Spencer Brown

SOURCE: "The Odor of Durability," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXVI, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 146-52.

[Brown is an American poet and critic. In the following review, he commends the essays of E. B. White and John McPhee.]

Two of our foremost essayists have appeared almost simultaneously in retrospective volumes. E. B. White's selection from his own essays [Essays of E. B. White, 1977], is a companion to his collected letters published in 1976, and an anthology from John McPhee's dozen books [The John McPhee Reader, 1977], has been edited with great understanding and taste by William L. Howarth.

White describes himself alternately as essayist and as journalist. McPhee clearly considers himself a journalist. White being intensely personal and McPhee apparently impersonal, they have little in common but excellence and the same employer—the New Yorker, whose pages they have enriched and influenced. White's influence and enrichment, of course, are the greater; he is older by a generation.

White's position in the essay, indeed, is that of the schooner America off the Isle of Wight. "Who is second?" asks Queen Victoria. "Madam, there is no second." White has been our preeminent essayist so long that many would say there is no other. If you want to know what the modern informal essay is, you must read One Man's Meat or The Second Tree from the Corner or The Points of My Compass. Here you find both the best and the only true exemplar—a precise definition of a classic, as, for example, Milton is the English epic. When White tells us that he has chosen a few of his pieces that seem "to have the odor of durability clinging to them," we feel confident that here, as always, his nose knows. Yet I am a bit disappointed that he didn't wish to be remembered also by "The Door"—if it is an essay—surely one of his most remarkable achievements. Perhaps he considers it already anthologized enough, or bravura and therefore too easy.

Elsewhere I have tried to make a case for White as poet. He is so in part but not altogether. The poet writes with his ear cocked for sounds: for him, in the beginning was the Word. White writes more with his eye on the object. He seeks and often attains a precision so deft that it does soar off the ground into poetry. He is also so enchanted by the very words that he often adopts the other, the poet's, direct way—especially in his reminiscence "Years of Wonder," which recounts his journey to Alaska in 1923, drawing heavily and amusedly from his journal kept on the voyage. "Alaskan towns," wrote White of 1923, "are just murmurings at the foot of mountains." White of 1961 writes: "Sandburg had me by the throat in those days." Later: "A lookout had been posted on the forecastlehead and Tony, the giant Negro watchman, was heaving the lead. Although I was busy getting squared away in my new job, my journal for that date contains a long, fancy description of the heaving of the lead. I was tired, but not too tired for a burst of showy prose." Self-mockery, the lightest fluff of romantic irony, makes the best of both past and present.

Like White's letters this essay suggests the extraordinary unity of his career. He portrays himself as socially gawky, financially feckless, vocationally indecisive; also single-minded in his ambition for literary success, into which, over the years, he continually sidles, each time as astonished as Dumbo to find himself up so high and yet gratified that dedicated skill has won superiority over a slovenly and illiterate world.

"The essayist," says White in his foreword, "is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." It is, if you can write like White. One such thing, for him, is birds, from city pigeons to the Harris's sparrow he saw in Maine, "at least a thousand miles from where he belonged"; and one of the pleasantest of the essays is "Mr. Forbush's Friends," concerning a three-volume work on the birds of Massachusetts. White's professional conscience only moderates his admiration: "If Edward Howe Forbush's prose is occasionally overblown, this results from a genuine ecstasy in the man, rather than from a lack of discipline. Reading the essays, one shares his ecstasy." So too is White's ecstasy genuine, though the prose is scarcely overblown.

Even casual readers of the New Yorker have long been aware of White's style and observing eye. The author has generously included in his selection a number of such long-esteemed or even famous pieces as "Coon Tree," "Death of a Pig," "Bedfellows," and "Once More to the Lake." These and others like them, about his farm and life in Maine, give the characteristic flavor to the book—a flavor compounded of shrewd insight, hindsight, and artfully rambling structure. "Bedfellows," ostensibly a memorial for White's disreputable and mendacious dog Fred, actually ruminates on politics, democracy, the nurture of heterodoxy, and the shadow of death—not Fred's death, but, one might say,

It is the blight man was born for,
It is E. B. White you mourn for.

The structure of a White essay resembles the configurations of a corps de ballet, in its confusing and harmonious and interlacing whirls of snowy tutus, gliding long-legged on point (in what Noel Coward once called a pas de tout) into the predestined arrangement. White's genius is in expatiation, in byways. He is not a thinker; he is a wry observer; but he achieves peripheral vision.

Yet his elegantly controlled digressions are less remarkable than the sentences they ride on. And since we are more familiar with his notes on Maine than with his Florida pieces, it is in the latter that we can best admire his quality. In "The Ring of Time," after a tenderly ironic picture of a girl training as a rider in the circus winter quarters, he writes:

It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him. At any rate, it is worth reporting that long before the circus comes to town, its most notable performances have already been given. Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources—from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

Like the two greatest American poets, Dickinson and Frost, White can become exasperatingly cute; but normally he is saved from cuteness by humor that they achieve only irregularly. Though he may pose as much as they, his poses are more natural and less noticeable. Wilbur, the hero of Charlotte's Weh, is SOME PIG, but at the last triumphs by being HUMBLE.

White's sentences can be sharp and memorable. His first view of Siberia: "On shore we could see dogs curled up asleep among patches of tired snow." On the USSR: "The West has a real genius for doing approximately what the East wants it to do." "The side that enjoys numerical superiority stands to gain by disarmament, the side that does not have any intention of remaining unarmed for more than a few minutes stands to gain, and the side that uses the lie as an instrument of national policy stands to gain. If disarmament carried no chance of advantage, Mr. Khrushchev would not be wasting his breath on it." On Thoreau: "It is probably no harder to eat a woodchuck than to construct a sentence that lasts a hundred years."

The essay on Thoreau, "A Slight Sound at Evening," deliberately points up the differences between White and Thoreau. Thoreau's humor—what there is of it—is savage. White's is tolerant—with teeth. Thoreau's finest sentences are those of an angry man. Says White: "Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world (and not be derailed by a mosquito wing) and the urge to set the world straight. One cannot join these two successfully, but sometimes, in rare cases, something good or even great results from the attempt of the tormented spirit to reconcile them."

White loves the past. His is true nostalgia, full of detailed knowledge, avoiding stock responses. He is too humorous to be overtly sentimental, and usually too accurate. The Model-T Ford, which he eulogizes as mechanically uncanny in "Farewell, My Lovely!", was really not better than its successor. "Here Is New York" shows the city in 1948 as safer and kinder than it is now. White considers this essay a period piece, written about New York emerging from the depression. He loved it, though its face even then was pockmarked.

He is at his best when nostalgia merges with current observation and when the drift toward sentimentality turns to genuine emotion:

Here in New England, each season carries a hundred foreshadowings of the season that is to follow—which is one of the things I love about it. Winter is rough and long, but spring lies all round about. Yesterday, a small white keel feather escaped from my goose and lodged in the bank boughs near the kitchen porch, where I spied it as I came home in the cold twilight. The minute I saw the feather, I was projected into May, knowing that a barn swallow would be along to claim the prize and use it to decorate the front edge of its nest. Immediately, the December air seemed full of wings of swallows and the warmth of barns. Swallows, I have noticed, never use any feather but a white one in their nestbuilding, and they always leave a lot of it showing, which makes me believe that they are interested not in the feather's insulating power but in its reflecting power, so that when they skim into the dark barn from the bright outdoors they will have a beacon to steer by.

In contrast to all this, John McPhee is journalist rather than essayist, not the only journalist though one of the best. McPhee rejoiceth not in uniquity but rejoiceth in the truth. Perhaps his vision of truth is what makes him appear unique.

William L. Howarth's brilliant introduction focuses on McPhee's awesomely organized methods of work: weeks, months of interviews, neutral listening (utterly unlike the television interviewer's pushiness: "And how did you feel when you saw your baby burned to death?"), acres of notes, shuffling and reshuffling of index cards, decisions on structure; the writing comes last of all.

McPhee's range is so extensive that it is astonishing how one man can encompass it. Surely no one could be an expert in tennis and basketball, nuclear physics, irrigation and river control, urban blight, the wilderness, and artistic treasures and forgeries—a partial summary of The McPhee Reader. Presumably his interest in each field is what originally dictates his choice of subject. Once made, the choice demands total research and total recall, since so much material comes from conversations and scenes that could not be fully noted on the spot. (He does not use a tape-recorder, for fear of inhibiting his speakers.) Like a top-flight novelist McPhee has the knack of creating at least the illusion of mastery, through his skill in setting down characteristic speech and his excellence in narrative.

Ernest Hemingway says that the extent and accuracy of a writer's knowledge of some activity will altogether determine the quality of his writing about it. The slightest ignorance will betray itself or will make the reader uneasy. (Hemingway implies, of course, that his own profound competence in all human arts, from sex to war to hunting and bullfighting, produces the splendor of his style.) McPhee writes as if he subscribes to this principle. He seems to sound the depths of whatever he studies, yet his approach is almost always through a person rather than directly toward a subject. His exposition depends on the methods of fiction, and his best pages remind us forcibly of the best stories of Kipling, or the marvelous technical descriptions in Richard Hughes's In Hazard—the same clarity and offhand savoir faire. McPhee makes every reader wish to be an expert in each field of discourse. He is both a stimulator of intellectual curiosity and a showman who plays on the gee-whiz emotion.

McPhee likes to work on a frame. Sometimes it is a little gimmicky, as in "The Search for Marvin Gardens," where he laminates bits of description of the decay of Atlantic City with bits of the game Monopoly, which happens to use the street-names and geography of that city. Sometimes it is a structure that he himself arranged: the furious dialogue between conservationist David Brower and dambuilder Floyd Dominy grew out of a trip down the Colorado that McPhee maneuvered them into; or the tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, a videotape of which McPhee used to draw from each player just how he had felt and thought at each point. In "The Pine Barrens" and "A Roomful of Hovings" he is more direct, though he plunges in medias res and flashes back and forward freely in time and place. (In Coming into the Country, a study of Alaska not included in The McPhee Reader, he uses the proposed relocation of the state capital as the thread to string exploration and interviews on.)

"The Curve of Binding Energy" and "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" are more ambitious, studying respectively: effects of atomic bombs and the chances of their extracurricular manufacture, and an extraordinary series of experiments with the idea of an airship (not an airplane—an airship). Both demonstrate McPhee's peculiar strength and also a weakness in the Reader. Wishing to show as many sides of McPhee as possible in a compendious book, Howarth has necessarily limited the length of each selection. Consequently a reader unfamiliar with the whole work thus abridged may easily be confused. The fault is partly McPhee's: it is nearly impossible to figure out (even in the original length) what happened and what would happen to the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed—though I doubt if many readers stop reading, so compelling is the narrative drive. But this book does have the inevitable defect of an anthology of fragments: it cannot but distort.

Many of McPhee's pieces resemble the biographical sketches in Dos Passos's US.A.—in overwhelming richness of detail, in speed, in absorption with the person. But Dos Passos is more outside his character, usually satirical, always detached. And though McPhee is well aware of his characters' flaws, he so sinks himself into another man that his own vigorous personality vanishes; it comes as a shock when I appears in propria persona, complete with glinting wit.

His ability to merge with a character can lead him astray. In his study of Frank Boyden, "Headmaster," McPhee's admiration climbs through the words, and a kind of preachiness takes over; he forgets to show us and tells us instead. We are less than convinced. Somewhat similar is "A Roomful of Hovings." Hoving is no doubt a genius; but some of his mental feats here recorded stretch credulity; and not everything he and his family have done is admirable. The elder Hoving, enormously wealthy, refused to pay his son's graduate-school tuition; so Hoving won a scholarship—which someone else would have really needed.

McPhee's "nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." If this is sometimes a defect, it can also account for the superb coloring of everything he does. The material is the style—seemingly only functional yet possessed of sharp individuality. If you chance to open the New Yorker in the midst of a McPhee profile, you spot it at once: the direct, subject-verb, connectiveless sentences; the infallible vocabulary; the richness and speed. Like the Colorado River through the canyon in his unsurpassed description, he sweeps you along.

McPhee and White are not really alike except in one way: in the preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth said he sought "a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect"; and he wished "to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature." The poet's prosy formulation states what these two distinguished prose writers have consistently achieved.

J. P. Riquelme

SOURCE: "The Modernist Essay: The Case of T. S. Eliot—Poet as Critic," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 21, No. 4, Autumn, 1985, pp. 1024-32.

[An American educator and critic, Riquelme is the author of book-length studies of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. In the following essay, Riquelme analyzes Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as an "exemplary Modernist essay. 'I

The triumph is the triumph of style.…Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.

—Virginia Woolf, "The Modern Essay"

Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor.

—Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"

The modernist essay emerges as part of the reaction against Matthew Arnold that is characteristic of Modernism. Arnold expresses his sense of the secondary function of criticism in his famous 1864 lecture at Oxford on "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." There he asserts that the "aim of criticism" is not the passing of judgment, though it is judgment's precursor, but the achieving of accurate perception through procedures exercised by a "disinterested curiosity." The critic strives "to see the object as in itself it really is." The most forceful early counter to Arnold's attitude toward criticism as less independent and less worthy than creation comes from Oscar Wilde in his volume Intentions (1891), especially in the essay in dialogue form, "The Critic as Artist," originally published as "The True Function and Value of Criticism: with Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing." For Wilde, criticism's aim is to see the object as it is not, and this aim is never disinterested and never just a procedure. And it need not be pursued through the style of high seriousness that Arnold adopted. By both assertion and example, Wilde makes claims for criticism that are at least as wide-ranging and, in the results, at least as successful as any we encounter nowadays. With the combined force of Ruskin and Pater as precursors to aid him, Wilde is able to create a crucial, liberating turning point in late nineteenth-century English letters. Wilde heralds the essay's importance as a literary form that would become the sibling of Modernist poetry and fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, but one that academic literary criticism continues largely to neglect. Despite this relative neglect, a surprising number of essays written by Wilde's Modernist descendants—Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett, among others—have achieved the status so many contemporary critics desire for their works in prose: the status of being recognized as literature.

The Modernist essay is not easy of definition, and that is one of its characteristics, for it is not produced by an academic writer interested in adhering to the conventions of argumentation and decorum practiced by a community of established literary critics. The refusal of adherence takes on a variety of stylistic manifestations, markedly different from those of conventionally expository and interpretative literary critical essays. Because of its multiplicity and difference, the Modernist essay cannot be conveniently fitted either into the category of literary criticism or into literary criticism's categories. In part out of lack of another term, we call it an essay because it is a relatively short work in prose, but neither a short story nor a scientific or quasi-scientific report. Generally, it is a commentary dealing with art or literature whose function is not primarily expository and whose mode of procedure is not necessarily strictly logical. Its function is to help make possible the creation of a new kind of artwork, of which it may itself be an example and not just a precursor. Our response upon encountering an example of the form may resemble Samuel Beckett's in "Three Dialogues," where he says, "I don't know what it is, having never seen anything like it before." On this unashamedly flexible and general account, even a portion of another text, such as the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses, if taken in isolation from its fictional context, could be considered a Modernist essay. In this case, the episode is, in fact, one of the precursors of Beckett's "Three Dialogues," which is both essay and literary text masquerading as an interview. The clear distinctions between genres have largely disappeared.

I take as an exemplary Modernist essay, but by no means as a paradigm—this particular literary form always refusing to conform to any prescriptive pattern—, T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Several reasons stand behind the choice. Eliot has consistently been the most badly treated of the major Modernist writers by the contemporary neo-Romantic reaction against Modernism that, in one of its forms, wishes to see the emergence of a creative criticism. Such a creative criticism has already been achieved in this and other Modernist essays. In addition, this specific essay is quite possibly the most widely anthologized literary essay of the twentieth century. It was so widely anthologized by 1964 that Eliot complained of its omnipresence in the preface to the reissuing of The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism, a volume that he hoped might provide anthologists with other material. The essay has now become so familiar to us that we take it largely for granted. It has been put to rest—buried as a dead part of the tradition—by our excessive contact with it. To read the essay as if it were readily intelligible, that is, under our control, is a serious failure of literary understanding, for such a reading is unable to recognize the continuing and permanent nature of the essay's radical qualities. It is not merely revolutionary in a specific historical situation that has now passed; it is perpetually revolutionary because of certain curious and compelling features of style.

Eliot's achievement as an essayist has been considerably misunderstood by those who claim that his reformulations of the English poetic tradition failed to turn back through logical argument the assertion that the poems of Dryden and Pope were, in Arnold's catchy phrase, "classics of our prose." Eliot was, in fact, not involved in redefining the canon only by means of conventional literary critical argumentation. In addition, through his writing practice, he changed our understanding of the possibilities for expression in prose. He answered Arnold in effect by taking the writing of prose seriously. For Eliot, who sees the real possibility of something new coming into being, something that transforms the way we think in the present, thereby transforming the past, the critical project is indistinguishable from the poetic one. That something new need not be limited to poetry; it may well occur through and as prose.

In his writing practice Eliot implicitly rejects the simplistic association of literary forms with separable functions of mind. Prose need not be seen as a mimetic manifestation of critical, rational thinking, for it can involve a mixture in which creative and critical have indissolubly merged. Such prose may at times be both necessary to the creating of poetry and in many ways identical to it as to function and certain aspects of style. One function of prose so conceived is to act as both evidence and occasion for the bringing of new work into existence, perhaps quite different work implicated in the writing of the prose, but even the prose work itself as that something new. The style of such new work, whether in verse or in prose or possibly in both, strives to reach a maximal intensity, expressing and evoking a meaning and experience that could not be otherwise expressed and evoked. Section two of part five of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen Dedalus writes his villanelle, would be an example of a work that uses both verse and prose in order to represent the verse's creation. That representation embedded in prose is itself an example of the truly new text, though in this case it is a work of fiction. If the prose is really new, then the technical means employed to reach the necessary intensity will vary from other works. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" involves the creating of something new in both ways: as one of the precursors of The Waste Land and simultaneously as that poem's prose counterpart, going beyond the conventional literary essay to reach the status of literature. The essay reaches that status because, despite its ostensible familiarity, the more closely we look at its argument, organization, and even sentence structure, the stranger it becomes.

We can see this strangeness especially clearly at the end of the essay, in the oft-quoted concluding sentence of part III:

And he [the poet] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

At the beginning of this final section, only a single paragraph in length, Eliot claims that the essay "proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to … practical conclusions." But it does not halt at the frontier of what might be expected in the style and structure of a literary essay in the Arnoldean tradition. It crosses that frontier most prominently in the final sentence. We might recall at this point the distinction Eliot makes briefly in the concluding pages of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) between poems that have "'meaning'" in order "to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him" and those other poems, presumably Modernist ones, that pursue different possibilities entirely through the attenuating of meaning in the ordinary sense. The conclusion of "Tradition" also pursues those different possibilities. This is not to say that the sentence is nonsense, but it goes beyond the making of ordinary sense because of its resonance and complexity, generated by repetition and contrast within the sentence and within the essay at large. The repetition and contrast within the sentence are clear enough. They are part of the reason we do not grasp any simple, determinate significance when we read or hear the whole sentence and attempt a semantic interpretation: it is too complicated to be taken in all at once. But the sentence also does not yield an easily restatable meaning when we break it into parts for analysis, for it is organized antithetically, by contrasts that work through both multiple repetition and multiple antitheses. If we follow the to-and-fro, fro-and-to shifting, our engagement is decidedly temporal, in a way that does not result in a meaning that can be grasped instantaneously in overview.

Both grammatically and logically, the sentence is a multiple antithetical construction. The basic construction clearly announces an apparently controlling contrast through the use of "not" in counterpoint to "unless" and "but." Eliot uses constructions involving such contrasts regularly in the other essays collected in The Sacred Wood, for example, in the short pieces grouped under the rubric "Imperfect Critics." None of these other sentences, however, achieves a comparable complexity of structure and implication, for in "Tradition," the negation by contrast is repeated and then repeated again. Each repetition, which is also a contrast, modifies our sense of all the others. The contrast between "not likely to know" and the first dependent clause beginning with "unless" seems clear enough and easily graspable, until we reach the relative clause, "what is not," used as a substantive within the dependent clause, for the second "not" repeats the first one literally at the same time as it stands in contrast to it in context. The complications increase when we discover that the second "not" is linked to the "but" that follows shortly. Now, not just "not," but "not … but" repeats the whole "not… unless" construction while it also forms a part of it. And the antithesis with reversal is repeated again in the second, parallel subordinate clause, with its "unless … not…, but." When we compare the parallel dependent clauses, the contrasts that are also virtually repetitions proliferate. "What is not… but" is matched, but not repeated in form or meaning by "not of what is …, but of what is.…" "Merely the present" and "the past" occupy the same respective positions in the first as "what is dead" and "living" do in the second. The repetitions create alignments of meaning where semantically a contrast would otherwise stand. The connotations and the repetitions in structure, together with variations and reversals, combine to make each contrast and each repetition modify the possible meanings of their counterparts and antitheses in other parts of the sentence. In the other essays of The Sacred Wood, the constructions employing "not" and "but" generally function as part of Eliot's effort to achieve the sort of balanced judgments through point-counterpoint that he praises in his commendation of Samuel Johnson as a model for critics in the "Introduction." The wildly complicated construction at the end of "Tradition" has little to do with balance, unless we understand that concept anew, dynamically, as an uneasy equilibrium produced by antitheses in interaction.

Such an analysis can help clarify the sentence's potentially dizzying effect on the reader, but it does not provide a clue to its meaning that can be applied semantically to produce a convincing, explanatory translation. The analysis suggests instead that the sentence's meanings are in flux, though not necessarily haphazardly so. It complicates rather than simplifies our sense of the reading process, which we now realize involves an encounter with multiple antitheses in a series of repetitions. Tropologically, we can describe the construction as a rhetorical process of transformation structured as a chiasmus within a chiasmus. We have a repetition and reversal, as in chiasmus, with the complication that the repetition and reversal have also been repeated in such a way as to include reversals. To use a German word, which Eliot himself employs in his essay on Massinger to describe some lines by Tourneur and Middleton, we find "meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings." The word evokes something like the fitting of Chinese boxes inside one another. Or we might think of anastomoses, the way veins in plants and animals merge with other veins through a system of tiny, articulating connections. This is a special kind of sentence in Eliot's prose, though by no means unique, whose resonance and appeal arise in part from syntactical and semantic complexities crafted into a rhythmic sequence of contrasts within contrasts. Such complexities can set us into a kind of mental activity in response that is not often engendered by a literary essay. But the sentence from "Tradition" exerts a special concluding force, because it has the rest of the essay as prelude and context. The essay has already given us, through the two analogies of parts I and II, a double antithetical structure, like the structure of meaning we are able to realize through our enactment and enact through our realization of the ending's syntactical and rhetorical play. In addition, through the shifts in style and focus from part to part, a stylistic pressure and thematic dissonance have built up that are brought to fulfillment by the reversals within reversals of the final sentence.

The large structure of the entire essay is reflected in the ending. The congruence amidst and by means of heterogeneous complications between whole and part gives the essay a great deal of its special force. It does so because the whole-to-part relationship of synecdoche is combined inextricably with the disjunctive, dialectical interplay of irony. Part reflects whole but only by reflecting the whole as an uneasy interaction of parts. This conjoining of synecdoche with irony amounts to a Modernist critique and revision of Organicist attitudes. As in the sentence, the parts of the essay may be said to overlap, that is, to interact, and to be in parallel at the same time as they differ significantly. The overlap is indicated in a straightforward way at the end of the first two parts, when the focus is shifted toward what will be developed in the part to come. The essay is structured like a complex sentence in which two segments, parts I and II, are set in parallel at the same time as they stand in antithetical relationship to one another. This structure of simultaneous contrast and parallelism is most obvious in Eliot's use of analogies in place of more conventional argumentation to make his case, which, bluntly stated, is a case against Romanticism as a tradition that had become a moribund cliche still refusing to die. Eliot carefully chooses his analogies to propose antithetical alternatives to conventional Romantic ones; that is, the alternatives are at once antithetical to the conventions and to one another. How fair Eliot is to Romanticism is not at issue here, for the essay is not working in service to balanced judgment but in service to an impulse to write that must express itself in new ways.

Eliot's strategy is to attack Organicist visions of both literary history and literary creation, which he sees as the debased, unusable tradition of Romantic thinking. In part I, he rejects the notion that literary history, and by implication history in any form, is teleologically oriented, developing with a clear direction like an organism either growing or evolving toward a higher state that carries with it in some direct way the stages that have preceded. In place of growth and evolution, he describes a model that also has an organic aspect but not the same one. This aspect is something like homeostasis. Literary history is not to be thought of as growing and improving gradually in a foreseeable direction but as simply changing in response to new stimuli on the way to achieving again temporary homeostasis. This conception of history as involving mutation, or disruption, and eventual homeostasis rather than continuous growth stands in contrast to both the ideology of Imperialism—that is, of Social-Darwinism—and the tenets of Marxism, with their common heritage of teleological views of history. The other aspect of Organicism that Eliot rejects is the notion of the poet's mind as sensitive plant. Here his choice of analogy from inorganic chemistry, the catalyst that remains unchanged in the chemical reaction though it enables it, is antithetical to the conventional Romantic conception of the poet's role.

With the introduction of the second analogy, the complications, like those of the sentence's construction, arise, for this analogy is built around an inorganic process, while the first one is still basically organic, though not teleologically so. Both analogies challenge by implication the debased Romantic conventions, but they also reflect through the antithesis of organic with inorganic a sensitivity to an abiding dissonance. As Eliot understood, such dissonance accompanies any serious attempt to conceptualize about history and mind together rather than about one or the other separately. The recognition that this and related dissonances are incapable of being assimilated smoothly into any conceptual system relying primarily on one kind of rhetorical figure, as Organicism relies on synecdoche, forms another, perhaps the boldest, aspect of the position Eliot takes against Romanticism and its heritage. The essential role of contradiction in the critique of Romanticism, understood as aligned with Organicist attitudes toward history and mind, helps explain and justify the complexity of the essay's final sentence.

The intensity that the style of "Tradition" reaches in its ending belies the clear distinction many critics have tried to make between Eliot's work as poet and his work as critic. In his well-known essay, "Poetry and Drama" (1951), Eliot formulates in one way the stylistic ideal he strives for, here with specific reference to his attempt to write verse drama:

… if our verse is to have so wide a range that it can say anything that has to be said, it follows that it will not be "poetry" all the time. It will only be "poetry" when the dramatic situation has reached such a point of intensity that poetry becomes the natural utterance, because then it is the only language in which the emotions can be expressed at all.

Achieving this ideal of a flexible style is also one goal of Eliot's work three decades earlier in both verse and prose. We can reformulate Eliot's statement for this earlier, and in certain regards more general, context pertaining to the relationship of prose to verse: If our prose is to have so wide a range that it can say anything that has to be said, it follows that it will at times come close to being "poetry." It will only do so when the critical situation has become critical in another sense; when the issues and the argument reach a point of such intensity that prose of the usual sort is left behind, because then the new style is the only one in which the necessary complexity can be expressed at all. The fact that Eliot continued working in both poetry and prose throughout his career points to his abiding interest in developing a range of styles. Within that range, the wide latitude in style and the resulting possibility of new juxtapositions and combinations of styles make possible the simultaneous representation and evocation of aporia. This evocation is one of the goals of the flexible style. As in the ending of "Tradition," the style communicates the grounds for its own intensity by reflecting in its movement the contradictory structure of the dissonance as source. Because of that movement, the essay remains permanently outside what we can call, following Beckett, "the domain of the feasible."

The Modernist essay, for which I have taken "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as primary example, is a literary form that cannot justifiably be evaluated by a mimetic standard. This is true in at least two senses. It is not merely a reflection of either some ostensible object of study or of a faculty of mind that we might just as well call reason rather than the critical faculty. It moves beyond the function of critical exposition and outside the control of the conventionally assumed Arnoldean constraints of both the object and reason. Its power inheres largely in its style, which it draws round us, shutting us in, not out, by giving us an experience of meaning that goes beyond semantics. We can say of Eliot, as of other writers of Modernist essays, what Eliot said of F. H. Bradley: "Certainly one of the reasons for the power he still exerts, as well as an indubitable claim to permanence, is his great gift of style." Eliot's most original contribution as a critic is his prose style, through which he responds effectively to the Arnoldean distinction in value between poetry and prose. In reading "Tradition and the Individual Talent," we can experience the aporia of the title when the essay's structure and style evoke in us the interplay of reciprocal relations in a continuous process of exchange. This process in itself is not wholly describable by means of the formulations of reason yoked to the thematic semantics of critical exposition. We can come close to an adequate description in one way by comparing its images and structure to those of some Modernist poems. We encounter, to our surprise and against our expectation, because the form is prose but not fictional, a phenomenon closer to Yeats's "Byzantium" and "Those images that yet / Fresh images beget" than to anything Matthew Arnold was able to write in either prose or verse. The triumph is the triumph of style.

Charles O'Neill

SOURCE: "The Essay as Aesthetic Ritual: W. B. Yeats and Ideas of Good and Evil," in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, edited by Alexander J. Butrym, The University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 126-36.

[O'Neill is an American-born educator and critic. In the following essay, he discusses William Butler Yeats's essays collected in Ideas of Good and Evil as reflective of aesthetic and philosophical principles that were current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.]

Virginia Woolf claims that the essay "should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last." These words apply literally to the essays of William Butler Yeats. Most often consulted as explanatory material for the poetry and plays, Yeats's many essays exist in their own right as unique examples of the modern essayist's art. I will consider Yeats's early essays with a view to accounting for the "spell" they cast no matter how often they are read.

At the end of his career, Yeats wrote, "As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect." This statement applies as much to his prose as to his poetry. Yeats wrote essays throughout his life for many purposes: to create audiences for his diverse interests, to explain his esoteric beliefs, and to reflect on his art and on his life. The Autobiographies volume is actually a series of more or less self-contained essays composed over many years and in differing styles. From the luxuriant rhythms of his earliest prose to the astringency of his last, Yeats's essays reflect not only the evolution of a commanding literary sensibility but also the evolution of the modern essay itself.

Ideas of Good and Evil collects the best and most suggestive of the essays Yeats wrote between 1895 and 1903, from his thirtieth to his thirty-seventh year. In this period the poet was committed both to creating an audience for Irish literature and to the symbolist aesthetic in art and thought. These early essays differ from other modern essays and from Yeats's own later work. Whether appraisals of other writers, reflections on the nature of art, or investigations into occult ideas, the essays in Ideas of Good and Evil employ symbolist thought and technique to suggest a version of "reality" in which the imagination—and not science—is the central good.

In his essay "Magic," Yeats asks rhetorically, "Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passersby?" For Yeats, the purpose of this spell or enchantment was nothing less than the transformation of the modern world. In the new age that symbolist art is heralding, the imagination will reassert its ancient authority over empirical reality. "I cannot get it out of my head," Yeats writes in 1895, "that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place." Symbolist in manner and matter, the essays collected in Ideas of Good and Evil attempt to indicate, as much as Yeats's poems of the 1890s, the art of that "new age."

Kenneth Burke, in Counter-Statement, writes that "if the artist's 'revelations' are of tremendous importance to him, he will necessarily seek to ritualize them, to find a correspondingly important setting for them." In the nineteen essays of Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats attempts to "ritualize," through complex patterns of syntax and symbol, the "revelation" of the new age he anticipated. According to Burke, "Revelation is 'belief,' or 'fact.' Art enters when this revelation is ritualized, when it is converted into a symbolic process." The early essays of Yeats are works of art: while announcing the "revelation" of a new age, they also, by means of evocative symbol and complexly cadenced prose, deliver that "revelation" in "ritual." The best of these essays go beyond the traditional rhetorical ends of the form to enter the nonparaphrasable realm of poetry. From the great mass of his early essays, book reviews, and journalism, Yeats selected only those works which, in manner as well as matter, announce a new age.

Yeats, with his avowed hostility to objective truth, logic, "the restraints of reason," and a corresponding faith in subjectivity, intuition, and revelation, works without many of the traditional tools of the essayist in designing his "aesthetic rituals." In an essay entitled "The Moods," Yeats explains: "Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods." This brief essay, only a paragraph in length, replaces argument by a patterned repetition of words and phrases in the manner of a poem. It is, in effect, a "spell" that Yeats seeks to cast over his readers. The nineteen essays together constitute "a community of moods" that persuade by suggestion and evocation. Yeats writes, "Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelations." Thus as an imaginative artist Yeats comes to the essay, employing symbolist thought and technique to deliver this "revelation."

The beliefs that organize and motivate Ideas of Good and Evil are presented most succinctly in the essay "Magic." Yeats declares, "I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic," and he then lists three articles of faith or "doctrines": "(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature itself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols." The essay "Magic" treats, in detail, the poet's own efforts to evoke "spirits" by means of magical symbols. "I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers," Yeats writes, "whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half consciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist." All artists, in other words, work in the same essential manner and to the same end: casting spells to evoke the "great memory," they thereby enchant their audiences. Yeats claims, "If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of life remains unbroken." With Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats will announce the imminent return of the "old order of life."

Yeats took the book's title from William Blake. According to Yeats, Blake "announced the religion of art," the one "true" religion of the modern world. "In our time," Yeats writes, "we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of some one of the great poets of ancient times" or out of such modern poets as Blake, Shelley, or Wordsworth. The role of the artist in this "soul-making" is that of a priest: "We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood."

In such a religion of art, the "ideas of evil" would include rhetoric, allegory, the will, reason, Nature, and time; those of "good" would include revelation, symbol, imagination, art, and Eternity. The central "good" is, of course, the imagination. The goal of such a faith would be "to come at least to forget good and evil" in what Yeats calls "an absorbing vision of the happy and unhappy." The imagination, in these terms, is beyond good and evil.

If William Blake is behind much of the matter of this volume, Walter Pater inspired its manner. In his 1918 poem "The Phases of the Moon," Yeats recalls "that extravagant style / He had learned from Pater." He employed that style in his fiction and essays of the 1890s. In The Renaissance, Pater, following Buffon, noted that "'the style is the man'—and it is his plenaiy sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world." Hating what he called "that straight-forward logic, as of newspaper articles," Yeats, when he deployed his own prose style most deliberately, dispensed with argumentation, "manifest logic," and "clear rhetoric" in favor of evocation, poetic citation, and suggestive rhythm. Yeats can be seen as having turned his back on the three most popular modes of the nineteenth-century essay: the familiar essay (Hazlitt), the critical essay (Arnold), and the scientific essay (Huxley). In this, he followed Pater, who, in his essay on "Style," insisted that a writer is "vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself, his own true manner."

Pater's sinuous, allusive prose style was perfectly suited to Yeats's symbolist aesthetic. Late in his career, Yeats printed a passage from Pater's description of the Mona Lisa as free verse, contending that it was a poem, one which had arisen "out of its own rhythm." For Yeats, poems often did arise, not from ideas, but from rhythms, and the acoustic singularity of a cadence or phrase frequently led him to an insight not consciously intended. In like manner, Yeats felt that Pater's subtly cadenced prose rhythms were able to transform a rhetorical description into a poetic incantation. It was the "extravagant style" he needed for his own early prose.

Yeats's debt to Pater goes well beyond the influence of the latter's prose rhythm. In essays written throughout his long career, Yeats practices what Pater, in the preface to The Renaissance, calls "aesthetic criticism." Pater required the "aesthetic critic" to ask: "What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me?" The essays on art and artists collected in Ideas of Good and Evil examine their subjects for the sake of what they mean to Yeats and, specifically, to his sense of an imminent "revelation." Yeats's essays are examples of what Pater calls "the literature of the imaginative sense of fact." The artist, for Pater, transcribes "not … mere fact, but his … sense of it" and concludes, "All beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation to that vision within." Yeats's "vision" in his early poems, stories, and essays was of a world about to undergo a complete change of mind, or "mood," and he accommodated his "speech" on the art and ideas of others to that personal "vision within." Throughout Ideas of Good and Evil, literary criticism, historical speculation, poetry, philosophy, the occult, and personal experience are woven together to illustrate what Yeats calls "the continuous indefinable symbolism which is the substance of all style."

In an essay entitled "The Symbolism of Poetry," Yeats describes the change of style the "new age" will bring:

With this change of substance, this return to imagination, this understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style, and we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer possible for anybody to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can expound an opinion, or describe a thing, when your words are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the sense, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman.

This singular sentence makes up what I would call an "aesthetic ritual"; the "revelation" of a "change of style" is delivered in the "ritual" of the sentence's incantatory cadences. Instead of argument or description, Yeats, following symbolist procedure, suggests this coming "change" with the "wavering, meditative, organic rhythms" of the sentence itself. From individual sentence to entire volume, Ideas of Good and Evil is as deliberately composed as the "sacred books of the arts" it anticipates: form and content are inextricably fused.

In an essay entitled "Symbolism in Painting," Yeats declares, "All art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence." As much as any symbolist poem, the essays in Ideas of Good and Evil are designed to "entangle," on the formal levels of sentence, essay, and collection, the "patient" reader as well as whatever "part of the Divine Essence" the poet can capture. For Yeats constructs both sentence and essay as "symbolic talismans" that require pondering before they yield a meaning.

Yeats's famous essay "On the Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" can bring his essayistic strategies into focus. Written in a style of Paterian extravagance, it is a striking example of symbolist procedure applied to the essay form. Dispensing with logic, reason, and argumentation, and relying on evocation, suggestion, and incantation, the essay is a symbolic talisman that proposes the image of Shelley as a symbolist poet. All of the volume's themes are woven into this prose reverie: symbolism, magic, Irish folklore, and the "revelation" that Yeats hoped for. Yeats's "Shelley" is as much a creation of a Paterian "vision within" as Pater's own "Mona Lisa."

Like a familiar essay, it opens with a personal reminiscence: "When I was a boy in Dublin," Yeats writes, "I was one of a group who rented a room in a mean street to discuss philosophy." Yeats then announces his "one unshakable belief": "I thought that whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent." After years of observing "dreams and visions," he is now "certain" that "the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know." This sequence of beliefs, which we recognize from other essays in the volume, serves as a prelude to the discussion of Shelley. Yeats's "imagination," then, sets the conditions in which Shelley will be seen. We can expect that when Prometheus Unbound is introduced, it will be seen as a Yeatsian "sacred Book." He writes of it: "I remember going to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin's Political Justice put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist, and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate mankind." Yeats, who felt that a new "revelation" would soon regenerate mankind and that Shelley was one of its prophets, uses these lines to dismiss academic criticism: it is the "scholar," and not Shelley, who is revealed to be crude; Yeats's "feeling" for the book is the "standard" of judgment.

Yeats then assimilates Shelley to his symbolist pantheon. By a careful selection of quotations from A Defense of Poetry, Yeats insists that Shelley exalts the imaginative faculty and denigrates reason, "the calculating faculty." "The speaker of these things," Yeats writes, "might almost be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other evils." Yeats is, clearly, creating in Shelley a precursor in order to provide further proof that "all art that is not mere story-telling … is symbolic."

After "proving" that Shelley was an early symbolist, Yeats concludes the first section of the essay by assimilating Shelley's work to his own world of Irish folk belief:

I have re-read his Prometheus Unbound for the first time for many years, in the woods of Drimna-Rod, among the Echtage hills, and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve na nOg where the country people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand with Blake that the Holy Spirit is 'an intellectual fountain,' and that the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.

Shelley, Blake, Yeats himself, and the unlettered Irish "country people" are all united in receiving influences from what he calls here, with a nod to orthodoxy, "the Holy Spirit" but in the next paragraph the "great Memory."

The longest sentence of the entire volume begins, "Alastor passed in his boat along a river in a cave." It continues, paratactically, for thirty-four lines and draws on at least seven separate poems by Shelley in order to exhibit his recurring symbols. In the essay "Some Post-Symbolist Structures," Hugh Kenner notes that Yeats adopted Mallarme's "syntactic legerdemain" in some poems of the 1890s. Kenner proves that Yeats's poem "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty" "proceeds by systematic digression from its formal structure." And Kenner claims, "The effect is to move our attention as far as may be from the thrust of subject-verb-object. The structure is formal, elaborate, symmetrical, and syntactically faultless; and yet only by a very great effort of attention is the reader like to discover it is." Yeats's prose, likewise, "proceeds by systematic digression"; in doing so, it creates true talismanic labyrinths, sentences to wander lost in, hypnotized by rhythm and word choice. We are finally convinced of the "truth" of the sentence, not by its logic or cogency, but by the elaborate formal "ritual" we have undergone to reach its end.

The conclusion of "On the Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" reveals the true import of the essay. Here Yeats is imagining a Shelley born into a culture in which the older imaginative traditions are still in force:

I think too that as he knelt before an altar where a thin flame burnt in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom speaks first in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household where the undying gods await all whose souls have become as quiet as an agate lamp.

In this "talismanic sentence," Shelley's own images—the "caves and towers," "Star," and drifting boat—are the pretext for Yeats's own "critical creation." It is, in fact, a belief of Yeats's—that for every man there is "one image" which will redeem his soul from the entanglements of reality—that is being "revealed" in the "aesthetic ritual" of the sentence. Yeats's own beliefs, finally, and not "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry," are the real subject of this essay. Shelley's own work is judged inadequate throughout and nowhere more than in the concluding sentence. There Yeats writes: "But [Shelley] was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was content merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more than verses." With these abrupt words, the "spell" that the essay cast is broken, and we are left impatiently waiting for the day when the "old wisdom" will return.

The question that "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" asks—and it is the question posed by Ideas of Good and Evil as a whole—might be "How does the Great Memory work in the modern world?" Yeats's answer is that it works through symbols. But as an "answer" impossible of "proof," it is given through suggestion and repetition. Yeats's "dialogue" with Shelley, with his symbols considered as "philosophy," can extend only so far; Shelley is not Yeats, and the "dialogue" is finally internal.

If, as I have claimed, each essay in Ideas of Good and Evil is a "mood," the entire volume makes up what Yeats calls "a community of moods." Whatever the ostensible subject of each essay, they have a common style, content, and purpose. All, in some degree, seek to announce a "revelation"; each does so by "ritualizing," with rhythm and symbol, its contents. On receiving the volume, Yeats's oldest friend A. E. (George Russell) wrote to the poet: "I did not think I would like the book so well as I do for I had only read one or two of the essays before, but read together they throw a reflected light on each other and the book has a perfect unity." In a reverie on the future of the arts entitled "The Autumn of the Body," Yeats concludes with the prophecy:

I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all these so different things "take light from mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stone," and become "an entire world," the signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as "the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves."

In this passage, the images are from Homer, the quoted phrases from Mallarmé: the oldest Western poetry and, as of 1903, the newest, are drawn together by Yeats as embodiments of that "invisible life" which, he believes, perpetually "delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelations."

The essays in Ideas of Good and Evil, like poems, finally resist paraphrase. Their intricate thematic, syntactical, and sonic patterns, sometimes descending into obscurity, often rising into poetic lucidity, make them works of art. Their contribution to the later poetry of Yeats has been, I believe, overlooked. In managing the syntactical complexities of his talismanic sentences and in the sudden "leaps" of poetic and intuitive "logic" the essays make, Yeats went a long way toward the intricate stanzas and sharp contrasts of his finest poetry.

Essays are written for many reasons: to describe, to persuade, to inform, to record personal impressions. Yeats himself had these as goals but felt compelled to work toward them in his own way. He declared: "The scientific movement brought with it a literature which was always tending to lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting.…and now writers have begun to dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the symbolism in great writers." The symbolist essay, as Yeats developed it in this volume, seeks to persuade and inform by "suggestion" and "evocation," to make his readers susceptible to an imminent "revelation" by involving them in the "aesthetic rituals" of sentence and essay. It is not a direction that most other essayists of the twentieth century have followed.

Yeats himself changed the direction of his prose. When reading the proofs of Ideas of Good and Evil, he had a meeting with the young James Joyce, who made him self-conscious and doubtful about the "generalizations" the books contained. Yeats then wrote, but did not publish, an "introduction" containing these criticisms. He did, however, write a letter to A. E. which casts light on his formal and thematic intentions:

I am no longer in much sympathy with an essay like "The Autumn of the Body," not that I think that essay untrue. But I think that I mistook for a permanent phase of the world what was only a preparation. The close of the last century was full of a strange desire to get out of form, to get to some kind of disembodied beauty, and now it seems to me the contrary impulse has come. I feel about me and in me an impulse to create form, to carry the realization of beauty as far as possible.

Yeats's "strange desire to get out of form" helped create the incantatory rhythms and the subjective development of these early essays.

If Yeats himself became disenchanted with the millenarian aspirations of Ideas of Good and Evil, the essays in which he elaborated them still possess the power that Virginia Woolf sought in the modern essay: "It must draw its curtain around us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out." These symbolist essays of Yeats enable us, reading them, to participate in an "aesthetic ritual" while we ponder, in the prose itself, a poetic "revelation."

Carl H. Klaus

SOURCE: "On Virginia Woolf on the Essay," in The Iowa Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring-Summer 1990, pp. 28-34.

[In the following essay, Klaus analyzes Virginia Woolf's "The Modern Essay.'

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.

When I first encountered this haunting passage from Virginia Woolf's "The Modern Essay," some thirty-seven years ago, I took no more note of it than I did of any other passage in the essay. To tell the truth, I didn't pay much attention to anything in that piece, compared to the time I spent on her other essays in The Common Reader. They were assigned reading for an undergraduate survey of modern British literature, and I made my way through them, as I did through the essays of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and George Bernard Shaw—to discover Woolf's ideas about literature, especially about great authors, great books, and the great literary forms. Essays, of course, didn't belong anywhere in that pantheon. They were about literature and therefore couldn't be literature too. So, it didn't seem especially important to hear what she had to say about the modern essay. Never mind that three out of twenty essays in The Common Reader were about essayists and the essay. Never mind that she, the doyenne of the Bloomsbury Group, had achieved her reputation as much for her essays as for her novels. Never mind that her reflections on the modern essay resonated with so vivid a play of personality that I might well have taken the piece for a dramatic monologue. I was one and twenty, no use to talk to me:

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.

Twenty-five years later, I did find myself wanting to sit down again with Woolf's essay. No longer the cocksure honors student, his sights trained on the big time and the big forms, I was instead revising a little textbook piece on the essay as a form of literature, and I hoped her essay might provide me with a few suggestive ideas or passages. Having cut through it so quickly during my salad days, I had no idea of what I would find, so imagine my surprise when I heard her refer to the essay right off as one of the "forms of literature," whose controlling "principle …is simply that it should give pleasure." Heady stuff that, even for someone already predisposed to look upon the essay as literature. Pleasure, after all, is hardly what I'd thought of as the purpose of essays, nor what I'd led my writing students to think about them, though upon reflection then I couldn't help admitting that the essays I'd been reading at the time—pieces by the likes of Arlen, Baldwin, Didion, Dillard, Eiseley, Ephron, Hoagland, and Mailer—had been giving me a good deal of pleasure. And the pleasure, as I thought more about it, seemed to emanate, just as Woolf claimed, from my passing "through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation.…"

What I couldn't accept so readily—or perhaps more accurately what I couldn't understand—was her equally bold assertion that the essay "should lay us under a spell with its first words, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last," that it "must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world." How, I wondered, could such a trancelike, other-worldly state of mind be induced by essays, given their so frequent immersion in the world of human experience, in the press of human affairs? But I didn't puzzle over this troubling question very long, for Woolf's conception of the essay as a virtually magical or hypnotic kind of writing seemed to endow it with the imaginative power ordinarily attributed to literature, which was all I really wanted to avow at that point in my little textbook piece on the essay. So, as it happens, I didn't on that occasion bother to read any further than the first few paragraphs of Woolf's essay—and thus didn't notice how she returns to the theme of hypnosis in her concluding declaration that the essay "must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out." Having shut myself out of Woolf's essay once again, I also didn't notice that within the hypnotic circle of her essay Woolf herself seems to be more vividly and variously present than the host of essayists who figure in her observations.

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.

Five years later, I once again found myself wanting to revisit Woolf's essay, and this time I stayed long enough to read it all the way through, two or three times in fact. I could hardly do otherwise, for I had assigned it as required reading in a graduate essay course I was then teaching—a speculative course in which a handful of students and I were trying to generate ideas about the most distinctive aspects and elements of the essay. Lacking a body of theory and criticism, I had suggested that we look at what the essayists themselves had to say, and Woolf, as it happened, had more to offer than most of her colleagues, for her essay was devoted to reviewing Ernest Rhys' Modern English Essays, a five-volume collection, published in 1920, of representative essays and essayists from each of the preceding five decades. But, as it turned out, her general reflections on the essay were so closely interwoven with her critical comments on the essayists in Rhys' collection that I initially found it quite difficult to disentangle the one from the other. Worse still, I was familiar with the writing of only a handful of the modern essayists she referred to—Pater, Beerbohm, Conrad, Belloc, and Leslie Stephen. The rest were unknown to me even by name—Mark Pattison, Mr. Hutton, Mr. Birrell, Henley, Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, Vernon Lee, Mr. Squire, Mr. Clutton-Brock. No wonder I didn't pay any attention to this piece during my undergraduate days! No wonder the graduate students were having trouble with it! No sooner did those thoughts come to mind than I began to wonder how many of our own modern essayists would be known some sixty or eighty years from now. And what would people think of them then? For that matter, what would Woolf think of them, I wondered, if she were reviewing a five-volume collection of representative pieces from the last five decades? Would she find them beset by the same problems she had perceived in her own time—some "stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas," others "strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day"?

Idle speculations, of course, especially compared to what I should have been most curious about, namely the essays in Rhys' collection. Had I tracked down his collection and worked my way through it, I might not have been so puzzled as I then was by Woolf's heavy emphasis on style as "the first essential" art of the essayist, on the necessity that the essayist "know… how to write." Had I read through Rhys' collection then, as I did a few years later, I'd have seen enough stylistic clumsiness, and self-consciousness, and affectation to convince me too that "it is no use being charming, virtuous, or even learned and brilliant, unless … you … know how to write." Lacking sufficient grounds for that intense conviction, I considered her view of the essay to be so aesthetically self-conscious as to be art-for-art sakeish, especially because her preoccupation with style seemed to be occasioned primarily, if not exclusively, by its power to induce a hypnotic state—"to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life—a basking with every faculty alert in the sun of pleasure." More than that, she seemed to be so carried away by the supremacy of style as to denigrate the importance of content. How else to construe her assertion that "learning… in an essay must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the texture of the surface"? How else to account for her painstaking attempts to identify the point at which stylistic polish gives way to stylistic decoration? Such questions, I later discovered, would not have been troubling me then had I also paid more attention to the range of Woolf's voice, to the play of her personality, and to her intense concern with the personality of the essayist:

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.

Five years later, I did find myself wanting to sit down again with Woolf's essay, for I was writing a piece about essayists on the essay, and I planned to discuss her as the exponent of a highly aesthetical approach to its form. But in the process of making my way through her essay again, I found numerous points at which the piece didn't really match my prior impressions and recollections of it. Oh yes, I did hear her once again insisting upon the hypnotic power of the essay, especially in her first few paragraphs, and growing out of that discussion I did again find her worrying at length about matters of style. At the same time, however, I noticed that she gradually seemed to be working up to a more substantial and complex view of the essay—a paradoxical view that she announces most clearly midway through her piece when she celebrates Beerbohm as "an essayist capable of using the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem."

Given so heavy an emphasis on the essayist's persona, and given such a paradoxical conception of it as both an authentic reflection and a fictionalized construction of personality, I could see more clearly why Woolf had been so preoccupied with style, for an essayist's persona is, after all, inseparable from the style in which and through which it is voiced. Remembering that truth, I could then also see why she might think that "to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well." So, it seemed, she was invoking an elaborate form of artful artlessness, a thought that put me in mind of Montaigne's reflections on his own essay writing, which he frequently referred to as an equally elaborate form of self-portraiture. Recognizing the kinship between Woolf and Montaigne made me feel much better about her essay—and about my self. And in the days and weeks to come I was to continue feeling better on both counts, as I recognized the kinship between her thoughts on the essayist's personality and the thoughts of other essayists, such as Hazlitt, Lamb, Hoagland, White, and perhaps most interestingly her father, Leslie Stephen, who also had written an essay on the essay. Published in 1880, it offered a synoptic view of the essay from Montaigne through the mid-nineteenth century, so I could not help wondering if Woolf's reflections on the modern essay had been engendered by the knowledge of her father's piece, as if she were picking up where he had left off, especially because she seemed to be worrying about some of the very same issues—about a shrillness of voice in her own time akin to what he had been hearing in his. Exploring such connections distracted me temporarily from a renewed sense of puzzlement about her belief in the hypnotic power of the essay, so I didn't return to that problem until a year later when I was rereading the essay again in preparation for a class discussion of it, and I finally happened to notice that haunting passage I had inadvertently been ignoring for so long:

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.

My first reaction to the passage was, of course, an extraordinary sense of surprise at not having noted it before, especially because of its pertinence to Woolf's essay, to my own continuing desire to meet it again and again, to my sense of finding it altered upon each visit, and by extension to finding myself altered each time as well. But my surprise on those counts was followed quickly by surprise about another oversight—namely, my failure to notice that arresting metaphor in which she conceives of reading a good essay as comparable to carrying on a highly civilized acquaintance or friendship with someone:

So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.

Looking back over the paragraph in which that passage occurs, I then noticed that she invokes the metaphor several sentences earlier in talking of Beerbohm's essay, "A Cloud of Pinafores," which she refers to as having "that indescribable inequality, stir and final expressiveness which belong to life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds." How, I wondered, could she possibly conceive of an essay—and of reading an essay—in such intensely familiar terms, unless she found it to be suffused with the sense of a human presence? Not just with a voice to be heard, nor with a personality to be observed, but with a virtually living presence to be encountered and engaged in talk, as if one were in the presence of it! And how could that be possible, I suddenly realized, unless one were stung wide awake and fixed in a trance "which," as Woolf says in the beginning of her piece, "is not sleep but an intensification of life"? And as if to confirm this supposition, I suddenly felt in that passage I had never noticed before the overwhelming sense of a human presence, engaging me directly in thought and feeling, evoking for me in word and phrase and image the drawing-room ambiance of Beerbohm's essays, where "there is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or insanity," where "ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course, are not said."

Feeling as I did at that moment, I could not imagine what more Woolf's essay might hold in store for me, so my sense of elation with it was tinged with the melancholy feeling that we might have nothing more to talk about. But I had not yet reckoned with the conclusion of her piece, as I realized a year later when I was reading it yet again to prepare for another offering of that graduate course on the essay. Then I heard her saying things that I had noticed but had not taken sufficient account of before—in particular, "that the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea." Having always believed that to be a fundamental premise of essay-writing, I suppose I must have thought it needed no saying. So I had more or less ignored it during prior readings of the piece as simply a gesture on Woolf's part toward an axiomatic truth about the essay that she had previously not bothered to acknowledge in her discussion. But here she was, I realized, saying it not just once but at length in the peroration of her essay: "It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape, that the diverse company which included Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the farther shore." And as if to challenge all that she had previously said about the essay, or to throw it into a new and more complicating framework, here she was crediting "an obstinate conviction" with the power to lift "ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody's language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union." So it suddenly appeared as if neither style nor personality alone were sufficient to produce the hypnotic state that Woolf attributed to the essay—"some fierce attachment to an idea" was also needed. That seemed to me to be Woolf's final and definitive word on the matter, until I thought again of her remarks about the experience of reading a good essay:

You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.