The Common Pursuit (20 page)

To say that Rosenberg tried to understand all that the war stood for means probably that he tried to expose the whole of himself to it. In one letter he describes as an intention what he obviously achieved: ' I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life...' This willingness—and ability—to let himself be new-born into die new situation, not subduing his experience to his established personality, is a large part, if not the whole secret of the robustness which characterizes his best work ... Here as in all the war poems his suffering and discomfort are unusually direct ; there is no secondary distress arising from the sense that these things ought not to be. He was given up to realizing fully what was. He expressed his attitude in The Unicom:

Lilith: I think there is more sorrow in the world Than man can bear.

Nubian: None can exceed their limit, lady: You either bear or break.

It was Rosenberg's exposure of his whole personality that gave his work its quality of impersonality. 2

What Harding says about Rosenberg in these passages has clearly the closest relevance to Tragedy. And it is especially significant, for my theme, that they belong to the essay containing that discussion of the poetic use of language which I have found so useful in defining the limitations, in respect of the tragic, of Johnson and (I suggest) Mr Santayana.

This significance, my main concern in this note, will get a

1 Scrutiny, Vol. HI, pp. 362-3 (The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg}.

suitable parting stress, if we consider I. A. Richards's treatment of * impersonality', which has, on the surface, resemblances to Harding's. Dr Richards deals with * impersonality' and Tragedy together in the same chapter (XXXII) of The Principles of Literary Criticism. These pages (245-253) contain some of the most valuably suggestive things in the book, and if, for my convenience, I dwell on die weakness, I have at any rate the justification that they are entailed by Richards's essential Neo-Benthamite ambition, which is irreconcilable with his best insight. (And I am urging that these pages should be read, or re-read.)

The ambition asserts itself characteristically when Richards, having told us that, in the full tragic experience, the *mind does not shy away from anything, it does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone and self-reliant', goes on to pronounce toughly (p. 246):

The joy which is so strangely at the heart of the experience is not an indication that 'all's right with the world* or that 'somewhere, somehow, there is Justice*; it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous system.

For him, of course, Tragedy is the supreme instance of die inclusive organization of impulses; it is 'perhaps the most general all-accepting, all-ordering experience known' (p. 247). Experience, for die purposes of the new science, must be reducible to unit impulses, so that evaluation may be quantitative. We are not, then, surprised when we read (p. 248):

This balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through die force of its exclusions, is not peculiar to Tragedy. It is a general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences of the arts. It can be given by a carpet or a pot or by a gesture as unmistakably as by the Parthenon, it may come about through an epigram as clearly as through a Sonata.

I must confess myself to have found, with surprise, that I had carried away a wrong impression from this passage—an impression that Richards actually pronounces the tragic experience to be obtainable from a carpet or a pot. But it is easy to see how I came to form it, the argument moving as it does, with so easy and uninhibited a transition. And it is not at all easy to see how Richards can satisfactorily explain the differences between any experience

fitly to be called 'tragic* and the most inclusively-poised experience a carpet or a pot can be supposed to give. The scientifico-psychological ambition entails his taking his diagrams of poised and organized * impulses' or * appetencies' too seriously: he couldn't go on supposing he took his science seriously if he even began to recognize the remoteness of their relevance to concrete experiences.

This may seem, so late in the day, too obvious a kind of criticism to be worth reiterating; but I want to give it a special point in relation to my main argument. No theory of Tragedy can amount to more than a blackboard diagram, a mere schematic substitute for understanding, unless it is associated with an adequate appreciation of the subtleties of poetic (or creative) language—the subtleties that are supremely illustrated in the poetry of Shakespeare. Such an appreciation, if operative, would have inhibited Dr. Richards's reliance on his 'impulses* and his 'nervous system*. This point is not the less worth making because he has always, in his Neo-Benthamite way, been interested in language and the meaning of meaning. He has, since the phase represented by The Principles of Literary Criticism, specialized in Semasiology. But no interest in language that is Benthamite in spirit, or controlled by a Neo-Benthamite ambition, can afford to recognize the profoundest aspects of linguistic 'communication* —those we find ourselves contemplating when we contemplate in the concrete the nature of tragic impersonality. Such an interest can no more be adequate to them than the Utilitarian calculus— with its water-tight unit self, confined, for all self-transcendence, to external transactions with other selves—could engage on the kind of interest in moral issues taken by George Eliot.

DIABOLIC INTELLECT AND THE NOBLE HERO:

or The Sentimentalist's Othello

OTHELLO, it will be very generally granted, is of all Shakespeare's great tragedies the simplest: die theme is limited and sharply defined, and the play, everyone agrees, is a brilliantly successful piece of workmanship. The effect is one of a noble, 'classical' clarity—of firm, clear outlines, unblurred and undis-tracted by cloudy recessions, metaphysical aura, or richly symbolical ambiguities. 1 There would, it seems, be something like a consensus in this sense. And yet it is of Othello that one can say bluntly, as of no other of the great tragedies, that it suffers in current appreciation an essential and denaturing falsification.

The generally recognized peculiarity of Othello among the tragedies may be indicated by saying that it lends itself as no other of diem does to the approach classically associated with Bradley's name: even Othello (it will be necessary to insist) is poetic drama, a dramatic poem, and not a psychological novel written in dramatic form and draped in poetry, but relevant discussion of its tragic significance will nevertheless be mainly a matter of character-analysis. It would, that is, have lent itself uniquely well to Bradley's approach if Bradley had made his approach con-sistendy and with moderate intelligence. Actually, however, the section on Othello in Shakespearean Tragedy is more extravagant in misdirected scrupulosity dian any of the others; it is, with a concentration of Bradley's comical solemnity, completely wrong-headed—grossly and palpably false to the evidence it offers to weigh. Grossly and palpably ?—yet Bradley's Othello is substan-

1 Cf. 'We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers/—A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 185.

'Othello is a story of intrigue rather than a visionary statement/—G. Wilson Knigk, The Wheel of Fire, p. 107.

tially that of common acceptance. And here is the reason for dealing with it, even though not only Bradley but, in its turn, disrespect for Bradley (one gathers) has gone out of fashion (as a matter of fact he is still a very potent and mischievous influence).

According to the version of Othello elaborated by Bradley the tragedy is the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of lago. Othello we are to see as a nearly faultless hero whose strength and virtue are turned against him. Othello and Desde-mona, so far as their fate depended on their characters and un-tampered-with mutual relations, had every ground for expecting the happiness that romantic courtship had promised. It was external evil, the malice of the demi-devil, that turned a happy story of romantic love—of romantic lovers who were qualified to live happily ever after, so to speak—into a tragedy. This—it is the traditional version of Othello and has, moreover, the support of Coleridge—is to sentimentalize Shakespeare's tragedy and to displace its centre.

Here is Bradley:

Turning from the hero and the heroine to the third principal character we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and catastrophe of Othello depend largely on intrigue. We must not say more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as distinguished from a tragedy of character, (p. 179.)

And we must not suppose that Bradley sees what is in front of him. The character he is diinking of isn't Othello's. 'lago's plot', he goes on,

lago's plot is lago's character in action.

In fact the play (we need hardly stop short of saying) is lago's character in action. Bradley adds, it is true, that lago's plot 'is built on his knowledge of Othello's character, and could not otherwise have succeeded'. But lago's knowledge of Othello's character amounts pretty much to Bradley's knowledge of it (except, of course, that lago cannot realize Othello's nobility quite to the full): Othello is purely noble, strong, generous, and trusting, and as tragic hero is, however formidable and destructive in his agonies, merely a victim—the victim of lago's devilish 'intellectual superiority' (which is 'so great that we watch its advance fascinated and appalled'). It is all in order, then, that lago

should get one of the two lectures that Bradley gives to the play, Othello sharing the other with Desdemona. And it is all in the tradition; from Coleridge down, lago—his motivation or his motivelessness—has commonly been, in commentaries on the play, the main focus of attention.

The plain fact that has to be asserted in the face of this sustained and sanctioned perversity is that in Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello Othello is the chief personage—the chief personage in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello's character in action. lago is subordinate and merely ancillary. He is not much more than a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism— that at any rate is a fit reply to the view of Othello as necessary material and provocation for a display of lago's fiendish intellectual superiority. lago, of course, is sufficiently convincing as a person; he could not perform his dramatic function otherwise. But something has gone wrong when we make him interesting in this kind of way:

His fate—which is himself—has completely mastered him: so that, in the later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, lago appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.

We ought not, in reading those scenes, to be paying so much attention to the intrinsic personal qualities of lago as to attribute to him tragic interest of that kind.

This last proposition, though its justice is perhaps not self-evident, must remain for the time being a matter of assertion. Other things come first. Othello has in any case the prior claim on our attention, and it seems tactically best to start with something as easy to deal with as the view—Bradley's and Coleridge's x — and of course, Othello's before them—that Othello was 'not easily jealous'. Easy to deal with because there, to point to, is the text, plain and unequivocal. And yet the text was there for

1 * Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of lago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed lago's honesty as Odiello did.'—Coleridge, Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare.

Coleridge, and Bradley accompanies his argument with constant particular reference to it. It is as extraordinary a history of triumphant sentimental perversity as literary history can show. Bradley himself saves us the need of insisting on this diagnosis by carrying indulgence of his preconception, his determined sentimental preconception, to such heroic lengths:

Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by lago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where lago is dismissed [III, iii, 238] Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word.

The 'proper sense of that word' is perhaps illustrated by these lines (not quoted by Bradley) in which, Bradley grants, 'the beginning of that passion may be traced':

Haply, for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have, or for I am declined Into the vale of years—yet that's not much— She's gone; I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others' uses.

Any reader not protected by a very obstinate preconception would take this, not for a new development of feeling, but for the fully explicit expression of something he had already, pages back, registered as an essential element in Othello's behaviour—something the evoking of which was essential to lago's success. In any case, jealous or not jealous 'in the proper sense of that word*, Othello has from the beginning responded to lago's 'communications' in the way lago desired and with a promptness that couldn't be improved upon, and has dismissed lago with these words:

Farewell, farewell:

If more thou dost perceive, let me know more; Set on thy wife to observe

HO THE COMMON PURSUIT

—to observe Desdemona, concerning whom lago has just said: