SOURCE: Raleigh, John Henry. “The New Criticism as an Historical Phenomenon.” Comparative Literature 11, no. 1 (winter 1959): 21-28.

[In the following essay, Raleigh comments how New Criticism as a historical phenomena was composed of contradictions, and a great part of its success arose precisely out of this many-sidedness, which lent to the whole movement complexity and power.]

The era of the New Criticism, everyone agrees, is over. Its beneficial effects, which are many, will we hope be permanent—its sins interred with its bones. One of the founders, T. S. Eliot, has already written an apologia and an historical analysis of the movement as a whole.¹ According to Eliot, it was the method and attitude of Coleridge, the first great critic in English to employ such extraliterary disciplines as philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology in the study of literature, that has stimulated the extraliterary interests of modern criticism in the social sciences, linguistics, and semantics. The other principal impetus of the New Criticism, according to Eliot, has been the search for “origins.”

René Wellek has also pointed to a twofold impulse behind the New Criticism, but his analysis differs from Eliot's. According to Wellek, there were “two groups: those who have more and more brought to bear on literature all kinds of knowledge—psychoanalysis, Marxism, and recently anthropology; and those who have tried to study literature as an aesthetic fact.”² Wellek's formulations seem to be more just and more accurate than Eliot's, since the concern for origins is surely an inheritance from the late nineteenth century and not something peculiar to the twentieth. Certainly Wellek's two poles—psychoanalysis, anthropology, theory of language (extrinsic interests), at one extreme, and precise linguistic analysis (intrinsic interests), at the other—define the general areas of activity of the New Criticism. Eliot himself, who is the father of practically all modern critics, even the Oedipal critics, once remarked in his early magisterial manner that the perfect critic should have at his disposal vast learning but that in his actual criticism he should be scrupulously concerned with the text; in this exhortation he launched the whole movement. But neither Eliot's nor Wellek's formulations, since they are largely descriptions, tell us much about the New Criticism as an historical phenomenon—what the forces behind it were, and why it was so remarkably successful.

The New Criticism emerged from the historical context of the early twentieth century and, as such, is an amalgam of certain forces that were predominant in that era. Viewed historically, Eliot, Richards, and the other principal critics of the group look less like idiosyncratic individuals and more like vessels for certain general tendencies of their age.

In the long run, I believe, the New Criticism will appear to be a curious and paradoxical blend of two great and supposedly antithetical forces—art and science, or, more precisely, aestheticism and scientific method. The New Criticism was a salutary, illogical, mistaken, and fruitful union of the two forces, which had been split since the Renaissance. It was Eliot, a poet, and Richards, a Benthamite, who inaugurated the movement: a poet with concern for the holiness of words and a psychologist with concern for their neurological effect; the sacred rage of an artist and the objective dispassionateness of a scientist. The bridge between them was furnished by a third power, the semanticism that prevailed not only in literary and rhetorical studies in the early twentieth century but in philosophy and psychoanalysis as well. Eliot himself furthered the “scientific” bent of the New Criticism and, as a critic, was always, in his early days at least, the cool, objective observer whose only mission was to state things as precisely as possible and without the verbal flights in which the “art” of criticism had formerly indulged. The central analogy of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is that of the “finely filiated” platinum catalyst effecting “sulphurous acid” out of “oxygen” and “sulphur dioxide.” The ancillary disciplines that the New Criticism mainly employed were not historical and humanistic studies, such as philosophy or aesthetics, but nascent sciences, such as anthropology and psychoanalysis.

The practice of the New Criticism generally, at least in its epigonous manifestations, bears all the earmarks, and at times the stigmata, of professionalism and scientism. There are the continuous protestations of “objectivity”—poetry constitutes a precise, “scientific” statement about human emotions that the language of science proper is too blunt, rationalistic, and abstract to make; there is the special vocabulary; there is the professional transmission of the skills to the next generation, just as the nineteenth-century scholars, in avowed imitation of the methods of science, trained their successors; there is the narrowing down of the subject to the short lyric, precisely and exhaustively described, just as scientists isolate for pragmatic examination small parts of large problems; there is the tendency to separate the subject, poetry, from all human and historical, and thus variable, factors—the “intentional fallacy”—as if poetry were some bright, isolable gem, separable from its author and from history, to be examined with a microscope under a pure white light; there is the sense of the deep and intense cooperation between the various practitioners, accompanied by the air of expertise and contempt for the outsider and the uninitiated. (Randall Jarrell mockingly exclaimed in his brilliant, witty, one-sided attack: “I'd just never read ‘We Are Seven’ till I got So-and-So's analysis of it for Christmas.”) There is finally the almost conspiratorial air and the mystique that always accompanies highly professionalized endeavor. The delicate impressionism, the wild, irrational response, the barbaric yawp of criticism as an “art” disappears behind a collective professionalism with its “objectivity” and its special vocabulary. And all this is accompanied, ironically, by a running attack upon science and scientific methods.

It was precisely this scientific pose, conscious or unconscious, that constituted one of the main strengths of the New Criticism. Literary criticism, especially when it deals directly with aesthetic effect, is always open to the charge of vagueness or irresponsibility or lack of rationale or inability to be specific—or of being just plain silly, as it often was in the works of many a weary fin de siècle poseur. But here, for the first time, was “art for art” with teeth in it, with a precise method and scientific aplomb. It was as if Oscar Wilde's festering lily had been transformed into a hard, sharp, steel scalpel. In an age of science literary criticism, in a perhaps unconscious desire to acquire protective coloration, borrowed some of the methods and some of the authority of science.

Yet unlike either “art for art” or science, the New Criticism has been determinedly, sometimes lugubriously, moral. Surely no literary criticism, not even Dr. Johnson's, has uttered the word “moral” so many times and, while being so avowedly nondidactic in theory—“the work of art has no message”—has been so didactic in practice. But the morality was neither external to the work nor derived from a common tradition of the collective historical wisdom of mankind, as was Dr. Johnson's. It was rather a quality of each specific great work of art which, complex and unique as it might be, was yet a moral “touchstone,” describing the world and the heart of man in terms of good and evil, telling the reader what was true and what was false, what had value and what did not. To Dr. Johnson, for example, Shakespeare could be and at times was “immoral.” For the New Criticism it was an a priori assumption that a great writer, or a great piece of literature, is by definition “moral,” and moral in a higher and wider sense than conceptualized ethics can ever begin to suggest. On its moralistic side the New Criticism was part of the conservative reaction—anti-bourgeois, antirationalistic, antiprogressive—that has been one of the most distinctive marks of modern culture and of which Eliot is the prime example.

There remains the question of history, and here again, as with the union of aestheticism and science, the New Criticism proves to be, using one of its own favorite words, “paradoxical”—a curious blend of historical and ahistorical allegiances. What strikes one first, of course, is the ahistorical aspect of the New Criticism. The critic, said Eliot in another of his early seminal statements, should see all literature spread out before him in a timeless perspective. There is no history, only a continuum, composed of the great works of literature. The past is not finished or gone; it is being continually modified by the present in this continuum where the past, the present, and the future merge. Man opens doors on the future only to find a mirror in which he sees the same old visage, now more worn: “Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!” Moreover, the two chief scientific disciplines which the New Criticism embraced, psychoanalysis and anthropology, both emphasize, individually and in conjunction, the ahistorical or archetypal aspects of human experience. Thus all literature becomes a series of parables, written in differing periods of history, but always concerned with the same basic topography of the human mind and the same basic patterns, myths, rituals of action, and significance.

Yet the New Criticism, if ahistorical in theory, has been obsessed with history in substance, and history itself has been the subject matter of much of the poetry written by the chief poets of the movement. In Allen Tate's words:

The difference between Pound's “Mauberly” and Arnold's “Obermann” is not merely a difference of diction or of subject; it is the subtle difference between two ways of trying to get out of history what Herbert or Crashaw would have expected only from God. Both Arnold and Pound are asking history to make them whole—Arnold through philosophy, Pound through art, or esthetic sensibility …³

The New Critics have also been eminently historical in a conservative sense in their manner of regarding modern history as a series of losses (the “belief” of Dante, the verbal ingenuity of the Elizabethans, etc.) and themselves as the preservers or restorers of these missing heritages.

In short, like most successful historical phenomena the New Criticism was composed of contradictions, and a great part of its success arose precisely out of this many-sidedness, which lent to the whole movement complexity and power. But I believe its ultimate appeal and power has arisen out of an even larger and wider historical anomaly—that it brought together and allied in the same cause the thought and attitude of Bentham and Coleridge.

The analogies of Eliot to Coleridge and Richards to Bentham have long been noted. The first to point them out, to my knowledge, was F. R. Leavis in an adverse review of Richards' Coleridge on Imagination in 1935,⁴ written before Leavis had his falling-out with Eliot over the “education” of D. H. Lawrence. Eliot emerges in this context as a very positive Coleridge, a poet with a critical intelligence who arrives on the literary scene when critical intelligence is most needed. Richards is taken to task because he is trying to make a science of criticism and because he is reinterpreting Coleridge in Benthamite terms. Some years later, in his introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, Leavis said that Richards' Principles of Criticism was a Benthamite book and that Richards was trying to replace Coleridge by Bentham; furthermore, the subtleties of semasiology clothe an essentially Benthamite spirit, and Basic English is emblematic of the practical spirit of Benthamism.⁵

The starting point for any discussion of Bentham and Coleridge is, of course, Mill's essays and his masterly summation of the thought of both men. They were, said Mill, the two great seminal minds of the time and the teachers of the teachers. No thinking man in England had escaped the influence of one or the other, and whosoever could combine the thought of the two could conquer the world, intellectually speaking. It was given to Bentham, said Mill, to discern those truths with which existing doctrines and institutions were at variance; to Coleridge, the neglected truths which lay “in them.”

Bentham's strength and weakness lay in the fact that he never took anything on authority but always asked the question “Why?”; he was therefore the great “subversive” or “critical” philosopher—not a profound philosopher himself but a great reformer in philosophic thought. He was not merely destructive; on the contrary, he was constructive in that he saw always the errors that lurk in generalities and in that he knew generalities were not the realities per se but an abridged mode of expressing facts. All discussions on serious matters have a tendency to disappear finally into “phrases”; it was Bentham's historic mission to tear them apart. In Mill's words:

It is the introduction into the philosophy of human conduct, of this method of detail—of this practice of never reasoning about wholes till they have been resolved into their parts, nor about abstractions till they have been translated into realities …⁶

But Bentham had the defects of his virtues. He had only contempt for the philosophers of the past and thus failed to derive light from other minds.

Richards' relationship to Bentham is direct and admitted; in contrast, his preoccupation with Coleridge's theory of imagination is a minor concern. In the Principles of Literary Criticism (1928) the chapter entitled “A Psychological Theory of Value” is pure Benthamism in its combined distrust of abstractions and its reliance on the concept that the satisfaction of appetencies—pleasure and pain—constitutes the ultimate value of things: “value lies in the ‘minute particulars’ of response and attitude …”⁷ Moreover, Bentham himself was basically a semanticist. David Baumgardt points out that Bentham objected to “The Declaration of the Rights of Man” not on moral or political but on semantic grounds; the Declaration confused the “is” with the “ought,” and in an empirical ethics or politics there can be no reference from “is” to “ought”; there can only be reference from one “is” to another “is.”⁸ And Bentham's chief aim was “to bring to light the hidden use of tautologies in moral reasoning.”⁹

Bentham thought that language was inherently ambiguous, and nowhere more so than in poetic and figurative discourse. When he felt himself falling into the trap of poetry, as even he occasionally did, he pulled himself up short: “But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved.”¹⁰ For him it was difficult to describe anything at any level of linguistic usage because of “a certain perversity of structure which prevails more or less throughout all languages.”¹¹ He himself hoped, looking forward to Basic English, “to lay aside the old phraseology and invent a new one. Happy the man whose language is ductile enough to permit him this resource.”¹²

The New Criticism, largely through Richards, was Benthamite in five important respects: first, it thought of itself as “scientific,” “objective,” and “concrete” in contrast to the “vagueness,” “impressionism,” and “abstractness” of its predecessors; second, like Bentham, it had a tendency to dismiss these predecessors as useless and to think of itself as the first literary criticism to “read” poetry; third, its methodology was systematic and exhaustive, working from part to whole rather than vice versa; fourth, it assumed that the value that inheres in poetry is not the “beautiful,” in the conventional sense, nor the “sugar-coated message,” but rather arises out of the fact that a linguistic structure can alter and satisfy certain emotional “appetencies,” affording pleasure and minimizing pain; fifth, it accepted the two Benthamite assumptions about language: that abstractions are meaningless verbiage and that all language is inherently ambiguous—only, unlike Bentham, it made this quality the supreme glory rather than the inherent defect of language, turning Bentham upside down.

The influence of Coleridge on the New Criticism is both more indirect and more obvious than that of Bentham. Eliot, by example, and Richards, by theory, have been the chief transmitters. Eliot, as Leavis said, actually played the role of a modern Coleridge—the poet-critic. Moreover, the whole cast of his mind is similar to that of Coleridge, and, like Coleridge, he seems to be still fighting the battle against eighteenth-century rationalism. As Mill summarizes:

It [Coleridge's thought] is ontological, because that [the philosophy of the eighteenth century] was experimental; conservative, because that was innovative; religious, because so much of that was infidel; concrete and historical, because that was abstract and metaphysical; poetical, because that was matter-of-fact and prosaic.¹³

The name “Eliot” could be inserted without causing any discrepancies in the description.

Coleridge's contributions to the New Criticism have been threefold. First, as Eliot remarked, he demonstrated that the province of literary criticism was infinite and that almost no field of knowledge, except the natural sciences, was irrelevant to its purposes, and Arnold had furthered this notion by his idea that the function of criticism was ever to provide a stream of new and fresh ideas. Second, Coleridge was concerned—and here Richards is the direct transmitter—with the outline and the workings of the poetic imagination or, in modern terms, the “psychology of the artist.” The Victorians had ignored this problem, as had the Edwardians. But the New Criticism took up Coleridge's preoccupation again, and produced the curious anomaly of noncreative writers of criticism discoursing, often with great “authority,” on the vision of the “artist” and the workings of the “artist's” mind. For along with “paradox” and “moral,” the word “artist,” and an assumed “artistic” perspective, have the highest incidence in the vocabulary of the New Criticism. Third, and most important, Coleridge's influence and legacy consist in a preoccupation with “meaning.” If Bentham asked of all received opinions, “Is it true?,” Coleridge asked, “What is the meaning of it?” Thus the New Criticism was not concerned with truth but with meaning. Its basic attitudes toward works of literature were analogous to Coleridge's assumptions about all human institutions; they are not treated judicially, as Dr. Johnson in striking a balance between the virtues and defects of Shakespeare, but as a kind of logos or revelation, a vessel of wisdom sailing down out of the past, something that it is idle to question or even to find fault with, a kind of impersonal statement above and beyond its specific author, an emanation from the deepest levels of the collective unconscious and thus shaped by the primordial human imagination. And it is therefore no accident that the group of Southern poet-critics who, after Richards and Eliot, have been the most influential, as well as the most brilliant practitioners in the New Criticism, were generally conservative in their political outlook as well.

Mill had said that nobody could escape being either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean; given the construction of the human mind there was no escape. But the New Criticism managed to have it both ways, so to speak, and to equip the basically antiscientific attitude of Coleridge with the scientific precision of Bentham.

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, The Frontiers of Criticism, Gideon Seymour Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1956).

2. René Wellek, “Literary Scholarship,” in American Scholarship in the Twentieth Century, ed. Merle Curti (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 111-145. See especially pp. 120-122.

3. Allen Tate, “Reflections on American Poetry,” Sewanee Review, LXIV (Winter 1956), 66-67.

4. F. R. Leavis, “On Richards, Bentham and Coleridge,” Scrutiny, III (1935), 382-402. There is a chart in William Elton's A Glossary of the New Criticism (Chicago, 1949), p. 2, showing the derivation of most of the New Critics from the twin heritage of Coleridge and Bentham.

5. F. R. Leavis (ed.), Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London, 1950), pp. 30-31.

6. Ibid., p. 53.

7. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York, 1950), p. 61.

8. David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (Princeton, 1952), p. 406.

9. Ibid., p. 92.

10. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford, 1907), p. 2.

11. Ibid., p. 103.

12. Ibid., pp. 104-105.

13. Leavis, op. cit., p. 108.