equipment for speaking Chinese which is different from
 22

the mental equipment for speaking English. But the potentiality externalizes itself in
accordance with the traditions into which the individual happens to be born. And by
education we do not mean the “awaking” of a moral, or religious, or social, or artistic sense,
but the leading of such potentialities into one specific channel. We cannot teach the moral
sense any more than we can teach abstract thought to a dog. But we can’t individuate the
moral sensea.by directing it into a specific code or tradition. The socialists today imply this
fact when they object to the standard bourgeois education, meaning that it channelizes the
potentialities of the child into a code which protects the bourgeois interests, whereas they
would have these same potentialities differently individuated to favour the proletarian
revolution.
This, I hope, should be sufficient to indicate that there is no hypostatization in speaking
of innate forms of the mind, and mentioning “laws” which the work of art makes accessible
to our emotions by individuation. And for our purposes we might translate the formula
“universale intelligitur, singulare sentitur” into some such expansion as this: “We can discuss
the basic forms of the human mind under such concepts as crescendo, contrast,
comparison, and so on. But to experience them emotionally, we must have them
singularized into an example, an example which will be chosen by the artist from among his
emotional and environmental experiences.”
Whereupon, returning to the Poetic Process, let us suppose that while a person is
sleeping some disorder of the digestion takes place, and he is physically depressed. Such
depression in the sleeper immediately calls forth a corresponding psychic depression, while
this psychic depression in turn translates itself into the invention of details which will more
or less adequately symbolize this depression. If the sleeper has had some set of experiences
strongly marked by the feeling of depression, his mind may summon details from this
experience to symbolize his depression. If he fears financial ruin, his depression may very
reasonably seize upon the cluster of facts associated with this fear in which to individuate
itself. On the other hand, if there is no strong set of associations in his mind clustered
about the mood of depression, he may invent details which, on waking, seem inadequate to
the mood. This fact accounts for the incommunicable wonder of a dream, as when at times
we look back on the dream and are mystified at the seemingly unwarranted emotional
responses which the details “aroused” in us. Trying to convey to others the emotional
overtones of this dream, we laboriously recite the details, and are compelled at every turn
to put in such confessions of defeat as “There was some-
thing strange about the room,” or “For some reason or other I was afraid of this boat,
although there doesn't seem to be any good reason now.” But the details were not the cause
of the emotion; the emotion, rather, dictated the selection of the details. Especially when
the emotion was one of marvel or mystery, the invented details seem inadequate the dream
becoming, from the standpoint of communication, a flat failure, since the emotion failed to
individuate itself into adequate symbols. And the sleeper himself, approaching his dream
from the side of consciousness after the mood is gone, feels how inadequate are the details
for conveying the emotion that caused them, and is aware that even for him the wonder of
the dream exists only in so far as he still remembers the quality pervading it. Similarly, a
dreamer may awaken himself with his own hilarious laughter, and be forthwith humbled as
he recalls the witty saying of his dream. For the delight in the witty saying came first (was
causally prior) and the witty saying itself was merely the externalization, or individuation,
of this delight. Of a similar nature are the reminiscences of old men, who recite the facts of
 23

their childhood, not to force upon us the trivialities and minutiae of these experiences, but
in .the forlorn hope of conveying to us the “overtones” of their childhood, overtones which,
unfortunately, are beyond reach of the details which they see in such an incommunicable
light, looking back as they do upon a past which is at once themselves and another.
The analogy between these instances and the procedure of the poet is apparent. In this
way the poet's moods dictate the selection of details and thus individuate themselves into
one specific work of art.
However, it may have been noticed that in discussing the crescendo and the dream I
have been dealing with two different aspects of the art process. When art externalizes the
human sense of crescendo by inventing one specific crescendo, this is much different from
the dream externalizing depression by inventing a combination of details associated with
depression. If the artist were to externalize his mood of horror by imagining the facts of a
murder, he would still have to externalize his sense of crescendo by the arrangement of
these facts. In the former case he is individuating an “emotional form,” in the latter a
“technical form.” And if the emotion makes for the consistency of his details, by determining
their selection, technique makes for the vigour, or saliency, or power of the art-work by
determining its arrangement?
We now have the poet with his moods to be individuated into subject matter, and his
feeling for technical forms to be individuated by the arrangement of this subject matter. And
as our poet is about to express himself, we must now examine the nature of self-expression.
First, we must recognize the element of self-expression which is in all activity. In both
metaphysics and the sphere of human passions, the .attraction of two objects has been
called will, love, gravitation. Does water express itself when it seeks its level? Does the
formation of a snow crystal satisfy some spiritual hunger awakened by the encroachment of
chill upon dormant clouds? Foregoing these remoter implications, avoiding what need not
here be solved, we may be content with recognizing the element of self-expression in all
human activities. There is the expression of racial properties, types of self-expressions
common to all mankind as the development from puberty to adolescence, the defense of
oneself when in danger, the seeking of relaxation after labour. And there is the self-
expression of personal characteristics: the development from puberty to adolescence
manifesting itself in heightened religiosity, cruelty, sentimentality, or cynicism; the defense
of oneself being procured by weapons, speech, law, or business; the relaxation after
labour being sought in books rather than alcohol, alcohol rather than books,
woman rather than either -or perhaps by a long walk in the country. One man attains self-
expression by becoming a sailor, another by becoming a poet
Self-expression today is too often confused with pure utterance, the spontaneous cry
of distress, the almost reflex vociferation of triumph, the clucking of the pheasant as he is
startled into flight. Yet such utterance is obviously but one small aspect of self-expression.
And, if it is a form of self-expression to utter our emotions, it is just as truly a form of self-
expression to provoke emotions in others, if we happen to prefer such a practice, even
though the emotions aimed at were not the predominant emotions of our own lives. The
maniac attains self-expression when he tells us that he is Napoleon; but Napoleon attained
self-expression by commanding an army. And, transferring the analogy, the self-expression
of the artist, qua artist, is not distinguished by the uttering of emotion, but by the evocation
 24

of emotion. If, as humans, we cry out that we are Napoleon, as artists we seek to command
an army.
Mark-Twain, before setting pen to paper, again and again transformed the bitterness
that he wanted to utter into the humour that he could evoke. This would indicate that his
desire to evoke was a powerful one; and an event which is taken by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks
as an evidence of frustration can just as easily be looked upon as the struggle between two
kinds of self-expression. We might say that Mark Twain, as artist, placed so much greater
emphasis upon evocation than utterance that he would even change the burden of his
message, evoking what he best could, rather than utter more and evoke less. Certain
channels of expression will block others. To become an athlete, for instance, I must curb
my appetite for food and drink; or I may glut and carouse, and regret to the end of my days
the flabbiness of my muscles. Perhaps those critics, then, who would see us emancipated,
who would show us a possible world of expression without frustration, mean simply that we
are now free to go and storm a kingdom, to go and become Napoleons? In this they provide
us with a philosophy of action rather than a method, and in the last analysis I fear that their
theories are the self-expression of utterance, not a rigid system for compelling conviction,
but a kind of standard for those of their own mind to rally about.
Thus, we will suppose that the artist, whom we have left for some time at the agonizing
point of expressing himself, discovers himself not only with a message, but also with a desire
to produce effects upon his audience. He will, if fortunate, attempt to evoke the feelings
with which he himself is big; or else these feelings will undergo transformations.(as in the
case of Twain) before reaching their- fruition in the art-work. Indeed, it is inevitable that all
initial feelings undergo some transformation when being converted into the mechanism of
art, and Mark Twain differs from less unhappy artists not in kind, but in degree. Art is a
translation, and every translation is a compromise (although, be it noted, a compromise
which may have new virtues of its own, virtues not part of the original). The mechanism
invented to reproduce the original mood of the artist in turn develops independent
requirements. A certain theme of itself calls up a counter theme; a certain significant
moment must be prepared for. The artist will add some new detail of execution because
other details of his mechanism have created the need for it; hence while the originating
emotion is still in ferment, the artist is concerned with impersonal mechanical processes.
This leads to another set of considerations: the artist’s means are always tending to
become ends in themselves. The artist begins with his emotion, he translates this emotion
into a mechanism for arousing emotion in others, and thus his interest in his own emotion
transcends into his interest in the treatment. If we called beauty the artist's means of
evoking emotion, we could say that the relationship between beauty and art is like that
between logic and philosophy. For, if logic is the implement of philosophy, it is just as truly
the end of philosophy. The philosopher, as far as possible, erects his convictions into a
logically progressive and well-ordered system of thought, because he would rather have such
a system than one less well ordered. So true is this that, at certain stages in the world's
history when the content of philosophy has been thin, philosophers were even more
meticulous than usual in their devotion to logical pastimes and their manipulation of logical
processes. Which is to say that the philosopher does not merely use logic to convince others;
he uses logic because he loves logic, so that logic is to him as much an end as a means.
Others will aim at conviction by oratory, because they prefer rhetoric as a channel of
expression. In the Inquisition, conviction was aimed at through the channel of physical
 25

torture and presumably because the Inquisitors categorically enjoyed torture. This
consideration shows the poet as tending towards two extremes, or unilateral: the extreme
of utterance, which makes for the ideal of spontaneity and `pure' emotion, and leads to
barbarism in art; and the extreme of pure beauty, or means conceived exclusively as end,
which leads to virtuosity, or decoration. And, -in that fluctuating region between pure
emotion and pure decoration, humanity and craftsmanship, utterance and performance,
lies the field of art, the evocation of emotion by mechanism, a norm which, like all norms,
is a conflict become fusion.
The poet steps forth, and his first step is the translation of his original mood into a
symbol. So quickly has the mood become something else, no longer occupying the whole of
the artist's attention, but serving rather as a mere indicator of direction, a principle of
ferment. We may imagine the poet to suffer under a feeling of inferiority, to suffer sullenly
and mutely until, being an artist, he spontaneously generates a symbol to externalize this
suffering. He will write, say, of the King and the Peasant. This means simply that he has
attained articulacy by linking his emotion to a technical form, and it is precisely this junction
of emotion and technical form which we designate as the “germ of a plot,” or “an idea for a
poem.” For, such themes are merely the conversion of one's mood into a relationship, and
the consistent observance of a relationship is the conscious or unconscious observance of a
technical form. To illustrate:
In “The King and the Peasant” the technical form is one of contrast: the Humble and
the Exalted. We might be shown the King and-the Peasant, each in his sphere, each as a
human being; but the “big scene” comes When the King is convoyed through the streets,
and the Peasant bows speechless to the passing of the royal cortege. The Peasant, that is,
despite all the intensity and subtlety of his personal experiences, becomes at this moment
Peasant in the abstract- and the vestiture of sheer kingliness moves by… This basic
relationship may be carried by variation into a new episode. The poet may arrange some
incidents, the outcome of which is that the King and the Peasant find .themselves in a
common calamity, fleeing from some vast impersonal danger, a plague or an earthquake,
which, like lightning, strikes regardless of prestige. Here King and Peasant are levelled as
in death: both are Humble before the Exalted of unseen forces… The basic relationship may
now be inverted. The King and the Peasant, say, are beset by brigands. There is a test of
personal ingenuity or courage, it is the Peasant who saves the day, and lo! the Peasant is
proved to be a true King and the King a Peasant.
Our suppositional poet is now producing furiously, which prompts us to realize that
his discovery of the symbol is no guarantee of good writing. If we may believe Jules Gaultier,
Flaubert possessed genius in that he so ardently desired to be a genius; and we might
say that this ratio was reindividuated into the symbol of Madame Bovary, a person trying to
live beyond her station. This symbol in turn had to be carried down into myriad details.
But the symbol itself made for neither good writing nor bad. George Sand's symbols, which
seemed equally adequate to encompass certain emotional and ideological complexities of her
day, did not produce writing of such beauty. While as for Byron, we approach him less
through the beauty of his workmanship than through our interest in, sympathy with, or
aversion to, Byronism-Byronism being the quality behind such symbols as Manfred, Cain,
and Childe Harold: the “man against the sky.”
This brings up the matter of relationship between the symbol and the beautiful.
 26

This symbol, I should say, attracts us by its power of formula, exactly as a theory of
history or science. If we are enmeshed in some nodus of events and the nodus of emotions
surrounding those events, and someone meets us 'with a diagnosis (simplification) of our
partially conscious, partially unconscious situation, we are charmed by the sudden
illumination which this formula throws upon our own lives. Mute Byrons (potential Byrons)
were waiting in more or less avowed discomfiture for the formulation of Byronism, and when
it came they were enchanted. Again and again through .Byron's pages they came upon the
minutiae of their Byronism (the ramifications of the symbol) and continued enchanted.
And thus, the symbol being so effective, they called the work of Byron beautiful, By which
they meant that it was successful in winning their emotions.
But suppose that I am not Byronic, or rather that the Byronic element in me is
subordinated to other much stronger leanings. In proportion as this is so, I shall approach
Byron, not through his Byronism, but through his workmanship (not by the ramifications
of the symbol, but by the manner in which these ramifications are presented). Byronism
will not lead me to accept the workmanship; I may be led, rather, by the workmanship to
accept Byronism. Calling only those parts of Byron beautiful which lead me to accept
Byronism, I shall find less of such beauty than will all readers who are potential Byrons.
Here technical elements mark the angle of my approach, and if will be the technical, rather
than the symbolic, elements of the poet's mechanism that I shall find effective in evoking my
emotions, and thus it will be in these that I shall find beauty. For beauty is the term we,
apply to the poet's success in evoking our emotions.
Falstaff may, I think, be cited as an almost perfect symbol from the standpoint of
approach through workmanship, for nearly all readers are led to Falstaff solely through the
brilliancy of his presentation. The prince's first speech, immediately before Falstaff himself
has entered, strikes a theme and a pace which startles us into attention. Thereafter, again
and again the enormous obligations which the poet has set himself are met with, until the
character of this boisterous “bedpresser” becomes for us one of the keenest experiences in
all literature. If one needs in himself the itch of Byronism to meet Byron halfway, for the
enjoyment of Falstaff he needs purely the sense of literary values.
Given the hour, Flaubert must share the honours with George Sand. But when the
emphasis of society has changed, new symbols are demanded to formulate new complexities,
and the symbols of the past become less appealing of themselves. At such a time Flaubert,
through his greater reliance upon style, becomes more “beautiful” than Sand. Although I
say this realizing that historical judgments are not settled once and for all, and some future
turn of events may result in Sand's symbols again being very close to our immediate
concerns, while Flaubert might by the same accident become remote: and at such a time
Flaubert's reputation would suffer. In the case of his more romantic works, this has already
happened. In these works we feel the failures of workmanship, especially his neglect of an
organic advancement or progression, a neglect which permits only, our eye to move on from
page to page while our emotions remain static, the lack of inner coordination making it
impossible for us to accumulate momentum in a kind of work which strongly demands such
momentum, such “anticipation and remembering.” This becomes for us an insurmountable
obstacle; since the symbols have ceased to be the “scandals” they were for his
contemporaries, so that we demand technique where they inclined more to content
themselves with “message.” And thus only too often we find the Temptations of Saint Anthony
not beautiful, but decorative, less an experience than a performance.
 27

Yet we must not consider the -symbol, in opposition to style, as outside of technical
form. The technical appeal of the symbol lies in the fact that it is a principle of logical1
guidance, and makes for the repetition of itself in changing details which preserve as a
constant .the original ratio. A study of evolution, for instance, may be said to repeat again
and again, under new aspects, the original proposition of evolution. And in the same way
the symbol of art demands a continual restatement of itself in all the ramifications possible
to the artist's imagination.
In closing: We have the original emotion, which is channelized into a symbol. This
symbol becomes a generative force, a relationship to be repeated in varying details, and thus
makes for one aspect of technical form. From a few speeches of Falstaff, for instance, we
advance unconsciously to a synthesis of Falstaff; and thereafter, each time he appears on
the stage, we know what to expect of him in essence, or quality, and we enjoy the poet's
translation of this essence, or quality, into particulars, or quantity. The originating emotion
makes for emotional consistency within the parts; the symbol demands a logical consistency
within this emotional consistency. In a horror story about a murder, for instance, the
emotion of horror will suggest details associated with horror, but the specific symbol of
murder will limit the details of horror to those adapted to murder.
The symbol faces two ways, for in addition to the technical form just mentioned (an
“artistic” value) it also applies to life, serving here as a formula for our experiences, charming
us by finding some more or less simple principle under lying our emotional complexities.
For the symbol here affects us like a work of science, like the magic formula of the savage,
like the medicine for an ill. But the symbol is also like a “message,” in that once we know it
we feel no call to return to it, except in our memories, unless some new element of appeal is
to be found there. If we read again and again some textbook on evolution, and enjoy quoting
aloud pages of it, this is because, beyond the message, there is style. For in addition to the
symbol, and the ramifications of the symbol, poetry also involves the method of presenting
these ramifications. We have already shown how a person who does not avidly need the
symbol can be led to it through the excellence of its presentation. And we should further
realize that the person who does avidly need the symbol loses this need the more thoroughly
the symbol is put before him. I may be startled at finding myself Faust or Hamlet, and even
be profoundly influenced by this formulation, since something has been told me that I did
not know before. But I cannot repeat this new and sudden “illumination.” Just as every
religious experience becomes ritualized (artistic values taking the place of revelation) so
when I return to the symbol, no matter how all-sufficient it was at the first, the test of
repetition brings up a new factor, which is style.
“What we find words for,” says Nietzsche, “is that for which we no longer have use in
our own hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” Contempt,
indeed, so far as the original emotion was concerned, but not contempt for the act of
speaking.
2.4 REVISION POINTS
1. Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in
fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual
author.
2. Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called psychoanalysis
as a means of analysis.
 28

3. Freud was not the first to talk about the workings of the psyche. However, his
views on psychoanalysis has enormous influence on many fields including
literature
4. Kenneth Burke is considered a great American critic, philosopher, translator, poet,
and short story writer.
5. Burke has been associated with many of the New Critics.
6. Burke used the psychological tools to explore and define the poetic process.
7. He begins ‘The Poetic Process’ with an analysis of climax or crescendo.
8. Burke gives a psychological twist to the Platonic doctrine of ideas. According to
Burke, we think of ideas as existing in the human mind.
9. Finally, Burke discusses the question of the artist’s self-expression.
10. Artists are keener on provoking emotions in the audience than in uttering his own
emotions.
2.5 IN TEXT QUESTIONS
1 Who is Sigmund Freud?
2 Who are the New Critics?
3 What is the concept of “crescendo”?
4 Explain the concept of scholastic philosophy.
5 How does Burke view emotions?
6 What is the difference between evocation and utterance?
2.6 SUMMARY
Summary of “The Poetic Process”
Psychology is a sense or a form of studies to understand clearly what does a human do
in generating his/her actions. Mostly, psychological studies does not only focus on such
human activities and human perspective and conceptualization. Psychology pertains to a
method of how an idea was formed. Emotions and Feelings expressed are mostly the basis
of this studies. More books form the late centuries include the idea of psychology to be as a
prominent form of getting the numbers of how to individualize human beings towards their
ideals and human characteristics and pleasant or unpleasant human behavior. The Poetic
Process shows how more knowledge of this approach through a series of a "Process" can be
subdued or expanded. It is always said that artists or humans begin with his/her
emotions. Pertains to the ideology of a writer, how he/she managed to bring up
such a brilliant work. The Poetic Process by Kenneth Burke suggests the climatic, style.
Poet`s perspective and intellectual concepts. This also suggest the consciousness and mood,
judgement or any writer through a psychological aspects. “feeling for such arrangements of
subject matter as produce crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure,
reversal, contraction, expansion, magnification, series and so on..” There are two main
words which are of great focus in the poetic process: “crescendo’ and “individuation.” A
gradual increase in the highest part and the process of our mind to record formally arrange
our experiences through progression which may be psychic or physical is the crux of
crescendo. Individuation is the process by which individuals in society become
differentiated from one another. The process of being differentiated, for such arrangements
and such activity in mind formed through his/her own concepts, different in aspects and
conceptualizations but still the same essence, and the ability to “rationalize” attempt to
explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons,
even if these are not true or appropriate. Sometimes moods turn to be the subject matter
in the principle of individuation. Emotional factor is the basis of technical form or the
 29

consistency of the writer`s perceptions formed. The spontaneous overflow of feelings and
emotions of the writer must be consistent and the details are arranged specifically to
withdraw the emphatic justice he/she wants to pertain. Exploitation of style spontaneously
generated and the fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself.
Self-expression of the writer’s idea must provoke the mental and emotional awareness of the
reader. Evocation rather than utterance. Evocation needs to be a kind of summoning the
mind and soul and utterance through vocal presentation. Art is a translation and every
translation is a compromise either positive or negative. Exaggerations to mentally subdue
the concept, although part of the artistic style, different from real experience. Emotional
and ideological complexities must be critical and yet important to understand. Symbolism
is a principle for logical guidance. Original emotion is channelized into a symbol. The
symbol then becomes a generative force, a relationship to be repeated in varying
details. Symbolism requires an emotional consistency and logical consistency. It
externalizes the artist’s sense of mood towards rationalization by substituting a “good
reason” for an action. It further dictates the analogy between instances and procedure that
may occur on his spontaneity.
To life, serving here as a formula for our experiences, charming us by finding some
more or less simple principle underlining us by finding some more or less simple principle
underlying our emotional complexities. For the symbol here affects us like a work science,
like the magic formula of the savage, like the medicine for an ill. But the symbol is also like
a "message," unless some new element of appeal is to be found there. If we read again and
again some textbook about evolution, and enjoy quoting aloud pages of it, this is because,
beyond the message, there is style. For in addition to the symbol, and ramifications. We
already have shown how a person who does not avidly need the symbol, and the
ramifications of the symbol, poetry also involves the "method of presenting" these
ramifications. We have already shown how a person who does not avidly need the symbol
can be led to it through excellence of its presentation. And we should further realize that
person who does avidly need symbol loses this need the more thoroughly the symbol is put
before him. "What we find words for," says Nietzsche, "is that for which we no longer have
use in our own hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." Contempt,
indeed, so far as the original emotion was concerned, but not contempt for the act of
speaking.
2.7 TERMINAL EXERCISES
1. Examine Burke’s evaluation of the poetic process.
2. What are Burke’s remarks on crescendo and individuation?
3. Discuss Burke’s analysis of symbols in the poetic process.
4. How are the elements of self-expression recognized in all human activities?
5. How does the poet set forth in the translation of his original mood into a symbol?
2.8 SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
The Psychological Approach: Literature and Psychological Theory
By the early years of our second decade, most writers were acquainted with the ideas
of Freud. A. A. Brill had translated into English Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex
in 1910, and in 1912, The Interpretation of Dreams. Also as early as 1910, Dr. Ernest
Jones had published his first attempt to interpret Hamlet from a Freudian point of view.
These works were of special interest to writers, seeming to offer a key-perhaps the key-to
 30

the processes of art, the unconscious intentions of artists, and the motives of fictitious
characters.
The attraction of Freudian theory to creative writers is easily explained. Literary
Naturalism (especially French) had presented an image of man as a victim of environment
and/or biology. Freudian ideas substantiated these insights, offering a "scientific"
terminology by which to interpret man's bondage to his libidinous compulsions, or to the
repressions society forced upon him. The Freudian judgment-that man is sick rather than
villainous-fit neatly with the Naturalist's refusal to condemn a being who was not
responsible, but was the dupe of natural and preterhuman forces. Psychology like-wise
seemed to give sanction to the Romantic impulse toward self-expression and the exploitation
of the perverse. Much of the "madness" of the French Symbolists and the experimentalists
who followed them could now be regarded as the method of the unconscious.
So with the spreading of Freud's theories and a new terminology, writers of both
Romantic and Realistic persuasions were enabled and encouraged to probe deeper in their
dramatizations of the human situation. In time the impact of psychology upon creative
literature was strengthened by the additional influence of Adler's concept of the inferiority
complex, and of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. But the earliest force was
Freudian. Its presence in the work of Lawrence, Mann, Sherwood Anderson and others has
been studied by F. J. Hoffman in Freudianism and the Literary Mind, 1945, and one can
also note without difficulty the part psychology has played in the writings of May Sinclair,
Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Graham Greene, and Dylan Thomas.
It was inevitable that critics as well as creative writers should turn to the new field of
knowledge for illumination. The first result seems to have been the enlistment of the new
"science" in the war against the Past, particularly the Puritan culture in America, and the
Victorian in England. The values of both these traditions, devoted to kinds of "high
seriousness," were especially vulnerable to the new weapon. If the virtues of reticence,
chastity, gentility, respectability, and so on, could be exposed as unhealthy repressions of
the id rather than as revelations of divinity, then those who argued for the retention of such
traditional values could be effectively accused of ignorance or deliberate and regressive
blindness. Randolph Bourne’s “The Puritan’s Will to Power” is one of many examples of the
attempt to destroy, with the aid of psychology, those traditional values which the Neo
Humanists were concerned to salvage.
The flourishing use of psychology in literary criticism began with Conrad Aiken’s
Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, 1919. Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, as editors
of The Masses, despite their inclination to stress sociological values, certainly helped to
popularize the psychological approach. In England Robert Graves wrote from the new point
of view, although in his case the point of view was rather particular being the application of
W. H. Rivers’ theory of the conflict of unconscious personalities. And Hebert Read pleaded
for the use of the Romanticism, 1926.
Of course in the first unqualified enthusiasm, many critics used the tools injudiciously.
Some had only a superficial comprehension of psychology and applied it indiscriminately to
ferret out erotic motive and meaning behind the work of art. But this is the sort of error
that is an inevitable result of such a delicious and heady draft. As critics came to hold
themselves more soberly responsible for psychological theory, and as growing restraint
 31

checked the excess, the light cast by psychology upon literature began to appear more
substantial.
In general the application of psychological knowledge to art can generate three kinds
of illumination. First as I. A Richards has illustrated, the new field provides a more precise
language with which to discuss the creative process. In Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924,
Richards analyzed the constituents of the aesthetic experience, following the definition he
and his collaborators, Ogden and Wood, had established earlier: Beauty is "that which is
conducive to synaesthetic equalibrium"-that is, a particular and harmonious kind of
response in the audience, brought about by the stimulus of a work of art. Although many
had quarreled with one part or another of his work, almost no critic since Richards
published his studies has been able to work without recognizing some of his insights. The
use to which his kind of analysis has been put can be seen in Kenneth Burke's essay,
"Antony in Behalf of the Play" in which this critic brilliantly examines the unconscious
relations between writer and reader.
A second application goes back, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, to literary
biography, to the study of the lives of authors as a means of understanding their art.
Psychology, of course, enables biographers to speculate upon the "interior" parts of a life.
The criticism that employs this approach assumes that an important part of the relationship
between artist and art is similar to that between patient and dream; assumes that, as D. H.
Lawrence put it, the writer has "shed his sickness" in his books. The critic then becomes
the analyst, taking the art as the symptom, by interpretation of which he can discover the
unconscious repressions and drives of the artist. These discoveries may lead in turn to an
understanding, even an interpretation, of the work of art itself. Essays in Wilson's The
Wound and the Bow exemplify how effectively this approach can be used to lead us to
understand not only the personal problems of writers, but also the underlying patterns of
their writings.
Third, psychology can be used to explain fictitious characters. F. L. Lucas in Literature
and Psychology, 1951, provides numerous instances from life which clarify the actions and
reactions of created characters who might otherwise be puzzling or implausible. The critic
who brings this interest to fiction becomes, again, a psychoanalyst, searching for the
subconscious patterns which motivate a character. The classic example is, of course, Ernest
Jones's study of Hamlet in which he expands the theory he had sketched in 1910. Dr.
Jones provides an answer to the puzzle of Hamlet's delay in avenging his father-an answer
that could perhaps not have been conceived, certainly not easily expressed, before the
development of Freudian psychology. The effect that such an approach to literature can
make upon the interpretation of art can be seen almost as remarkably in the numerous
psychological studies of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, beginning with Edna Kenton's
essay in 1924.
Attacks upon the psychological approach have been of two sorts. One charge is
oversimplification, such as occurred early when the tools were new and the spirit of the
users was uncritical. Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, 1920, and Lewisohn's
Expression in America, 1932, have both been attacked on these grounds, although both
books nonetheless offer interesting and valuable insights. Another criticism has been more
central: that art is significantly different from dream in that the artist is largely, or at least
to some extent, in control of his product, as the dreamer is not. The dream may be
compulsive confession; art is composed expression. Lionel Trilling and Kenneth Burke have
 32

intelligently explored this sort of distinction and related matters in essays which aim to
define the uses and limits of psychology for both writer and critic.
A final note. One branch of psychological criticism deals with the unconscious-not of
the individual writer or character, but of the race or culture. This approach seems to merit
separate attention, especially since it has relations with another field of knowledge, social
anthropology, and therefore is best considered under the heading, "The Archetypal
Approach."
2.9 ASSIGNMENTS
Write in about 400 words on the following topics:
1. Burke’s views on Plato’s doctrine of Ideas
2. Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis
3. Burke’s concept of self-expression

2.10 SUGGESTED READINGS

1. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action; Essays on Life, Literature, and Method.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

2. Burke, Kenneth. "Definition of Man." The Hudson Review 16 .4 (1964): 491 – 514.
3. Burke, Kenneth. The Rhetoric of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1961. Print.
4. Killian, Justin; Larson, Sean; Emanuelle Wessels. "Language as Symbolic Action".
University of Minnesota. Retrieved 2014-02-19.
5. Toye, Richard. Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
UP, 2013. pp. 71–73.
6. Warren, Austin. “Kenneth Burke: His Mind and Art.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 41,
no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933, pp. 344–64,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27534907.
2.11 LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Read the works of Freud and Burke.
2.12 KEY WORDS
1. Sigmund Freud: Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis.
2. Process: A series of or the gradual development of actions leading to an end.
3. Crescendo: A gradual rise to a crisis
4. Plato: Athenian Philosopher
Utterance: The action of saying or expressing something

UNIT - III
THE SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH
STRUCTURE
3.1 Objectives
 33

3.2 Introduction
3.3 Contents
3.4 Revision Point
3.5 In-text Question
3.6 Summary
3.7 Terminal Exercises
3.8 Supplementary materials
3.9 Assignments
3.10 Suggested Readings
3.11 Learning Activities
3.12 Key Words
3.1 OBJECTIVES
The relationship between the work and the society forms the basis of the sociological
approach to literature. To familiarize the students to the purpose and application of this
approach is the aim of this unit.
3.2 INTRODUCTION
Sociological criticism focuses on the relationship between literature and society, the
social function of literature. Literature is always produced in a social context. Writers may
affirm or criticize the values of the society in which they live, but they write for an audience
and that audience is society. Through the ages the writer has performed the functions of
priest, prophet and entertainer: all of these are important social roles. The social function
of literature is the domain of the sociological critic. Even works of literature that do not deal
overtly with social issues may have social issues as subtexts. The sociological critic is
interested not only in the stated themes of literature, but also in the latent themes. Like the
historical critic, the sociological critic attempts to understand the writer's environment as
an important element in the writer's work. Like the moral critic, the sociological critic usually
has certain values by which he or she judges literary work.
According to X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,
Poetry, and Drama, when using the sociological approach, a critic “examines literature in
the cultural, economic, and political context in which it is written or received.” What does
this mean? The critic might look at the society – or context – in which the text was written
or s/he might look at the society in which the text is read or seen or heard. The critic might
be asking, “What can the society that the author lived in tell me about his/her work?” or the
critic might instead be asking, “What does this text mean to our society?” What aspects of
society might the critic examine? The critic might look at the culture of the society, including
standards of behavior, etiquette, the relations between opposing groups (e.g., parents and
children, the rich and the poor, men and women, religious beliefs, taboos, and moral values.)
The critic might also look at the economy and politics of the society, including its system of
government, the rights of individuals, how wealth is distributed, and who holds the power.
Sociological criticism aims to discover what a text can tell us about the society in which it
was written, and further explores:
 The power of the individual in the society and the reasons for such powers
 34

 The official and the unofficial rules of the society and the impact when these rules
are broken
 The conventions of the behavior/norms imposed on men and women and their
specific roles
 The values attached with love, money, power, order, honesty, etc.
 How does money affect individual’s lives in this society?
 How do opposing groups (e.g., parents and children, the rich and the poor, men and
women) relate in this society?
 What type of government does this society have? How is the ruler chosen? What
rights do individuals have?
 wealth distribution in this society
To discover what a text can tell us about our society, ask:
 What aspects of this society would most readers find unacceptable? What ideas have
changed?
 What aspects of this society would be admirable to most readers? What has changed?
 Why does our society value this text? What “speaks to us?”
 How do we view the characters, plot, and themes differently than an audience in
another time and place?
To discover whether the author is affirming or criticizing his/her own society, ask:
 Does the author seem to think the way his society works is acceptable or
problematic?
 What values, virtues, character traits, and actions does the author either not
question or seem to hold up for admiration?
 What values, virtues, character traits, and actions does the author seem to hold up
for criticism?
3.3 CONTENT
Text of George Orwell’s “Rudyard Kipling”
It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with
which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because
before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been
created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position
of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened
person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened
persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily
explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a
‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no
use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by
any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British
soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting
merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the
slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct – on
 35

the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which
a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out
why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear
so badly.
And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any
understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was
further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be
nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro
without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from
‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-
left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a
mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its
context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’
refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are
‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The
whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power
politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as
politics, not as poetry):
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law – Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word – Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second
stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they
labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’
It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time,
believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to
overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying
that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold.
Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a
thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook
is pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris.
He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their
psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and
brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the
 36

modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the
period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign
of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of
British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel,
The Light That Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian
of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All
his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or
near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political
disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not
gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser
world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had
gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to
paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because
he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is
notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial
administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees
it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’,
and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He
could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence
would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan
jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed
over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the
nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their
advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook,
allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who
despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’
calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing
which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility.
The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All
left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they
make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.
They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard
of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and
those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our
standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.
A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the
central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-
eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms
that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic
aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the
map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he
sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects
whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men,
inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
 37

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and
engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had
travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind
in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly
neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century
Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did
things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is
instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the
surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have
maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had
been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary
picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it
because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and
regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from
several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries
did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India,
and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in
India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was
wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable
to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different
background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs.
But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes?
It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if
then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that
he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that
‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’
was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the
people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only
unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class,
the people who read Blackwood’s. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps,
having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set
Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given
almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with
attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not
possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer
things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is
attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the
muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and
Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War
have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must
have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in
1918, or is saying now, for that matter.
Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he
could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with
them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems, especially
Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an
underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer,
 38

and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be
a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with
all the aitches and final ‘g’s’ carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as
the humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one
can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply
going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech. This is
especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do
(one is about a funeral and the other about a wedding):
So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me!
And it’s finish up your swipes and follow me!
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow me – follow me home!
and again:
Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding – Give them one cheer more!
Grey gun-horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore!
Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to
have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and
that ought to have overridden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In the
ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to
Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice
one of his best lines is spoiled – for ‘follow me ‘ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow me home’.
But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney
dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the printed page,
and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they quote him.
Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading Barrack-Room
Ballads and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any
soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost
unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only
that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer
of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles
could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my England?’ is essentially a
middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with ‘What has
England done for me?’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to ‘the intense
selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of
‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it
remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he
shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier
is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he
safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the
private’s life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war,
and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of
football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in
battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone
 39

is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening
except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops,
frequently run away:
I ‘eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,
Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t stop to see,
Till I ‘eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ‘e ran,
An’ I thought I knew the voice an’ – it was me!
Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war
books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:
An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust,
An’ no one wants to face ’em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go,
They moves ’em off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.
Compare this with:
Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at
all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for
cruelty. But at least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are
dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous pension.
How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary
army of the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about
nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary
picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise
only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his
picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class
English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay
on Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to publish [1], I was
struck by the number of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely
intelligible to an American. But from the body of Kipling’s early work there does seem to
emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army – the
sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the
pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls,
the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the
bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken
camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar
picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s
gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a
long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they will be able to learn
something of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of.
 40

It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for
example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling’s opportunities. That
is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century
England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy’s minor stories of army
life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but
because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the
appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for
almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British
Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost
incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in
most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a
very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling’s gaudy tableau, in which
Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound
of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half
civilized.
Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.
The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin
do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi
broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a
word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on
him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes
in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name.
It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:
East is East, and West is West.
The white man’s burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.
There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many
years. The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very
recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’
for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But
what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases
which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m
to be Queen o’ the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing
could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many
times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about
paying the Dane-geld?[2] The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his
gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (‘palm and pine’ – ‘east of
Suez’ – ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest.
It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find
themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man’s burden’ instantly conjures
up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to ‘black man’s burden’. One
may disagree to the middle of one’s bones with the political attitude implied in ‘The
 41

Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which
are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or
verse-writer.
Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it
is ‘great verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a
‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or
poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it
was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever
an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on
the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought
to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly
vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-
hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, and
yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry
means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’,
Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people
secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of
being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is
merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get
any pleasure out of such lines as:
For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’
and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles
hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by
juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet.
He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of
work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes
on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.
There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent
to 1790. Examples of good bad poems – I am deliberately choosing diverse ones – are ‘The
Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret
Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of
Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet – not these particular
poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who
can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad
poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known
to be worth reprinting.
It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine
popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts.
Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes
be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can
see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes
and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the
words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the
very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most
 42

people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you
could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience
within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested
reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across
to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand.
Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one
of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not
be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them
and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had
quoted anything much better than this.
In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is
popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading
public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions,
poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless,
Mr. Eliot thinks it worthwhile to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share but
are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can
exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The
intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality,
and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad
poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being
can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however
sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to
find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to
know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such
poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually
gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling will do:
White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry ‘Turn again!’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is
a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels
the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting
for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.
One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested – his sense
of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it
happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party,
Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call
themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He
identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this
seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a
 43

certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such
circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take
responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition,
as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who
starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for
Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it,
always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally.
This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined,
and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage
from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great
thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He
dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said
sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’
utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes
at the end of Man and Superman.
3.4 REVISION POINTS
1. Sociological criticism focuses on the relationship between literature and society, the
social function of literature.
2. The social function of literature is the domain of the sociological critic.
3. a critic “examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context in
which it is written or received.”
4. In the essay, ‘Rudyard Kipling”, George Orwell analyses Kipling’s writings from the
sociological point of view.
5. Kipling is charged with being a Fascist.
6. Orwell admits that there is definitely a strain of jingo imperialism and sadism in
Kipling but denies that he was a Fascist.
7. Orwell makes certain pertinent observations on Kipling’s poetry.
8. T.S. Eliot observed that Kipling expressed unpopular views in a popular style.
9. Orwell concludes that Kipling is ‘a good bad poet’.
3.5 IN -TEXT QUESTIONS
1. What does sociological criticism aim at?
2. What are the features of sociological criticism?
3. How do the sociological critics look at the text?
4. How does Orwell refute the charge that “Kipling was not a Fascist”?
5. What are Orwell’s remarks on Kipling’s jingoism?
6. How does Orwell view Kipling’s romantic ideas about England?
7. Why does Orwell describe Kipling as a good bad poet?
8. What does Kipling mean by ‘East is East and West is West?
3.6 SUMMARY
Summary of George Orwell’s “Rudyard Kipling”
 44

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular English writer of this century who was not at the
same time a thoroughly bad writer. His popularity was, of course, essentially middle-class.
In the average middle-class family before the War, especially in Anglo-Indian families, he
had a prestige that is not even approached by any writer of to-day. He was a sort of
household god with whom one grew up and whom one took for granted whether one liked
him or whether one did not. For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him
at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather
admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget
him. Certain of his stories, for instance The Strange Ride, Drums of the Fore and Aft and
The Mark of the Beast, are about as good as it is possible for that kind of story to be. They
are, moreover, exceedingly well told. For the vulgarity of his prose style is only a surface
fault; in the less obvious qualities of construction and economy he is supreme. It is, after all
(see the “Times Literature Supplement”), much easier to write inoffensive prose than to tell
a good story. And his verse, though it is almost a by-word for badness, has the same
peculiarly memorable quality.
“I’ve lost Britain, I’ve lost Gaul,
“I’ve lost Rome, and, worst of all,
“I’ve lost Lalage!”
may be only a jingle, and The Road to Mandalay may be something worse than a jingle,
but they do ‘stay by one.’ They remind one that it needs a streak of genius even to become
a by-word.
What is much more distasteful in Kipling than sentimental plots or vulgar tricks of
style, is the imperialism to which he chose to lend his genius. The most one can say is that
when he made it the choice was more forgivable than it would be now. The imperialism of
the ‘eighties and ‘nineties was sentimental, ignorant and dangerous, but it was not entirely
despicable. The picture then called up by the word “empire” was a picture of overworked
officials and frontier skirmishes, not of Lord Beaverbrook and Australian butter. It was still
possible to be an imperialist and a gentleman, and of Kipling’s personal decency there can
be no doubt. It is worth remembering that he was the most widely popular English writer of
our time, and yet that no-one, perhaps, so consistently refrained from making a vulgar show
of his personality.
If he had never come under imperialist influences, and if he had developed, as he might
well have done, into a writer of music-hall songs, he would have been a better and more
lovable writer. In the role he actually chose, one was bound to think of him, after one had
grown up, as a kind of enemy, a man of alien and perverted genius. But now that he is dead,
for one cannot help wishing that I could offer some kind of tribute – a salute of guns, if such
a thing were available – to the story-teller who was so important to my childhood.
Thus, it was Orwell, the anti-imperialist and radical socialist who, despite strongly
disapproving of both Kipling’s alleged jingo imperialism and his moral insensitiveness,
acknowledged that Kipling behaved like a gentleman throughout his life and, by creating
memorable catch-phrases of general use, had a streak of genius. Orwell gives a complex
picture of Kipling’s work and personality. Kipling’s many-sided creativity defies taxonomic
straitjackets imposed by ideology or a particular literary taste. And that was why Orwell felt
compelled to acknowledge, no matter how repulsive Kipling’s imperialistic views were, then
and now, that Kipling’s artistry endures and continuously surprise us. Kipling certainly
 45

deserves Orwell’s praise of Kipling as an imperialist, a gentleman, and a great artist. Orwell,
who, unlike many of Kipling’s most dismissive critics, had experienced military action (on
the side of the democrats in the Spanish Civil War) and had known such clubs as a member
of the Burma Imperial Police, and had read Kipling’s works, notes that, while furiously right
wing, Kipling was not, in fact, as uncritical of authority and militarism as is sometimes
assumed. While upholding the status quo and the glory of imperialist conquest, he also
criticized it realistically. Orwell observes about enjoyment of the poems of Kipling something
which can be applied to other famous writers who are as politically and aesthetically
indefensible and as popular as he once was:

3.7 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1. Analyze Orwell’s remarks of Eliot on Kipling.
2. What are Orwell’s remarks on Kipling’s poetry?
3. Discuss Orwell’s evaluation of Kipling as a writer.
4. How does Orwell classify good and bad poetry?
5. In what respects is sociological approach different from other approaches?
6. Comment on Orwell’s estimate of Rudyard Kipling.
7. What are Orwell’s views on Kipling’s vision of war?
3.8 SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
The Sociological Approach: Literature and Social Ideas
Sociological Criticism starts with a conviction that art's relations to society are vitally
important, and that the investigation of these relationships may organize and deepen one's
aesthetic response to a work of art. Art is not created in a vacuum; it is the work not simply
of a person, but of an author fixed in time and space, answering to a community of which
he is an important, because articulate part. The sociological critic, therefore, is interested in
understanding the social milieu and the extent to which and manner in which the artist
responds to it.
Edmund Wilson traces sociological criticism to Vico's eighteenth century study of
Homer's epics, which revealed the social conditions in which the Greek poet lived. Herder in
the nineteenth century continued with this approach, but it was the Frenchman Taine who
brought it to fullest statement with his famous pronouncement that literature is the
consequence of the moment, the race, and the milieu. Before that century ended, Marx and
Engels had introduced a fourth factor, the methods of production, and thus made possible
the development, in the thirties, of that special branch of the sociological approach—Marxist
criticism.
The tendency to associate art and social values is natural, perhaps intrinsic, to the
realistic movement. In America, Howells, Jack London, Hamlin Garland, and Frank Norris
have all been concerned with the relation between literature and society. When the critic,
substituted social or political theory for the term "society,” he found he had an integrating
view of large masses of literature. Thus John Macy composed The Spirit of American
Literature in 1908 from the view POINT of Socialism, and the strength as well as the
weakness of Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, 1927- 1930, came from his
personal commitment to Jeffersonian liberalism. Of course the early debunkers of our
 46

period, Randolph Bourne and T. K. Whipple, for example, were at least implicitly thinking
of the effects of society upon artists.
But with the economic depression writers began to add powerful tool of judgment to
their examination of literature as a mirror of society: the Marxist interpretation and
evaluation of social forces. Both in England and America authors moved politically to the
left. Witness the poetry of Auden, c. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Archibald MacLeish.
Journals were formed-for example, the New Masses, under Michael Gold's editorship, and
the Left Review, under Edgell Rickword—which served as organs for Marxist criticism.
Symposia were edited: Kicks' Proletarian Literature in the United States, 1935, C. Day Lewis'
The Mind in Chains, 1937, Bernard Smith's Forces in American Criticism, 1939. And books
by single authors argued the cause: V. F. Calverton's The Liberation of American Literature,
1931, John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, 1933, and Ralph Fox's The Novel and
the People, 1937.
The result was, first of all, an extraordinarily vigorous critical approach. The touchstone
seemed clearly defined: dialectic materialism; the method of application seemed sure: how
does the work contribute to the cause of this social truth? Consequently, the judgments
could be made with an Old Testament force of conviction. So literature and its creators were
sorted as being with or against the Truth; the single-minded critic, frequently unfazed by
the complexities of art's relations to society, and strengthened by the mood of faith and the
sense of revelation, demanded that writers share his creed, and that literature show its
validity. There were exceptions: the vision was too narrow for some, notably Christopher
Caudwell, whose profound knowledge of Marxism and mature taste for literature enabled
him to resist the gravitational pull toward the crude absolutism that characterized the
approach of many lesser Marxists of the time.
But there was madness in the method. As the yardstick became shorter and the
applications more naïve, it became uncomfortably apparent that the intensity of the vision
was achieved at the price of its breadth. James Farrell, in A Note on Literary Criticism, 1936,
took his fellow Marxists severely to task for their benighted dilutions of the problem.
Edmund Wilson too, once he had abandoned the group (though Taine as much as Marx had
been his mentor) joined the attack with his essay, “Marxism and Literature" in The Triple
Thinkers, 1938. Finally, with the Russo-German pact and the outbreak of World War II in
1939, and the consequent confusion and defection of many votaries, the movement lost its
central strength and ceased to be a major force in literary criticism.
But the excesses of this critical aberration did not destroy the validity of the sociological
study of literature. If the critic cannot reasonably hold an author or a work of art to a
particular creed, like Americanism, Proletarianism, Socialism, Capitalism, and so on, the
fair-minded juxtaposition of the work and social theory can strike sparks that are genuinely
illuminating. The Achilles' heel of sociological criticism, as of the moral in general, lies in the
area of judgment—the narrowing temptation to praise or condemn a piece according to the
extent to which its social or moral implications are congruent with the convictions of the
critic. We need not condemn Restoration comedy for instance, as does L. C. Knights, 2 ' for
being so unrelated to the most important thought of the period; but to view that body of
writing with the reminder that Isaac Newton, Sir Thomas Browne, and John Bunyan also
were forming, in their own ways, the cultural atmosphere, is to see the comic drama in a
new light. This is, in fact, what the best sociological critics do: place the work of art in the
 47

social atmosphere, and define that relationship. If too narrow an evaluation follows, this is
likely to reveal the moral position of the critic, as much as the intrinsic merit of the work.
Scholars, of course, have long been interested in the ties between the art, the writer,
and the social milieu, and very often their studies contain implicit judgments based on those
associations. But the associations are not simple. Harry Levin has stated: “... the relations
between literature and society are reciprocal. Literature is not only the effect of social causes;
it is also the cause of social effects.” 3 So we continue to have critics who are drawn to this
complex association, Van Wyck Brooks has for a long time been writing a series of books
devoted to the social atmosphere in which American writers worked; F. O. Matthiessen is
the author of one of the most thoughtful of such studies, American Renaissance, 1941; L.
C. Knights has pursued the same goal in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 1937. It
is clear that as long as literature maintains its bonds with society—and that cannot help
but be forever-the sociological approach, with or with- out the persuasion of a particular
theory, will continue to be a vigorous force in criticism.
3.9 ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write in about 400 words on the following topics:
2. Literature and the social conditions
3. Prominent Sociological and Marxists Critics of our time
4. Rudyard Kipling, the Poet
5. Orwell’s examination of Kipling
3.10 SUGGESTED READINGS
1. Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace 1971.
2. Bottomore, Tom B. Sociology as Social Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1975.
3. Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Critical Theory Since
Plato. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York: 1971.
4. Harrington, Austin. Art and Social Theory. Malden: Polity Press Ltd., 2004.
5. Judd, Denis. “Diamonds are Forever? Kipling’s Imperialism.” History Today
6. 47.6 (June 1997): 37-43.
7. Moretti, Franco. “The Dialectic of Fear.” New Left Review 1:136, November-
December 1982.
3.11 LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Students are advised to read the poems of Kipling to fully understand the views of
Orwell on Kipling.
3.12 KEY WORDS:
1. Vico: An Italian Critic
2. Taine: A Frence Critic
3. Milieu: The combined influence of surroundings, climate, physical environment,
social conditions, and the like.
4. Kipling: An Indian-born English writer of the nineteenth century.
 48

5. Race: The hereditary temperament and disposition of people

6. Fascist: A political philosophy.

UNIT - IV
THE FORMALISTIC APPROACH
STRUCTURE
4.1 Objectives
4.2 Introduction
4.3 Contents
4.4 Revision Point
4.5 In-text Question
4.6 Summary
 49

4.7 Terminal Exercises

4.8 Supplementary materials
4.9 Assignments
4.10 Suggested Readings
4.11 Learning Activities
4.12 Key Words
4.1 OBJECTIVES
To acquaint the learners with the most influential critical approach of our time is the
prime objective of this unit.
4.2 INTRODUCTION
Formalism is a mode of literary analysis that focuses primarily on the literary text itself,
without regard to the context of its creation or consumption. Formalism emerged in the
1920s as a way to separate literary studies from other disciplines such as history, sociology,
and psychology; formalism was designed to define literary studies as its own form of
knowledge, with its own unique object and methods of study. Formalists focus solely on
what they call “literary facts,” meaning the language of the literary text, arguing that literary
language calls attention to its own status as language, rather than to the objects or concepts
the words represent. In most formalist studies, “literature” is synonymous with “poetry,”
which has led to the criticism that formalism neglects drama, fiction, and other non-poetic
literary forms. A movement known as Russian formalism developed in Moscow in the 1920s,
led by Roman Jakobson, who viewed poetics as a subset of linguistics, and differentiated
between the practical language of everyday life and the poetic language that characterized
literary works. Russian formalism was attacked by the Soviets under Trotsky, who
supported the Marxist idea that literary studies should always describe the relations
between a literary text and the social and economic factors that determined its production.
Because of this, Russian formalism was suppressed, and none of its critical writings
appeared in the West until the 1950s and 1960s, when it informed the structuralism of
Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette. Though the Anglo-American “New Criticism” was also
a formalist method, it was not influenced by Russian formalism.
“Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary
form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a
general impact on later developments in “Structuralism” and other theories of narrative.
“Formalism,” like “Structuralism,” sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis
through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that
comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of
texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither
author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the
“hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or
narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had
functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and
Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well-known.
The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier”
nicely expresses their notion of literariness. “Formalism” is perhaps best known in
Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky
 50

contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence.
Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from
the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.
4.3 CONTENTS
Text of James Smith’s “AS YOU LIKE IT”
IT IS A COMMONPLACE that Jaques and Hamlet are akin. But it is also a
commonplace that Jaques is an intruder into As You Like It, so that in spite of the kinship
the plays are not usually held to have much connection. I have begun to doubt whether not
only As You Like It and Hamlet, but almost all the comedies and the tragedies as a whole are
not closely connected, and in a way which may be quite important.
Recent criticism of Shakespeare has directed itself with profit upon the tragedies, the
“problem plays,” and certain of the histories. The early comedies, ob the other hand, have
either been disparaged or entirely overlooked. Yet the same criticism owes part of its
successes to a notion of what it calls Shakespeare’s “integrity”; his manifold interests, it has
maintained, being coordinated so as rarely to thwart, regularly to strengthen one another.
Hence he was alert and active as few have been, while his writing commanded not part but
the whole of his resources.
Such a notion seems sound and proves useful. Belief in an author’s integrity,
however, ought to forbid the dismissal. The comedies, to which he gave a number of years
of his life, are no insignificant part of Shakespeare’s. If it is true that they shed no light on
the tragedies nor the tragedies on them, it would seem he deserves credit for a unique
dissipation rather than concentration of his powers.
It is of course comprehensible that the comedies should be shunned. To some
readers they are less inviting than the tragedies, to all they are more wearisome when their
study is begun. Not only are the texts in a state of comparative impurity; the form itself is
impure. Being less serious than tragedy-this, I am sure, is disputed, but would suggest that
the word has a number of meanings-being less serious than tragedy, comedy admits of
interludes and sideshows; further the material for the sideshows is not infrequently such
that it might be material for the comedy itself. Decision is important, but not always easy
whether or not it should be disregarded.
The desultory nature of the following notes may, I hope, be forgiven, partly because
of complications such as these partly because of contemporary distractions which leave no
time for elaboration. I start with Jaques’s melancholy, in respect of which alone has been
likened to Hamlet.
It is, I think, most accessible to study in his encounter with Rosalind at the beginning
of Act IV. Having abundant leisure he needs a companion to while it away. “I prethee,
pretty youth” he say, “let me be better acquainted with thee.” But Rosalind, who has heard
unfavourable reports, is by no means eager to comply: “They say you are a melancholy
fellow.” As for that, replies Jaques, hi melancholy is at least sincere, for it is as pleasing to
him as jollity to other men: “I doe love it better then laughing.” But sincerity is irrelevant
unless to deepen his offense. As there is an excess of laugher so there is of sadness which
should not be pleasing to anybody:
Those that are in extremity of either, are abhominable fellowes, and betray
themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards.
 51

The rebuke is no more than a rebuke of common sense. Your melancholy, objects
Rosalind, is not justifiable merely because it is your melancholy, for it may be one of the
things which, though they exist, ought not to do so. But the rebuke is none the less
pertinent, common sense implying a minimum of alertness and Jaques being afflicted with
languor. Either as cause or as consequence of his state he is blind and fails to see, or is
stupid and fails to ponder obvious truths.
The force of the rebuke is to be noticed. From Shakespeare, medieval rather than
modern in this as other matters, drunkards receive no more than temporary tolerance:
Falstaff is in the end cast off, Sir Toby beat about the coxcomb. And the respect which they
receive is not even temporary. Wine and wassail make
… Memorie, the Warder of the Braine
…a Fume, and the Receit of Reason
A Lymbeck only;
the sleep they produce is “swinish,” by them nature is “drenched.” A drunkard as such
forfeits not only his manhood but his humanity. Nor does Rosalind’s “modern” mean what
the word does now, “modish” or what has been the mode, and which stands plain to reason
so that there never was need to invent it. In this play, for example, the justice is described
as
full of wise sawes and moderne instances
-of instances which belong to proverbial wisdom, apt and sound so that they have
become trite. What Rosalind is saying is that an old woman would be less ignorant, less
pitiable, than he.
Taken aback for the moment, he can think of nothing to reaffirm his liking: “why, ‘tis
good to be a poste.” And it would seem to be this which finally rouses him to a defense.
His melancholy, he begins, is not like others Rosalind has heard of:
I have neither the Schollers melancholy, which is emulation; nor musitians,
which is fantasticall; nor the Courtiers, which is proud; nor the Souldiers,
which is ambitious…
And so on. Jaques’s melancholy has its source not in private hapes, anxieties, and it
is in the world outside. “It is a melancholy” he continues, “of mine owne”-one, that is which
he is the first to discover-”compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects.” Or,
in other words, it is “the sundrie contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination
wraps me in a most humorous sadnesse.”
Jaques’s meaning may not be quite clear, and I do not think it is or can be, but his
intention would seem to be so. By boasting of originality, breadth, and freshness of
information he hopes to impress, perhaps to intimidate, the youthful Rosalind. But she
mistakes, and I suspect purposely, his drift: as she is intelligent enough to challenge it in
this way. Seizing on the word “travels” she exclaims:
A traveller: by my faith you have great reason to be sad; I feare you have sold
your owne lands, to see other mens; then to have seene much, and to have nothing
is to have rich eyes and poore hands.
She ventures after all, that is, to assimilate his melancholy ot other people’s suggesting
that it may be due to poverty, which is a private anxiety. But Jaques rejects with scorn the
 52

notion that his travels have on a balance brought him anything but profit: “I have gain’d,”
he insists, “my experience.” Once more he is implying that something, because it exists, has
a title to do so; that his experience, as it has been gained, was necessarily worth the gaining.
Once more therefore, and if possible more vigorously this time, she appeals to common sense
for his condemnation. Whatever profit he imagines he has brought back from his travels,
there is something which the merest stay-at-home could tell him is a loss:
JAQUES: I have gain’d my experience.
ROSALIND: And your experience makes you sad: I had rather have a foole to
make me merrie, then experience to make me sad, and to travaile for it too.
Whether or not Rosalind is aware of it, this second rebuke is of peculiar force as
addressed to Jaques. Of all characters it is he alone who, in previous scenes, has expressed
complete satisfaction in the company of Touchstone, the fool. He has gone even further,
and claimed that nowhere but in folly ought satisfaction to be found:
. . . oh noble foole,
A worthy foole: Motley’s the onely weare. . .
. . . o that I were a foole,
I am ambitious for a motley coat.
Yet now has to be reminded that there is an office which fools can perform. About his
conduct it seems there is a grave inconsistency, for at one time he countenances factitious
gaiety, at another equally factitious gloom.
If it stood alone, such an inconsistence might be puzzling; but it has a companion,
which also serves to explain it. In claiming in his interchange with Rosalind that all
experience is worthwhile, Jaques is claiming in effect that no experience is worth anything
at all. In asserting that, in the present, there are no reasons why he should do one thing
rather than another-why, for example, he should be merry rather than mope-he is shutting
his eyes to reasons why, in the future, one thing rather than skeptic, and scepticism is an
inconsistent doctrine. Though a belief itself, it denies the possibility of belief; it denies to
man the possibility of action, though by his nature he cannot refrain from acting. And it is
because Jaques, in his more alert moments, is aware of this second inconsistency that he
commits the first. He seeks shelter in the motley to persuade himself that, though he acts
and can not help doing so, he nevertheless does nothing. For if his actions are mere folly
they are of no account and as good as nothing at all.
It is, however, only at rare moments, as, for example, when stirred by a first meeting
with Touchstone, that Jaques is alert. For the greater part of his time he is characterized
by the languor already referred to: which keeps him from making sustained efforts, even
that which (as he is not wholly unintelligent) being a fool requires. Instead of concerning
himself to justify his scepticism, he quietly submits to it; and his submission is his
melancholy, his “sadness.” A man in whose eyes the world contains nothing of value cannot
be spurred to action either by the sight of objects he wishes to obtain or by the thought of
ideals he hopes to realize. The only action open to him-and as he is human, he cannot
remain wholly inert-no more than half deserves the name, for in it he is as much passive as
active. He needs, so to speak, to be betrayed into action-to be propelled into it from behind,
by agencies of which he is not completely aware. Such agencies are the mechanism of habit,
 53

or a conspiracy of circumstance. In comedy, where characters are not relentlessly harassed

by circumstance, they are able continually to yield to habit.
The travels to which Jaques refers the origin of his skepticism are equally likely to,
have been its consequence, for travel and exploration degenerate into habit. When the
senses are dazzled by a ceaseless and rapid change of objects, the intellect has no time to
discriminate between them, the will no occasion for choice, so that in the end a man becomes
capable of neither. The habit is then a necessity to life, which at the same time and to the
same extent has slackened, be- comes languid. It concerns itself only with the surface of
objects, while their substance is neglected. Jaques’s decision in Act V proceeds from a habit
of this kind:
The Duke hath put on a Religious life . . .
To him will I.
His pretext is that
. . . out of these convertites
There is much matter to be heard, and learn’d.
But his reason, rather than to learn; is to avoid learning. He quits the court for the
monastery much as amateur students, threatened with the labor of mastering a subject,
abandon it for the preliminaries of another-usually as different as possible. If during the
course of the play, Jaques, does not engage on travel, it should be remembered that he
frequently changes, not his surroundings, but his interlocutor. He indulges the habit of
gossip, which is that of a traveler immobilized. That he has abundant leisure for gossip is
only natural: time hangs heavy on a skeptic’s hands, for whom the world contains nothing
that can take it off.

It hangs heavy on Hamlet’s, and this is the most obvious point of resemblance between
him and Jaques. “I have of late”, Hamlet complains, “lost all my mirth, forgone all custome
of exercise”; and he goes on to give general reasons. They imply skepticism of a kind: the
earth and sky, he says, seem but a “foule and pestilent congregation of vapours,” such as
do not encourage enterprise: man himself has come to appear but the “Quintessence of
dust,” with whom he would not willingly have commerce. In the same way, to refer to another
tragedy, time hangs heavy on Macbeth’s hands, at least as he draws near his end. Neither
sight nor sound can rouse his interest; nor could it be roused by any conceivable sight or
sound. He finds himself incapable of believing in the reality even of his wife’s death: the
report of it, he suggests, should be kept from him until tomorrow. But at the same time he
knows that tomorrow will find him as insensible, as incredulous, as today.
Skepticism of a kind: but it is immediately obvious that Hamlet speaks with a disgust
or an impatience, Macbeth with a weariness, which to Jaques are unknown. Even in this
matter in which alone they are similar, their dissimilarity is yet greater. Anticipating a little,
it might be said that Macbeth and Hamlet lead a fuller, a more complete life than Jaques;
they are, that is, more conscious of themselves, and rather than languid are continuously,
perhaps, feverishly alert.
 54

One consequence is that they cannot easily be betrayed into action: Whereas Jaques
looks back without regret, even with complacency, on his travels, it is only with reluctance
that Macbeth lapses into the habit of fighting for fighting’s sake:
Why should I play the Roman Foole, and dye
On mine owne sword? whiles I see lives, the gashes
Do better upon them.
Sentiment and rhythm are flat to extinction, Macbeth is speaking sullenly. What he is
about to do may be better than nothing; it is all he can do; nevertheless, it is no more than
might be done by a common bully, by an animal. For them it might be a full life; for himself,
Macbeth admits, it can be no more than the slackened half-life of habit. Similarly the
“custome of exercise” and all custom have lost their hold on Hamlet; for him to act, he needs
to be surprised by extraordinary circumstance.
Nevertheless, as has been said, neither he nor Macbeth is idle. The energy which their
state of mind forbids they should employ on the world, they employ on the state of mind
itself; that not only the inconsistency, the evil (what Rosalind meant by the “beastliness”) of
skepticism is continually before them. They see it is not the solution to a problem, but rather
a problem which presses to be solved; not the tempering of feeling and the invigoration of
thought, but the denial of both. They not only reject Jaques’s flight into folly, which was to
preserve skepticism; they agonize over the sort of reflection with which, in both languid and
alert moments, Jaques is lulled. “And all our yesterdayes,” exclaims Macbeth in despair at
what forces itself upon him as the nothingness of man,
And all our yesterdayes have lighted Fooles
The way to dusty death;
“’ tis but an hour agoe,” observes Jaques with satisfaction,
‘Tis but an hour agoe, since it was nine,
And after one houre more, ‘twill be eleven,
And so from houre to houre, we ripe, and ripe,
And then from houre to houre, we ‘rot, and rot . . .
or rather Touchstone observes this, from whom Jaques is quoting. Touchstone is by
profession and conviction a fool, the seriousness of whose statements will come up for
consideration later; Jaques is as little serious as, in a quotation, it is possible to be. He is
echoing more sound than sense; the latter he has not plumbed (the movement, the rhythm,
show it), and the statement he has made no more than half his own-fitting accompaniment
and expression of a half-life of habit. Elsewhere he compares human life to a theatrical
performance as though, in harmony with his skepticism, to stress its unreality; but very
soon, in harmony with his languor, the theater begins to appear a substantial, for all he
cares, a permanent structure. Performances in it last a long time, so that it is possible to
make a full display of talent:
. . . one man in his time playes many parts,
His Acts being seven ages.
And then Jaques recites the ages, diverting himself with ob- jects separated on this
occasion not in space but in time. When the same comparison occurs to Macbeth he is so
 55

over- whelmed with the notion of unreality that he does not allow even the actor to act: the
latter “struts and frets . . . upon the Stage,” struts and frets not for a full performance but
only for “his houre . ,. and then is heard no more.” In Macbeth’s verse the comparison flares
up and extinguishes itself in indignation at what it implies of man’s lot:
. . . It is a Tale
Told by an Ideot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
That of Jaques continues to demean itself elegantly even when describing in detail
man’s end:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Once again the rhythm and the movement show that Jaques is meaning little of what
he says; that, a true traveler once more, he is occupied with the surface only, not the
substance of objects before him.
If I may look aside or ahead for a moment, I would venture to suggest that the essential
difference between comedy and tragedy may perhaps be this sort of difference: not one of
kind, I mean, but of degree. As far as I can see, it is possible and even probable that tragedy
and comedy-Shakespearean comedy, at any rate-treat of the same problems, comedy doing
so (to repeat the word) less seriously. And by “less seriously,” I may now explain, I mean
that the problems are not forced to an issue: a lucky happening, a lucky trait of character
(or what for the purposes of the play appears lucky), allowing them to be evaded. As, for
example, conditions in Arden and conditions of his own temper preserve Jaques from fully
realizing the nature and consequences of his skepticism: to Rosalind, to the reader, it is
obvious that his interests are restricted, his vigor lessened, but he is never put to the test.
Hamlet, on the other hand, in a similar spiritual state, is called upon to avenge a father, foil
an uncle, and govern a kingdom. And when at last chance forces him into action it is not
only that he may slaughter, but also that he may be slaughtered: in other words, not that
in spite of his disability he may achieve his end, but that because of it he may fail. In Othello
hardly an accident happens which does not lend plausibility to Iago’s deceit, so that the
problem posed by human malice on the one hand, human ignorance on the other, cannot
but be faced; in Much Ado there is a final accident-and a very obvious one, for its name is
Dogberry-which unmasks Don John. In Lear accident of the wildest form unites with malice
and with the elements to convince a human being of his imbecility; in The Winter’s Tale
accident equally wild serves to hide that imbecility, if not from Leontes (who is, however,
encouraged to forget it), at least from Florizol. In comedy the materials for tragedy are
procured, in some cases heaped up; but they are not, so to speak, attended to, certainly not
closely examined. And so what might have caused grief causes only a smile, or at worst a
grimace.
I apologize for speculations of this kind, which can only remain gratuitous until it is
known more exactly what comedy, more especially what As You Like It, is about. At least
one other resemblance, possibly an important one, between it and the tragedies, calls, I
think, for attention. As Hamlet’s melancholy is caused by the sin of others and Mac- beth’s
by sins of his own, so Jaques-if the Duke is to be trusted-has not only traveled, but been
. . . a Libertine,
As sensuall as the brutish sting itself.
 56

And the cure for all three, according to each of the three plays, is very much the same.
Fortinbras reproaches Hamlet, and Hamlet reproaches himself, with lacking a “hue of
resolution,” which, as it is “native,” is a defect he should not possess; Macbeth contrasts the
division of counsels within him, suspending activity, with the strong monarchy state”
enjoyed in the healthy man by the reason. Similarly, Rosalind confronts Jaques with the
desirability of what she calls merriment or mirth: from her remark already quoted it is
obvious she does not mean laughter, not at any rate laughter without measure, and
therefore not laughter in the first place. For the confusion of Jaques it is necessary she
should speak emphatically; in a conversation which irks her she is to be excused if she is
brief. Were the occasion other, or were she given to reflection, she might perhaps describe
this “mirth” more closely-as something similar to her own “alertness,” which has already
drawn attention: the prerequisite of common sense, and what in more recent times,
according to the sympathies and perspicacity of the speaker, has been known either as
“vitality” or “faith.” The meaning of “mirth” in fifteenth and sixteenth century devotional
books should be borne in mind, and its meaning on the lips of, say, Saint Thomas More.
Hamlet, it will be remembered, noted as first among his distressing symptoms that he had
“lost all his mirth.”
This scene at the beginning of Act IV sheds light, I do not think it would be too much
to claim, on all that Jaques says or does. If so, it is important to a not inconsiderable part
of the play, and in that at least Jaques cannot be an intruder. For his quips and monologues,
however loose in their immediate context, have a dependence on this dialogue, to which he
is indispensable. He is so not only by what he says, but also by what he causes to be said
to him. I am going to suggest that, in spite of the familiar verdict, he is no more of an intruder
anywhere. For the rest of the play consists largely of situations which, if he is taken as
primary melancholic, might be described as modeled on that in which he finds him- self
with Rosalind. Either she or a temporary ally or deputy of hers-frequently Corin the Old
Shepherd-faces and condemns a succession of characters who, like Jaques, are incapable
of or indisposed to action. Silvius, Touchstone, Orlando, the Duke, each has a melancholy
of his own; and so too has Rosalind, in so far as she is in love with Orlando. But Dot even
that escapes her judgment, since she can judge it disguised as someone other than herself.
Add that the minor characters occasionally condemn or at least reprove one an- other, and
it is possible to gain some notion of the pattern which Shakespeare seems to have intended
for As You Like It. A single motif is repeated, giving unity to the whole; but at the same time
it varies continually, so that the whole is complex,
Such, I think, was Shakespeare’s intended pattern: unfortunately it has been either
obscured by revision, or incomplete revision has failed to impress it clearly on the play. The
theory of the New Cambridge editors must no doubt be accepted, that there are at least two
strata of text, an early and a late. This is a difficulty of the kind referred to, that a student
must expect from textual impurities in a comedy. But certain portions of the pattern are
sufficiently clear to give, to a careful reader, some idea of the whole.
Take, for example, the relations obtaining between the Old Shepherd, on the one hand,
and Jaques and Touchstone, on the other. Touchstone has been much sentimentalized,
partly because of his wit, partly because of a supposed loyalty to Celia. But his wit has been
treated as though it were a mere interlude, a diversion for the reader as well as for the Duke;
whereas little else would seem more closely knit into the play. And as will be suggested, this
is the reverse of sentimental. As for Touchstone’s loyalty, it would seem to be mentioned
 57

only in Celia’s line,It may have had importance in an earlier version, but in that which has
survived Shakespeare is no more concerned with how the characters arrive in Arden-
whether under Touch- stone’s convoy or not-than how they are extricated from it.
Touchstone’s loyalty is about as interesting to him, and should be as interesting to the
reader, as Oliver’s green and gold snake.
What is interesting is a disingenuous reply which Touch- stone gives to the question:
“And how like you this shep- herds life?” He pretends to make distinctions where it is im-
possible there should be any:
Truly . . . in respect of itselfe, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherds life,
it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it verie well: but in respect that it is private,
it is a very vile life. . .
A shepherd’s life, no more than other things, can be distinguished from itself, nor can
what is solitary be other than private. What Touchstone is saying is that he neither likes nor
dislikes the shepherd’s life, while at the same time he does both; or, in other words, that
towards the shepherd’s life he has no feelings whatever. And, in truth, towards all things, if
not quite all, Touchstone is as apathetic as Jaques. He too has his melancholy, as has been
said: and naturally resembling Jaques more than Hamlet or Macbeth, he too accepts
distraction from a habit. It is not the ceaseless search for novelty or gossip, but what he
calls “philosophy” or the barren intercourse of a mind with itself. He multiplies distinction
like the above, or pursues similarities based solely on sound or letter, neglecting the
meaning of a word. The result is skepticism in a very practical sense, such as unchecked
would destroy language and all possibility of thought. Even the old Shepherd is not slow to
realize this, for his sole reply to the blunt question, “Has’t any Philosophie in thee. . . ?” is
to recite a number of obvious truths:

I know the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is: and that hee that
wants money, meanes, and content, is without three good friends. That the
propertie of raine is to wet, and fire to burne. . . .
and so on. However obvious, they are at least truths, at least significant; and he
concludes:
hee that hath learned no wit by Nature, nor Art, may com- plaine of dull
breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred.
In other words: he who cannot behave way than Touchstone is an idiot. But “idiot is
what I mean by a philosopher”-
Such a one is a naturall philosopher
rejoins Touchstone, indifferent enough to his diversion not to claim that it is more than
it is.
He proceeds to indulge in it at length. The Shepherd, he says, is damned because he
has not been to .court, court manners being good and what is not good being wicked. Too
patiently the Shepherd replies with a distinction which, as it is he and not Touchstone who
makes it, is of primary importance:
those that are good manners at the Court, are as ridiculous in the Countrey, as
the behaviour of the Countrie is most mockeable at the Court.
 58

But this is brushed aside, and Touchstone emphasizes his perversity by changing the
order in which court and country are ranked. Henceforward, he decrees, they shall be on a
level, or rather the court shall be more wicked. In despair the Shepherd retires from a
conversation in which words, as they have so variable a meaning, have as good as no
meaning at all:
You have too Courtly a wit, for mee, Ile rest.
Had he said “too philosophical a wit” is point might have been more immediately clear;
but for him, no doubt as for Touchstone, court and “philosophy” are closely allied.
To justify himself he adds the following description:
Sir, I am a true Labourer, I earne that I eate: get that I weare; owe no man hate,
envie no mans happinesse; glad of other mens good[,] content with my harme: and
the greatest of my pride, is to see my Ewes graze, and my Lambes sucke.
Of himself, that is, he claims to go about his own affairs, and to go about them with
the mirth or minimum of serenity demanded by Rosalind. He has no need of ”incision”-
whatever that may mean-or of any other remedy to conduct himself like an adult being:
whereas Touchstone, who suggests, the remedy, has at the moment no affairs; appears to
be able to conceive of no affairs to go about at all.
For Shepherd and audience the conversation is over. To them it seems that Touchstone
is defeated beyond recovery; not, however, to Touchstone himself. He insists on adding a
last word, and in doing so hints at one of the things to which he is not yet wholly indifferent,
in respect of which therefore he parts company with Jaques. Mention of ewes and sucking
lambs spurs him on to the following:
That is another simple sinne in you, to bring the Ewes and the Rammes together,
and to offer to get our living by the copulation of Cattle, to be. bawd to a Belwether,
and to betray a shee-Lambe of-a twelvemonth to a crookedpated olde Cuckoldly
Ramme, out of all reasonable match. If thou bee’st not damn’d for this, the divell
himselfe will have no shepherds, I cannot see how else thou shouldst escape.
About this there are two things to be noticed: first, that it is násty, and, secondly, that
it is the nastier because it falls outside the conversation. Touchstone is no longer
endeavoring to prove anything about country and court, whether sound or fantastic: he
assimilates the sexual life of men to that of beasts solely because it seems of itself worth
while to do so. Yet this should not cause surprise: if in this passage he appears to exalt the
latter, elsewhere in deeds as well as words he is diligent to degrade the former.
Upon their first arrival in Arden, when he and Rosalind overhear Silvius’s complaint,
Rosalind sighs:
Jove, Jove, this Shepherds passion
Is much upon my fashion.
“And mine,” exclaims Touchstone, adding, however, immediately, “but it growes
somewhat stale with mee.” That is, he is impatient of the elaborations and accretions
received by the sexual desire, when a persistent subject in an otherwise healthy mind. His
next appearance is as the wooer of Audrey, a country wench who thanks the gods that she
is “foul,” and whom no elaborations have been ‘necessary to win. Her desire to be a “woman
 59

of the world,” in other words a married woman, is ingenuous and no more a secret from
Touch- stone than from anyone else.
It is by no means to her discredit, nor would it be to Touchstone’s, if, gratifying her
desire, he thereby eased his own and was thankful. But the opposite is true. He is neither
eased, nor does he spare an occasion, public or private, of pouring ridicule on the
ingenuousness of which he has taken advantage. It is as though, aware that he can no
longer hope for desire to be restrained, he sought to humiliate it with the least attractive
object, then proceeded to revenge himself upon the object for his own lack of restraint.
Audrey protests that she is “honest” or chaste; but that, he answers, has had no share in
drawing his attentions:
AUDREY: Would you not have me honest?
TOUCH: No truly, unlesse thou wert hard favour’d. . .
AUDREY: Well, I am not faire, and therefore I pray, the Gods make me honest.
TOUCH: Truly, to cast away honesty upon a foule slut, were to put good meate
in an uncleane dish . . . But be it, as it may bee, I will marrie thee
To a large extent this conversation, like most of Touchstone’s, is mere playing with
words; but in so far as it has any meaning, it is that the word “honesty” deserves only to be
played with. And when at last he brings himself to mention honesty with an air of
seriousness, it is not that she but that he himself may be praised:
. . . a poore virgin sir, an il-favor’d thing sir, but mine owne, a poore humour of
mine sir, to take that that no man else will: rich honestie dwels like a miser sir, in a
poore house, as your Pearle in your foule oyster.
He is presenting her to the Duke as his intended: and, since her exterior has nothing
to explain his choice, hints that an explanation is to be found within. That is, he is claiming
for himself the credit due to perspicacity.
Unfortunately he put forward at the same time a claim to modesty, thus showing with
how little seriousness he is continuing to speak. Did he value honesty at all, he would not
represent the choice of it as a sacrifice; nor would he describe Audrey, its exemplar, as a
“poor thing.” His modesty, it should further be noticed, itself suggests confusion or deceit,
for not only does it permit of advertisement, it is advertised not at Touchstone’s expense but
at someone else’s. He does not in one respect decry himself so that he may be exalted in
another; rather in order to exalt himself he decries his future wife. The first would in any
case be tiresome, as is all inverted vanity; but the second, as a hypocritical form of
selfishness, is contemptible.
Given that Touchstone is a man of sense, a performance like this can be due only to
his attempting two things at once, and two things not very compatible one with another. As
usual he is seeking to ridicule Audrey; but at the same time, I think, to recommend himself
to the Duke. While sharing all Jaques’s objections to purposeful activity, he is without
Jaques’s income: he must provide himself with a living or must starve. And skepticism and
melancholy being essentially unnatural, no one starves for their sake. At Touchstone’s entry
on the stage it was hinted that the Duke might be willing to appoint a jester:
Good my Lord, bid him welcome: This is the Motley-minded Gentleman, that I
have so often met in the Forrest: he hath bin a Courtier he sweares. . . . Good my
Lord, like this fellow.
 60

And the Duke is well known to be, in Jaques’s word, “disputatious.” It is solely to
please him that Touchstone, among his other preoccupations, does what he can to handle
the notions “honesty” and “modesty”; were he speaking to a crony or to himself they would
not enter his head, no more than the euphuistic apologue about oysters with which he ends.
A similar reason is to be advanced for his string of court witticisms which follow, about
the causes of a quarrel and the degree of a lie. So long as to be tiresome, the modern reader
is tempted to dismiss it as an interlude; it is not, however, wholly without dramatic excuse.
At the stage reached by his candidature, Touchstone thinks it proper to give an exhibition
of professional skill. And that, too, he makes sub- serve his sexual passion: having drawn
all eyes to himself, for a moment he directs them to Audrey:
Upôn a lye, seven times removed: (beare your bodie more seeming Audrey). . .
and so she is ridiculed once more.
It seems likely he obtains his appointment: at any rate he makes the impression he
desires. “He is very swift and sententious,” says the Duke.
He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he
shoots his wit.
Which of course is just what the real Touchstone never does, in spite of what the critics
say. The judgment of the Old Shepherd is sounder, that Touchstone’s folly has no purpose
at all, or, if any, that of discrediting and ruining purpose. And so is Jaques sounder, when
he recognizes in Touchstone’s folly the cover for his skepticism.
It is interesting, and significant of the subtle pattern which Shakespeare intends to
weave-a pattern not only of intrigue but of ideas-that the Duke, who is thus easily gulled
when Touchstone assumes a virtue, protests immediately when required to accept as a
virtue Touchstone’s vice. Jaques de- scribes to him, and asks for himself, the liberty of
railing which Touchstone enjoys:
. . . weed your better jujements
Of all opinion that grows ranke in them,
That I am wise. I must have liberty
Withall, as large a Charter as the winde,
To blow on whom I please, for so fooles have. . . .
Invest me in my motley: Give me leave
To speake my mind.
Such impunity, the Duke sees, can have no results of the kind Jaques promises:
. . . I will through and through
Cleanse the foule bodie of the’ infected world . . .
but only evil for himself and others:
Fie on thee. I can tell what thou wouldst do. . .
Most mischeevous foule sin.
And he proceeds to diagnose it correctly. Only a man ruined by evil, he suggests,
confines himself to the correction of evil; for this implies not that evil finds him, peculiarly
sensitive, but that he is insensitive both to evil and to good. To good, because he neglects
 61

and therefore runs the risk of destroying it; to evil, because he seeks no relief from what
should stifle and nauseate. Brutalized to this degree, Jaques can see no reason why others
should not be brutalized too:
. . . all the’ imbossed sores, and headed evils,
That thou with license of free foot hast caught,
Would’st thou disgorge into the generall world.
The portrait is drawn in high color, but Hamlet would recognize it. Jaques presumably
does not, being, as has been said, less alert and therefore less perspicacious; but here
unfortunately there is a cut in the text of As You Like It. Further instances of this
Shakespearean subtlety are two scenes in which Jaques and Touchstone, usually allies, are
brought, if not into conflict, into contrast. As Touchstone is as acutely sensitive to the
brutish sting as ever Jaques may have been in the past, in the present he can on occasion
be resolute as Jaques is not. In response to the sting he can make conquest of Audrey,
browbeat William for her possession: . . . abandon the society of this Female, or Clowne
thou perishest . . .. I will kill thee a hundred and fifty wayes, therefore tremble and depart.
William obediently trembles. But it is Jaques of all characters whom Shakespeare
chooses to administer a rebuke to Touchstone for this; as though to make it clear that if he
condemns -- inertia he does not, with a crudeness familiar in more recent times, advocate
precipitancy; if he deplores apathy, he does not commend brute appetite. When Touchstone
contemplates a hedge-marriage so that he might have “a good excuse hereafter” to leave his
wife, it is Jaques who prevents him:
And will you (being a man of your breeding) be married under a bushr like a
beggar? Get you to church. . . .
And at the final leave-taking it is Jaques who foretells to Touchstone a future of
wrangling, a “loving voyage. . . but for two moneths victuall’d.”
At the opposite pole to the characters hitherto considered, tolerating no elaboration in
love, stand Silvius and Phebe, who seek to conform their lives to the pastoral convention,
one of the fullest elaborations known. The scenes in which they appear are perhaps too
short to have the effect intended, now that the convention, if not forgotten, is no longer
familiar. But to an Elizabethan the sentiments and the verse- the former largely echoes,
external as well as internal, to the play: the latter easy yet mannered-would suffice to evoke
a wealthy tradition. A modern judges of this perhaps most readily by the apostrophe to
Marlowe:
Dead Shepherd, now I [f]ind thy saw of might, Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at
first sight?
No incongruity is intended or feared from his introduction with fleece and crook: the
tradition being rich enough to absorb him, vigorous enough to assert even beside him its
actuality.
And also the apostrophe may serve to dispel some of the mist which has hung about
pastoral in England since the seventeenth century, and notably since the attack of Johnson.
Though actual, pastoral need not be realistic; and to apply to it realistic canons as he did is
to misconceive it entirely. It is not an attempt to portray a shepherd’s life: but in its purity-
though frequently, of course, it is impure-to portray a life in which physical misery is
reduced to a minimum or has disappeared. Traditionally such a life is called a shepherd’s:
 62

in which, therefore, man is held to enjoy every happiness, if only his desires will let him. But
as becomes clear with the progress of the pastoral, his desires will not. Removed from the
danger of physical pain those of the intellect and the imagination become the acuter; in
particular the passion of love, with neither social pressure nor economic necessity inclining
it in any direction, becomes incalculable in its vagaries. It remains an ever open source of
calamity. A tragic note of undertone is thus inseparable from pastoral, and if subdued is
only the more insistent. It is in permanent contrast with the composure or gaiety of the rest
of the score.
By their share in a tradition of this kind, the Silvius and Phebe scenes have a claim to
be effective out of all proportion to their length; and the effect they are intended to produce
is in the first place a serious, not a comic one. That there is a close connection between
Shakespearean tragedy and comedy, I have already stated, is one of my assumptions in this
paper.
As the Old Shepherd is contrasted with Touchstone, so he is with Silvius. When the
latter pours out his complaints, Corin’s attitude is far from one of incomprehension:
Oh Corin, that thou knew’st how I do love her.
-I partly guesse; for 1 have lov’d ere now.
Far also from impatience, for the complaints are not of the briefest, far, however, from
approval. To put the matter at its crudest, Silvius is not prudent in his conduct:
That is the way to make her scorne you still.
And however charitably Corin listens to the recital of another’s, extravagances, he has
no regret that now he is rid of his own:
How many actions most ridiculous
Hast thou been drawne to by thy fantasie?
-Into a thousand that I have forgotten
His attitude seems to be that Silvius’s extravagances will pass with time as his own
have passed; meanwhile they may at least be tolerated, for they are decent. Touchstone’s
reaction to the meeting with Silvius has already been noticed. Rosalind’s is somewhat more
complicated:
Alas poor Shepherd searching of [thy wound],
I have by hard adventure found my own.
She approves of the premises on which the pastoral convention is based, both that the
wound of love is genuine and that it is sharp and serious. But the assumption that therefore
it is deserving of sole attention, or that by receiving such attention it can in any way be
cured, she criticizes as does Corin, and less patiently. It conflicts with the common sense,
for which she is everywhere advocate, and which requires either as condition or as symptom
of health a wide awareness of opportunity, a generous assumption of responsibility. By
confining his attention to love, Silvius is restricting both, frustrating his energies like the
other melancholics. That Rosalind should be less patient than Corin is natural, as she is
younger: she cannot trust the action of time upon Silvius, when as yet she is not certain
what it will be upon herself.
 63

For she too is tempted by love, and in danger of the pastoral convention. Though she
rebukes Silvius and Phebe from the outset, she does so in language more nearly approaching
theirs than ever she approached Jaques’s. But the luck of comedy, which (it has been
suggested) stifles problems, is on her side, causing Phebe to fall in love with her. She needs
only to reveal herself as a woman, and the folly of pastoralism - as a convention which allows
freedom to fancy or desire-comes crashing to the ground. Taught by such an example and
by it teaching others, she pronounces the judgment that if Silvius and Phebe persist in love
yet would remain rational creatures, they must get married.
It is the same judgment she pronounced on all lovers in. the play. Of the four who are
left, two only call for separate consideration: herself and Orlando.
Orlando has achieved an extravagance but, unlike Silvius, not a decent one; his verse,
even in Touchstone’s ears, is the “right Butter-womans ranke to Market.” As Touchstone is
concerned only to destroy he finds criticism easy, but speci- mens of the verse prove he is
not wholly unreliable. And therefore Rosalind chooses to deal with Orlando in prose:
These are all lies, men have died from time to time, and wormes have eaten
them, but not for love.
-I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind, for I protest her frowne might
kill me
-By this hand, it will not kill a flie.
Her purpose once again is to disabuse her interlocutor about the supposed supreme
importance of love. And to do so effectively she makes use at times of a coarseness almost
rivaling Touchstone’s:
What would you say to me now, and I were your verie, verie Rosalind?
– I would kisse before I spoke.
– Nay, you were better speak first, and when you were gravel’d, for lacke of matter, you
might take occasion to kisse: verie good Orators when they are out, they will spit, and for
lovers, lacking (God warne us) matter, the cleanliest shift is to kisse.
Not that she agrees with Touchstone, except materially. She may say very much the
same as he says, but her purpose is different. It is not to deny that desire, no more than
other things, has value; but to assess its proper value, by no means so high as Orlando
thinks.
She can undertake to do so with some sureness, and command some confidence from
the reader, because she herself has firsthand acquaintance with desire. All criticisms passed
on others are also criticisms on herself, and she is aware of this (or if not, as on one occasion,
Celia is at hand to remind her). The consequences for the play are manifold. First the
criticisms, which as applying to other persons might seem scattered, are bound together as
applying to her; over the pattern of the repeating-motif, such as has been already described,
she superposes as it were another pattern, or en- closes it in a frame. Then the final
criticism, or judgment which resumes them all, is seen to issue from the body of the play
itself, not to be imposed on it by author or authority from without. Finally a breadth and a
sanity in the judgment are guaranteed. If Rosalind freely acknowledges in herself the
absurdities she rebukes in others-”Ile tell thee Aliena,” she says, “I cannot be out of sight of
Orlando: Ile goe find a shadow and sigh till he come”-in return she transfers to others her
own seriousness and suffering:
 64

O coz, coz, coz; my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom
deepe I am in love: but it cannot bee sounded: my affection hath an unknowne
bottome, like the Bay of Portugall.
Or in a phrase which has a foretaste or reminiscence of Donne:
One inche of delay more, is a South-sea of discoverie. I pre-thee tell me, who it
is quickely, and speake apace.
The final judgment would seem to run somewhat as follows. As Rosalind says to
Orlando at their first meeting: “Love is purely a madnesse, and I tel you, deserves wel a
darke house, and a whip, as madmen do”; it is, however, a madness which, owing to the
number of victims, there are only two ways of controlling. One is to “forsweare the ful stream
of the world, and to live in a nooke merely Monasticke”-and this way does not generally
recommend itself. The second, then, must be adopted, which is marriage. Above all, whines
and cries such as combine to a chorus in Act V must be prevented:
. . . tell this youth what ‘tis to love
-It is to be alL made of sighes and teares,
And so am 1 for Phebe.
-And I for Ganimed.
-And I for Rosalind.
-And I for no woman.
-It is to be all made of faith and service, And so am 1 for Phebe. . .
da capo three times. Rosalind, though as lover she joined in, as critic and judge rejects
it as “the howling of Irish wolves against the Moone.” To it the alacrity of Oliver and Celia
are to be preferred: “They are in the verie wrath of love, and they will together. Clubbes
cannot part them.”
If once again this seems reminiscent of Touchstone, and of Touchstone at his worst,
the distinction already drawn should be remembered. The same words can mean different
things on Touchstone’s lips and on Rosalind’s. She is not inciting her fellow characters to
marriages which shall hold only until the “blood breaks,” but to “high wedlock,” which is
“great Juno’s crown,” and a “blessed bond”-the masquing song, though possibly not by
Shakespeare, aptly summarizes certain of the play’s sentiments. Further, that Rosalind and
Touchstone agree on a single topic, even a topic so important as the qualities of desire, does
not mean that one of them is not superior to the other. Rosalind is very obviously the
superior: not, however, in respect of the topic on which she and Touchstone agree. She is
distinguished and privileged beyond him, not because she knows desire-rather that
confounds both him and her-but because she is, whereas he is not, at the same time many
things besides. She is not only a capable manager of her own life, but a powerful influence
for good on the. lives of others. And finally a word may be put in for Touchstone himself. If
Shakespeare, as has been said, does not condemn apathy in order to’ commend lust, neither
does he disapprove of lust in order to advocate Puritanism. Touchstone is on the way to
tragedy because he has allowed desire to get out of control; had he controlled it, he would
have -built up a life more satisfactory than do those who, while living in the world, neglect
desire altogether or overmuch. And therefore he remains a positive critic even in his failure
and to some extent because of it; it is proper not only that he himself should rebuke Orlando,
 65

but also that Rosalind, taking, it would seem, words from his lips, should rebuke large
groups of people.
If As You Like It is planned at all in the way I have suggested, the least title it deserves
is, I think, “unsentimental.” But for common practice I would go further and call it
“unromantic”; and suggest that, to get the measure of its unromanticism, no more is
necessary than to read it alongside its source, Lodge’s Rosalynde. And the title “unromantic”
would possibly be confirmed by an investigation of the Duke’s melancholy, which in this
paper it has not been possible to investigate.
There is little time to return to the topic from which the paper started, the relation
namely between the tragedies and the comedies. But perhaps it is obvious that, conceived
as unromantic, the early comedies are a fitting preparation for the “problem plays,” while
from these to the tragedies is but a step.
4.4 REVISION POINTS
1. Without question, the most influential critical method of our time is the formalistic.
2. Formalism is a mode of literary analysis that focuses primarily on the literary text
itself, without regard to the context of its creation or consumption.
3. “Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes
literary form and the study of literary devices within the text.
4. “Formalism” is perhaps best known in Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.”
5. As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic
object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the
unified sensibility of the artist.
6. James Smith, a formalistic critic analyses Shakespeare’s play AS YOU LIKE IT, a
romantic comedy applying the tools of formalistic criticism.
7. The play is generally called as a romantic comedy, but he calls as unromantic
8. Smith found that the characters are unromantic and full of melancholy; hence
unromantic
4.5 IN-TEXT QUESTIONS
1. What does formalism aim at?
2. What are the elements of formalism?
3. Point out the tenets of formalist criticism.
4. What are the advantages of the closeness of reading a text?
5. What are Smith’s notes on the character of Rosalind?
6. What are Smith’s views on Touchstone?
4.6 SUMMARY
Formalistic approach is the most influential mode of literary analysis that focuses
mainly on the literary text. It simply excludes and rejects all the external elements for its
analysis of a poem or a novel or a drama. These formalistic critics come under the movement
called the New Criticism. The “New Criticism,” so designated as to indicate a break with
traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. “New
Criticism” stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept
“explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the work of literature
as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected
the unified sensibility of the artist. James Smith is a formalistic critic. He rejects all the
 66

major approaches such moral, sociological, and psychological approaches. All these
approaches, according to him, are extrinsic to a literary work. He is of the opinion that a
literary text should be read as closely as possible without any references to external
elements. As You Like It by Shakespeare has usually been considered as a romantic play.
But, Smith, with his close reading of the play, came out with a startling discovery that the
play is indeed the most unromantic play. He discovered that many of the characters in the
play utter unromantic sentiments. Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, Corin, Silvius, and even
Rosalind voice unromantic sentiments. James Smith discovers the unromantic emotions
throughout the play. He, after his close reading of the play, pronounces As You Like It as
unromantic.
4.7 TERMINAL QUESTIONS
1. Define formalism.
2. Analyze the main focus of formalism.
3. What are the elements of formalism?
4. How does Smith look at Shakespeare from the formalist lens?
5. Why does Smith consider Touchstone a “man of sense”?
6. Examine Smith’s evaluation of As You Like It.
4.8 SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
4.8.1 New Criticism
The “New Criticism,” so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a
product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. “New Criticism” stressed close
reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.”
As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object
independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility
of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a
similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical
poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling.
New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K.
Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well
suited to New Critical practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor
to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal
structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. “New Criticism” was
fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on
readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. “New
Criticism” in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose
manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren.
Perhaps the enduring legacy of “New Criticism” can be found in the college classroom, in
which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.
4.8.2 The Formalistic Approach: Literature as Aesthetic Structure
Without question, the most influential critical method of our time is the formalistic. It
has commanded the zeal of most of our leading critics; has established its unofficial organs
of journalism-the Kenyon Review, the Sewannee Review, Accent, and the Hudson Review;
is, in fact, the method one almost automatically thinks of when speaking of contemporary
criticism.
There is some reason to trace the seeds to Coleridge's view that a literary piece exists
in its own way, with its own kind of life. His concept of organic unity - the whole being the
harmonious involvement of all the parts - surely calls for a critical approach that would
 67

attend to the efficiency of the various elements as they work together to form a unified total
meaning. In this respect, Poe's principle of the unified effect of a work of literature may be
listed in the ancestry of the modern movement, although Poe seems to have had little direct
influence upon contemporary critics. And Henry James's scrupulous attention to the
matters of his own craft, shown in his numerous prefaces, has probably given direction to
Eliot and Blackmur. T. S. Eliot is a major figure in the development of formalistic criticism.
Under the influence of Pound and Hulme, he announced the high place of art as art, rather
than as an expression of social, religious, ethical, or political ideas, and advocated the close.
Study of the texts of the works them-selves. In numerous essays he applied his view of
poetry as an independent organism, and his attention, in Blackmur's words, to “the facts in
the work under consideration as they are relevant to literature as such.” His dictum,
pronounced in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that the poet escapes into the poem
from emotion and personality, encouraged critics to move away from biographical study into
the scrutiny of the craft of the poem. He was, in short, concerned to formulate a kind of
criticism that would be free of the pursuit of extrinsically historic, moral, psychological, and
sociological interpretations, and free to concentrate on the aesthetic quality of the work.
Less directly, the poetry of Eliot and Pound (and that of numerous followers) with its
complicated techniques developed from the French Symbolists of the nineteenth century
and the English Metaphysicals of the seventeenth, demanded the closest of examinations
and gave occasion for the sharpening of critical tools.
A second great guide is I. A. Richards. Just as his Principles of Literary Criticism,
1924, with its analysis of the poem audience relationship was to give impetus to the
psychological approach, so his work with Ogden in The Meaning of Meaning, 1923, offered a
vocabulary for discussing and analyzing the kinds of meaning that occur in the response to
verbal stimuli; and laid the foundations of the semantic approach in literary criticism. The
Science of Poetry, 1926, studied the fallen place of poetry in our age when most beliefs have
been demonstrated, according to Richards, to be “pseudo-statements.” Although he later
abandoned this degrading evaluation the book obviously has a place in the growing search
for the intrinsic merit of poetry. Practical Criticism, 1929, classified and analyzed certain
misinterpretations of thirteen poems, most of them of kinds later invalidated by ontological
critics. In all these matters, Richards cleared the arena for later occupation by the “new”
critics; but probably his fundamental contribution was in his investigation of meaning,
which led on the one hand into semantics, the science of signs and sign interpretation, and
on the other into the scrupulous explications of poems as illustrated by the work, for
example, of Empson and Blackmur.
Besides the important contributions of Eliot and Richards, a factor in the development
of formalistic criticism was the reaction against the Victorian and Neo-humanist emphasis
on the moral uses of literature, the academic interest in historical and literary tradition and
the biography of the author, and the willingness of impressionists to make of each literary
experience an odyssey of the critic's personality. It is also likely that there was some reaction
against the Marxist's stress on social values, and the psychological stress on the neuroses
of writers. In any case, the atmosphere of the thierties was ripe for just such an approach
as the formalistic critics then began to practice.
Though there are considerable differences among these “new” critics, they are best
defined by their common beliefs, attitudes, and practices. Primarily they regard poetry as a
valid source of knowledge that cannot be communicated in terms other than its own. This
 68

leads them to shun all material such as the personal or social conditions behind the
composition, the moral implications, and so on, so long as these are, “extrinsic”-that is,
tangential to an understanding of the poem, and to concentrate on the structure of each
poem, or on elements of that structure as they relate to the total poetic experience. Robert
Penn Warren puts it this way: “Poetry does not in here in any particular element but depends
upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem.”? The critic, then,
examines these elements in their interconnections, assuming that the meaning is made up
of matters of form (meter, image, diction, and so forth) and matters of content (tone, theme,
and so forth) working not separately but together. The closeness of reading required by
such a method has existed before, wherever an analytic reader has approached literature,
but it has come to seem the signature of the “new” criticism. The central position and many
particular applications are to be found in Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, 1938.
Although many ontological critics have disagreed with one or more of their dicta, the
introduction gathers forcefully and clearly all the essential elements of the formalistic
approach.
So vigorous a movement was bound to be attacked and surely some of the attacks
validly reflect its limitations. The most tangential disapprobation is by Kazin, who deplores
the cliquishness of the tactics and their tendency to develop a terminology that approaches
jargon, thereby excluding those who are not initiated members of the society. Perhaps, too,
the special vocabulary has permitted some with insufficient imagination or taste to ride the
bandwagon. R. S. Crane has protested the establishment of Brooks' “paradox” (or of
Ransom's “texture,” Tate's “tension,” or Empson's “ambiguities”) as the sole principle of
poetry. This goes along with L. C. Knights's and F. R. Leavis' accusation that Empson
and Richards have isolated one part of the work of art for examination, forgetting the poem
as a totality. Even John Crowe Ransom, the Dean of the group, has protested, in
commenting on Brooks' Well Wrought Urn, the use of analysis to such an extreme that the
sense of the whole is lost in the study of a part. R. P. Blackmur, himself an insider, writes
that method deals chiefly with “the executive technique of poetry (and only with a part of
that) or with the general the Yeats-Eliot school of modern poetry, and less effectively
literature to man as more than an aesthetic being have been some extent met this stricture
by asserting that the ontological approach can establish the literary quality of a work, but
that other methods are necessary to determine its greatness. Since his religious conversion,
he himself has been concerned with the formal aspects of art when he writes closely of
particular pieces, and with the philosophic values of art in his more general essays. The
mention of R. S. Crane's censure prompts some attention to the dissidence between the
formalists and the “Chicago” School. The public nature of the debate suggests they are
irreconcilable antagonists; actually theirs is a family quarrel. Both are chiefly concerned
with “internal” analysis of the work of art, eschewing social, moral, philosophical, and
personal material as irrelevant; both insist on close textual study. But the Chicago critic
makes a strong plea for a basic aesthetic, of an Aristotelian sort, in order to differentiate
between species of works of art, and to deduce the rules for each particular kind accordingly.
Crane describes the method as one which
seeks to appraise a writer's performance in a given work in relation to the
nature and requirements of the particular task he has set
himself, the assumed end being the perfection of the work as an artistic whole
of the special kind he decided it should be.
 69

From this point of view, the formalistic critic examines the total poem without proper
regard for the species of which it is an example, thus failing to distinguish between the broad
genres (drama, novel, lyric, epic) or, still less, between subspecies (one kind of tragedy,
perhaps mimetic, as opposed to another, perhaps didactic).
A second point of disagreement is that the Chicago critic charges the ontological writer
with monism. He himself is prepared to welcome social, moral, historical aspects of the
work-after the analysis of the parts and their propriety according to the rules of the species-
as of value in recognizing the supra-aesthetic significance of the experience. W. K. Wimsatt,
Jr., in rebuttal disputes the value of dealing with species, genres, and subspecies. Such
categories are too rigid, and tend to blind the critic to elements that are actually operating
in the literary work, when such elements are not required by the species. He also arraigns
the “Neo-Aristotelians” for going outside the poem-not to history, psychology, or morality,
but to a theory of the genre by which to judge the particular instance. This leads to the
fallacy of evaluating a work according to the intention of the author.
Both sides, being seriously devoted to the problems of criticism, toss charges of
dogmatism and narrowness at each other. But the quarrel is really between Saul and David;
the differences between themselves are not nearly so great as those between them and other
kinds of critics. The kinship can be seen when the exposition of theory is abandoned, and
the critical performance begins; compare, for example, the study of “Sailing to Byzantinm”
by Elder Olson (Chicago) with that of “Among School Children” by Brooks (Formalistic), in
The Well Wrought Urn. Probably no approach can boast so many brilliant practitioners as
the Formalistic. Empson, Blackmur, Tate, Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn
Warren are only the best known; there are many others who have contributed essays to
periodicals, with equal rigor and insight.
4.8.3 Summary of James Smith’s “As You Like It”
James Smith, a formalistic critic analyses Shakespeare’s play AS YOU LIKE IT, a
romantic comedy applying the tools of formalistic criticism. The play is generally called as
a romantic comedy, but he calls as unromantic. He starts with Jaques’s melancholy, it is
not innate in nature. It is assumed, he compares Jaques with Macbeth and Hamlet. The
melancholy of both Macbeth and Hamlet seems to be genuine while Jaques is unreal and
artificial.
During the course of play, Jaques doesn’t engage in travel, he frequently changes not
his surrounding but his interlocutor. He indulges the habit of gossip, which is a traveller
immobilized. Time hangs heavy on Hamlet’s, it is the most obvious point of resemblance
between him and Jaques. In another tragedy, time hangs on Macbeth’s hand. He finds
himself incapable of believing in the reality even of his wife’s death. Macbeth is rudely
shaken when he is informed that Lady Macbeth is dead. He loses interest in the worldly life.
He says,
“Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.
The pathetic cry of the villainous character elevates him to the level of a tragic hero.
Hamlet is too young to commit the murder. He, therefore procrastinates, which snowballs
into a great problem and results in his melancholy. He cries thus “To be or not to be…” the
melancholy of Jaques is forced to him through his “wide travel”. Even Rosalind finds out
the nature of his grief. She, therefore, prefers a clown like Jaques. Skepticism of a kind is
also similar it is obvious that Hamlet speaks with a disgust or an impatience, Macbeth with
 70

a weariness, which Jaques are unknown. Anticipating a little, it might be said that Macbeth
and Hamlet lead a fuller, a more complete life than Jaques.
One consequence is that they cannot easily be betrayed into action. Whereas Jaques
looks back without regret, even with complacency, on his travel, it is only with reluctance
that Macbeth lapses into the habit of fighting for fighting sake. Hamlet’s melancholy is
caused by the sin of others and Macbeth’s by the sin of his own, so Jaques -if the Duke is
to be trusted -has not only travelled but been ….. a libertine,/As
sensual as the brutish sting itself.
The cure for all three is very much same. Fortinbras( his friend) reproaches Hamlet,
and Hamlet reproaches himself, with lacking a “hue of resolution,” which, as it is “native” is
a defect he should not possess; Macbeth contrasts the division of counsels within him,
suspending activity, with the strong monarchy or “single state” enjoyed in the healthy man
by the reason.
Silvius, Touchstone, Orlando, the Duke, each has melancholy of their own; and so
too has Rosalind, in so far as she is in love with Orlando. Touchstone is unromantic.
Although he falls in love with Audrey the Shepherdess, his love for Audrey is nor sincere,
neither genuine. He wants to marry her with the help of the priest and dessert her later.
His division of human life into seven stages is also unromantic. He seems to be more
pessimistic than romantic. Rosalind the protagonist of the play also seems to be unromantic
in nature. It is true that she falls in love with Orlando. But the fact remains that she has
not fallen headlong in love with him. She tries to cure the melody of her lover with wolves
howling at the moon during the night. Thus the characters are unromantic and full of
melancholy. Thus, James Smith, one of the great exponents of formalistic criticism finds
the similarities in Shakespeare’s characters in both his comedy and tragedy.
4.9 ASSIGNMENTS
Write in about 400 words on the following topics:
1. Formalistic Criticism
2. The New Criticism
3. The Great Exponents of Formalistic Criticism
4.10 SUGGESTED READINGS
1. Blackmur, R.P. The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1962.
2. ---. The Expense of Greatness. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.
3. ---. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954.
4. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
5. Dowling,William C. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative. Notre Dame UP, 2011.
6. Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.
7. Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP,
1981.
8. Warren, Robert Penn. Understanding Poetry. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1987.
9. ---. “Pure and Impure Poetry.” The Kenyon Review Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring, 1943): 228-
254.
10. Geoffrey Hartman, “Beyond Formalism”, from Beyond Formalism (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 42–57
 71

11. Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum”, Critical Inquiry 2 (Spring 1976): 465–85
12. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism”, from The New Historicism,
Harold Veeser, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 37–48
13. http://www.sou.edu/English/IDTC/Paradigm/formal.html
14. http://www.sou.edu/ENGLISH/IDTC/People/theory/therists.html
15. http://www.assumption.edu/users/ady/HHGateway/Gateway/Approaches.html#
New%20Criticism/Formalism
16. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/understanding-poetry.html
17. http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Continental/(Post)Structural
isms/Foucauldian/Foucault/Foucault.html
18. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary
_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/formalism.html
4.11 LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Read As You Like It and try to apply formalistic approach to the play.