A_History_of_English_Literature

Boadicea; and Kurtz’s enclosure, decorated with human heads, is like Tacitus’ grove of the druids in Anglesea. Conrad did not like the Russian empire, and he had spent twenty years carrying goods about the French, British and Dutch empires. Marlow tells his friends that the Roman administration was ‘merely a big squeeze’, and that

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only ... something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to ...

This portentous talk is true in ways that Marlow (and the reader at this point) cannot see. Besides its dramatic irony, Heart of Darkness is a parable with moral, psychological and spiritual aspects. Its stiff narration generates claustrophobia. Dickens’s drama is looser, James’s scrutiny is more refined, but English prose had not seen anything of this dense universality before. In Conrad’s maturer work, gesture and narrative become less obtrusive.

Nostromo

Other noted works are Victory and The Shadow Line, with three major novels, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, of which Nostromo is the acknowledged masterpiece. Its opening shows Conrad’s rhythmical balance:

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco - the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity - had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deepsea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf.

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Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semicircular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

This picture is sumptous but not decorative, for the grand indifferent natural setting puts human activity into the perspective Conrad wants. It is a big book, in which the temptations of trade do indeed violate the peace of the gulf and alter the history of the South American republic of Costaguana. The San Tome silver mine, inherited by Charles Gould, is financed by an American idealist. Its expansion slowly changes lives in the country, including that of the honourable Gould, who believes that ‘material interests’ and hard work will make Costaguana more peaceful and prosperous. Means become ends, limiting the value of human activity, even the heroic feats of the charismatic Nostromo – ‘our man’, the agent of the better party in the Revolution.

A varied cast of strongly-marked characters cross and recross a wide and beautiful landscape to sad or tragic ends. There is much irony, and some comedy: the dutiful unimaginative harbourmaster Captain Mitchell enjoys the historic importance of every event. There are time shifts in the narration, so that even the most picturesque actions fall into patterns from which meaning can be made out, though there is much final suspense. Conrad’s interest here is not in individual psychology but in the complex web of human action and in moments of grand and petty drama. It is a deeply satisfying work, epic in scale and of a similar standing to Middlemarch, more visual, less parochial, and involving our sympathies less immediately.

Political complexities also preoccupy the other two major novels, where Conrad’s sense of human absurdity becomes more intimate and Dickensian. James and Conrad were to be models for T. S. Eliot in his effort to regain for poetry some of the ground it had lost to the novel.

E. M. Forster

An Edwardian novelist appreciated in England is Edward Morgan Forster (18791970), who wrote four pre-war novels,

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910). Forster was brought up by his mother; a great-aunt left him money. After Kings College, Cambridge, he acted as a tutor and a private secretary, and became associated with the Bloomsbury group (see page 340).

Forster’s first short story shows his mastery of the comedy of manners: ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1904) sets conventional English tourists against natural Greeks. A Room with a View has several panics, in a comic Florence pensione and then in Surrey, setting inhibited upperagainst liberated lower-class characters. Under the motto ‘Only connect’, Howards End offers a liberal hope for the future in the marriage of the sensitive Helen Schlegel to the businessman Henry Wilcox in the house of the title. Both novels offer an analysis of an evolving England which might be saved by tolerance, forbearance and sympathy in personal relations, often presented through female characters. A Passage to India (1924), however, though advocating the same virtues through Mrs Moore and Mr Fielding, shows English and Indian differences as irreconcilable, thanks largely to English prejudice. Adela Quested, hoping to see the ‘real’ India, is taken to the famous Marabar Caves by the anglophile Muslim Dr Aziz.

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E. M. Forster (1879-1970).

The caves have a strange echo – ‘ou-boum’. She panics, accusing him of a sexual approach. At the trial, she withdraws the charge, but Aziz turns away from Fielding’s friendship towards an India without the British. Connection is not only a personal matter.

This ambitious novel in three parts, Mosque, Caves and Temple, has Forster’s clear shaping of theme, and a plot cleverly balanced on the fault-line of interracial sexual contact and the incident of the cave. What ‘happened’ is left unclear - probably nothing. We are shown the Brahmin Professor Godbole serene amid the festival at the Hindu temple, but Forster is more indulgent to non-Christian mysticism than to the possibility of the divine. ‘Ou-Boum’, the echo in the Caves, says to the Hindu sacred word ‘Om’ what ‘Hocus Pocus’ says to the Latin words of consecration, Hoc est corpus meum. Much ado, little connection.

Forster may have been a ‘thesis’ novelist who lost his thesis. Though he had used his gift with tact and charm, he wrote no more fiction. The posthumously published Maurice was completed in 1910. His Aspects of the Novel (1927), ‘intellectually null’ for F. R. Leavis, is useful to the more modest.

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) presided over the transition towards modernist writing, as typefied in Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (both 1922). Ford was grandson to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown and nephew to W. M. Rossetti, the brother of D. G. and Christina. His father was Dr Francis Hueffer, music critic of The Times and author of The Troubadours; Ford changed his name from Hueffer after the war. In 1906-8, he wrote The Fifth Queen, a picturesque Tudor trilogy about Henry VIII’s Catherine Howard. Conrad called it ‘the swan song of Historical Romance’. In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, editing it for fifteen months and making literary history.

Number 1 included contributions from Hardy, James (‘The Jolly Corner’), Conrad, Wells, W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, W. H. Davies, Galsworthy and Tolstoy – ‘The Raid’, translated by Constance Garnett. Later issues had contributions from Bennett, Yeats, Chesterton, Belloc and George Moore. Ford also introduced Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Rupert Brooke, E. M. Forster, Lowes Dickinson and

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Norman Douglas to a wider public, and published on sight a story submitted by post, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ by an unknown D. H. Lawrence.

Ford bridged the generations, but after the war some of these names were ‘modern’, others were not. Ezra Pound, the chief modernizer of English poetry, said that it was Ford who modernized him, by laughing at the stilted language of his third slim volume - laughing till he rolled on the floor. Ford, half a Pre-Raphaelite, knew where Pound’s medieval stilts had come from. He could now describe his Fifth Queen as ‘a fake more or less genuine in inspiration and workmanship, but none the less a fake’. The English Review was a turning point in his own development.

Ford’s best novel, The Good Soldier (1915), is a feat of narration. It uses indirect disclosure on a subject to which it is peculiarly suited: the discovery by a seemingly foolish narrator, John Dowell, that his wife Florence, an invalid with a ‘bad heart’, has betrayed him with his friend Edward Ashburnham, the soldier of the title; Florence and Edward commit suicide, and Edward’s ward goes mad. Dowell bumblingly unwraps a many-sided horror, in Henry James’s manner, but with less tissuepaper.

More attractive if less economical is Parade’s End (1924-8), a quartet also known as the Tietjens tetralogy, after its hero Christopher Tietjens, a Yorkshire squire rooted in an old idea of England. At the war’s end, Tietjens leaves his treacherous wife Sylvia for the suffragette schoolteacher Valentine Wannop. The inner volumes draw on Ford’s own war experiences. Also very attractive are Ford’s fictionalized literary reminiscences, Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1933), his travel book Provence and his wonderful The March of Literature (1938). In all the later books, the reader can hear Ford’s voice speaking. This is significant, since after a cultural transition, writing has to regain a vital relation with the speech of the day, and such a shift had begun before 1914. The last of Ford’s eighty books to appear (in 1988) was A History of Our Own Times, 1(1875-95), written in 1930.

Poetry

Pre-war verse

After 1900, the Romantic impulse became less rhetorical and its subjects became simpler. Apart from Hardy and Yeats, great talents were few. Kipling’s ‘The Way through the Woods’ is an example of a successfully nostalgic Edwardian poem:

They shut the road through.the woods Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees.

It is underneath the coppice and heath And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

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John Masefield, W. H. Davies and Walter de la Mare were Edwardians who also appeared in the first of Edward Marsh’s five anthologies of Georgian Poetry, which came out between 1912 and 1922. Successful anthologies establish poetic taste. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861), embodying Tennyson’s taste, sold well for a century; it was enlarged in 1896. Marsh preferred something more modest: Abercrombie, Drinkwater, Gibson. Less dim names are Rupert Brooke, J. E. Flecker, D. H. Lawrence, James Stephens, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Harold Monro, whose Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, London, offered readings (and beds) to many poets.

Headline literary history sometimes pretends that ‘Georgian Poetry’ (hedgerows, tweed and cider) was deservedly replaced by ‘War Poetry’ or by ‘Modernist Poetry’. Yet war poets and modernist poets appeared in Georgian Poetry, and Ezra Pound in

The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse,(1912).

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy wrote the most ambitious Edwardian poetry in The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908), an epic verse drama on the Napoleonic wars, set in various continental theatres and in Wessex, where Bonaparte was expected to land. There are Choruses of the Spirits of the Years and the Pities, as in Greek tragedy and Wagner’s opera. It rewards, but rarely gets, a reading. Its epic historical panorama and lofty viewpoint suggest a comparison with Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land; from this Hardy emerges with some solid qualities. But by common consent his best work is found scattered through the six volumes from Wessex Poems (1898) to Winter Words (1928). He wrote nearly a thousand poems.

Hardy, Yeats and Eliot, who dominate 20th-century English poetry, differ hugely. Hardy can be read without preface or note. He discouraged theorizers by remarks such as ‘there is no new poetry’, ‘unadjusted impressions have their value’ and ‘no harmonious philosophy is attempted in these pages - or in any bygone pages of mine, for that matter’ (1928). His unadjusted impressions are miscellaneous, and the collections, apart from the Poems of 1912-13, are unshaped. Many were written before 1900, but his style did not change. Although Hardy deepened, no critic could make a career out of explaining his ‘development’. He wrote workmanlike poems, from ‘Domicilium’ in his teens, to ‘During Wind and Rain’ in his eighties, hundreds of them excellent. His quality is acknowledged by subsequent poets as very English. Having no intellectual, political or artistic programme, he is easier to anthologize than to write about. But unpretentiousness should not be misprized; sketches and watercolours make a strong contribution to English art. In Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), only Shakespeare and Wordsworth had more poems than Hardy; in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973), Hardy had more than anyone.

Apart from a few ballads, the poems are apparently personal and occasional, prompted by place, time and mood. The title Moments of Vision (1917) suggests Hardy’s tradition from Wordsworth, Shelley and Browning. He owed much to his friend the Rev. William Barnes (1801-86), a gifted writer of verse in standard English and Dorset dialect. Barnes’s example (in poems such as ‘Woak Hill’ and ‘Linden Lea’) showed how local speech could ground a lyric in everyday life. To Hardy no word or thing was in itself unpoetic or poetic: his poems range from the tiny to the great. The interest of Hardy lies not in his attempted ‘philosophy’, but in his religious regard for the universe and its inhabitants, a country supernaturalism. His

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landscapes are full of omens and presences, and he wished to be remembered for his habit of noticing them, as he says in ‘Afterwards’:

.. . If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,

‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

There is a surprising amount of rising here, but Hardy is a surprising writer. The strong metrical tune of his verse carries his ‘unadjusted’ diction well.

As Pound said, Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13 ‘lift him to his apex, sixteen poems from “The Going” to “Castle Boterel”, all good, and enough for a lifetime.’ They are plangent elegies for his wife, who had died suddenly, and for the love they had at first enjoyed. Alongside the poems Pound mentions, ‘The Voice’, ‘Beeny Cliff’ and ‘After a Journey’ stand out.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together, The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

At the then fair hour in the then fair weather, And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago, When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

(‘After A Journey’)

War poetry and war poets

In 1915 Hardy published ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations’”:

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will fade into night

Ere their story die.

This poem, Hardy says, was prompted by farm workers he saw in Cornwall in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, but he ‘did not write the verses till during the war with Germany of 1914’. Hardy was thus a war poet; as was Kipling, who lost his son, and wrote a sombre set of Epitaphs of the War. The 1914-18 war also lies behind Pound’s poetry from 1915, and Eliot’s The Waste land. Eliot said that Ford’s ‘Antwerp’ was the only good poem he had met with on the subject of the war.

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Popularly, however, war poetry is about the Front, and by young combatants: typically, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), who protested against the mechanized slaughter of the trenches; supremely, his friend Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who was killed; as were Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Accounts which focus on anti-war poems usually employ Rupert Brooke (18871915) as a foil. Brooke had welcomed the war in a spirit of patriotic idealism: ‘If I should die, think only this of me,/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England’ (‘The Soldier’). After his death on the way to Gallipoli, the handsome young Brooke was held up as a symbolic type of the myriad of young officers lost in the war. After the battle of the Somme in 1916, the losses of the trenches blighted the idea of heroic sacrifice. Poems such as Sassoon’s ‘The General’, Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘To His Love’ by Ivor Gurney immerse us in that stalemate in the mud for which even professional soldiers were unprepared. The last battle anywhere near Britain had been Waterloo in 1815. The poems of Sassoon and Owen came to the fore after 1918, and came to express national mourning. The outraged sense that the wastage of the trenches must not be forgotten gave a symbolic value to Sassoon’s savagely effective protest verse and to Owen’s pathos. Both men returned to the front, Owen to die; Sassoon survived, to write Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930).

In 1914 poetry was still a natural medium for the expression of public feelings; the newspapers printed many patriotic poems. Survivors also wrote prose about the war: the novel Death of a Hero, by Richard Aldington (1892-1962), and the memoir Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves (1895-1985), both 1929. The ‘home front’ is commemorated in the popular Testament of Youth (1933), by Vera Brittain (1893-1970). Of the scores of books about the war, the account by Edmund

Blunden (1896-1974) of going to the front in Undertones of War (1928) should be read with In Parenthesis (1937) by David Jones (1895-1974) and Ford’s No More Parades (1924-8).

‘Over the top’: British troops climb out of a trench towards the barbed wire, in 1916.

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The best poet who came to light in the war, and fell in it, is the Anglo-Welsh Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Thomas had lived by writing ‘countryside’ prose and reviewing verse, until, encouraged by the American poet Robert Frost, he turned poet late in 1914. Poems such as ‘Adlestrop’, ‘The Owl’ and ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ approach the war indirectly through the life of rural England in peacetime, a contrast with the shock tactics of the protest poems. They have the effect of the similes in Homer which liken wartime to peacetime sights or activities. Natural observation accrues an understated symbolic suggestion in a poem like ‘Lights Out’, which, like another fine poem, ‘Old Man’, makes no reference to war but accepts death. Later English poets have seen Hardy and Edward Thomas as continuing an English tradition.

Yeats dismissed Owen with the words ‘Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’; his own poems on the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 strike a more heroic note. Although Owen’s pathos can cloy, his poems speak immediately, and are set for school examinations. The Owen-Sassoon story was often recycled later, but the literary merit of the poems has been exaggerated. Precious witness to a traumatic national experience, they are not major modern poems, though their simple emotions are easier to respond to than the adult poetry of the modernists.

Further reading

Bergonzi, B. Heroes’ Twilight: A Steady of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn (London: Constable, 1980). Fussell, P. The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

was largely written by exiles. Exiles is the name of a play by James Joyce, who avoided England. When the Irish Free State was created in 1921, Joyce had been thirty-nine years a British citizen. Yeats, who was then fifty-seven, continued to spend much of his time in England. Samuel Beckett (1906-89), sometimes called the last modernist, left Ireland in 1937 for Paris. (Yeats and Pound get less space here than they would in histories of Irish or American literature.)

D. H. Lawrence

D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence (1885-1930) had a prophet’s lack of interest in aesthetics. His first mature work, Sons and Lovers (1913), like his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914), has a 19th-century base - a slice of domestic life - and purpose: to make a strong emotional impact. When the Son (Paul Morel) has escaped from his mother’s suffocating love and two love-affairs - one spiritual, one carnal - the narrative stops. It is autobiographical: Lawrence grew up in a Nottinghamshire pit village; at home, his high-minded non-conformist mother cherished him; his father, a miner, felt out of place.

Although Lawrence came later to repudiate his mother’s ideals and to sympathize with his father, he retained an evangelical true-or-false model of what is good, a moral intelligence and a St Paul-like temperament. His writing is powered by

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Publications of the modernist period

1913 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street.

1914 James Joyce, Dubliners; W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities; Ezra Pound (ed.), Des Imagistes; Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance; George Moore, Hail and Farewell; George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion.

1915 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Lawrence, The Rainbow; Richard Aldington, Images; Rupert Brooke, 1914 & OtherPoems; Ezra Pound, Lustra, Cathay.

1916 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1917 T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations; Norman Douglas, South Wind.

1918 Gerard Hopkins, Poems (ed. Robert Bridges); D. G. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians; Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack.

1919 Eliot, Poems; W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole; Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius.

1920 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Lawrence, Women in Love; Eliot, Poems, 1920, The Sacred Wood; Wilfred Owen, Poems (ed. Siegried Sassoon); Shaw, Heartbreak House.

1921 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow; Lawrence, Women in Love.

1922 Eliot, The Waste Land; A. E. Housman, Last Poems; John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga; Isaac Rosenberg, Poems (ed. Bottomley); Joyce, Ulysses; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party.

1923 Lawrence, Kangaroo; Huxley, Antic Hay.

1924 Ford, Some Do Not; E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock.

1925 Ford, No More Parades; Lawrence, St Mawr, Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; W. B. Yeats, A Vision; Hugh MacDiarmid, Sangschaw.

1926 MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; Ford, A Man Could Stand Up; T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Yeats, Autobiographies.

1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man; Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel; T. F. Powys, Mr Weston’s Good Wine.

1928 Yeats, The Tower, Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, Huxley, Point Counter Point; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall.

tensions between the classes or the sexes or mind and body or, more apocalyptically, between natural life and a civilization of death. His better books enact these struggles, which are reduced to a simple formula in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Sir Clifford Chatterley, paralysed below the waist by a war wound, is in a wheelchair; his gamekeeper, Mellors, satisfies the needs of Lady Constance in clearly described sexual scenes, sacred in intention. It is the woman who admires and needs the man. Lawrence’s mission to make the word ‘fuck’ holy meant that this intensely serious book was banned. Its trial for obscenity in 1960 crowned a history of misunderstandings between Lawrence and official England. The ‘permissive’ consequences of the ‘not guilty’ verdict were not what Lawrence would have wanted. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a fable lacking the rich density of his major novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), and their prophetic burden.

In some 19th-century French novels, the test of integrity is the willingness of lovers to act on their (extramarital) love. Not so in Nottingham in 1912, when Lawrence ran off with Frieda, the German wife of his old tutor at the University College. She left Professor Ernest Weekley with their three children, went to Germany with Lawrence, and came back to England and married him in 1914; shortly after, her cousin became the leading fighter pilot, Baron von Richthofen. Lawrence was a pacifist, and when police kept an eye on his Cornish cottage, he felt persecuted. He

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David Herbert Lawrence, in 1908, at Nottingham University

College, aged 23.

was already alienated - by education from his family, by marriage from his friends at home, by intransigence from friends in London. His novels and paintings were often banned for indecency. He travelled incessantly from 1919 to his death - to Italy, Australia, Mexico, New Mexico, Italy and France - pouring out travel books, essays and sketches, as well as Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and other novels and novellas, and seeking a natural life untainted by modern consciousness. Travel made his alienation and his views more extreme, so that those who were not for him were against him.

As some of his ideas have been accepted (and others rejected: ‘The root of sanity is in the balls’, for example, or Dostoevsky as ‘a rat slithering along in hate’), partisanship has cooled. His writing is alive, uneven: the fresh accuracy of the first impression of Sydney in Kangaroo turns to turgidity and an incredible plot. His talent flames out in his poems and travel books, yet often he could not leave well alone. His efforts to raise consciousness of sexuality have succeeded so well that his theories and symbols can now seem over-insistent. (The modern disease was ‘sex in the head’, he said; yet he wanted no children.) His preaching is curbed in his short stories, and often absent from his informal free-verse sketches, which are autobiographical and of birds, beasts and flowers; these will last. In such glimpses, and some late essays, he is more playful and self-conscious than in his long fictions.

The Rainbow

His best novel is The Rainbow (1915), a saga of three generations of a farming family, the Brangwens. Social life gives way to individual personality; sexual relations are made to express both historical and emotional developments; and there is much symbolism.

Three of his modesrealism, symbolic projection and an exploratory expressionism - are shown in the following passage. Anna Brangwen finds she is expecting a child, but cannot tell her husband, though she loves him. She goes to tell her parents. Her husband walks in:

Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth. ‘How long are you stopping?’ the young husband asked his wife. ‘Not very long,’ she said.

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‘Get your tea, lad,’ said Tom Brangwen. ‘Are you itchin’ to be off the moment you enter?’

They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her wattles made an oriflamme tossed here and there, as she went, her grey body was like a ghost.

Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off things.

‘Where was I born, mother?’ she asked.

(The ‘oriflamme’ was a pennon on a lance, in form like a gold flame.) After the men’s antagonism, the sun shining through the old hen’s crest awakes in Anna a flickering trace of her own birth, and she asks her question. This almost subconscious symbolism, legible today, was subtle in 1915.

The Rainbow lies between the realism of Sons and lovers and the symbolism of Women in Love, itself a sequel to The Rainbow, but more ambitious and intellectually schematic. It is also typically modernist in its alienation, dislike of modern life, and satire on literary, social and intellectual élites. The Rainbow makes structural use of the symbolism of the rainbow after the Flood in Genesis. Lawrence made several efforts to replace the Christian story.

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) is the central figure in modernist prose, as Eliot is in modernist verse. He makes a contrast with Lawrence: both were rebels, exiles, and victims of censorship, but they had little else in common. Joyce is an artist, deeply interested in the medium and form of his art. Each of his chief works - Dubliners (1914), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) - differs in language and approach from its predecessor. Joyce’s aim was to leave an impersonal and objective work of art for the reader to interpret, an aim he shared with Eliot, James and Flaubert, but not with Lawrence. ‘The artist,’ Stephen Dedalus pronounced in Portrait of the Artist, ‘like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce was well educated at Jesuit schools and at University College, Dublin. He became an ex-Catholic (as Lawrence became an ex-Protestant) and an exile, but not an ex-Irishman. He kept away from Dublin, in Trieste and Paris, to remember it the more clearly in his art. Joyce’s family were ex-middle class. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus (the Artist) is asked what his father was.

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes.

-A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small a landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen’s arm, and said:

-The distillery is damn good.

It is characteristic of Dublin’s appreciation of speech that Cranly attends to the phrase ‘something in a distillery’ rather than to what Stephen has said. Joyce himself, in adopting the French convention of a dash rather than quotation marks to introduce direct speech, erased the distinction between words and things. When Joyce told his father that he was marrying, his father asked for the woman’s name. On

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hearing it was Nora Barnacle, he replied, ‘She’ll stick to you, then.’ Such a father had his educational side. Stephen’s own wit is appreciated by Cranly, but both are earnest enough young men. ‘- It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.’

Joyce studied languages, learning enough Norwegian to write to Ibsen. Though he read Yeats and others, much of his modern reading was European. He left Dublin at twenty-one, returning for his mother’s death, and leaving shortly afterwards with Nora, a Galway girl who stuck to him but never read his ‘dirty books’. Stephen gives Cranly his reasons for leaving:

- I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile and cunning.

Joyce lived obscurely, teaching English, helped eventually by a number of patrons. Although the first story of Dubliners was written in 1904, publication was delayed, so that Joyce’s three masterpieces appeared within eight years. Dubliners consists of realistic sketches of the lives of ordinary Dubliners, largely of the lower middle class. Each fails to break out of habitual routines, and the cumulative effect is depressing, as in Maupassant’s tales of little urban lives and George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903). Dubliners deals first with children, then gradually with older people; in Joyce’s plan, twelve stories in a style of ‘scrupulous meanness’ would show a Dublin paralysed by family, poverty, bigotry and provincial small-mindedness. Each story is organized through thematic symbols. All Joyce’s works have this multi-dimensionality.

Such systematic art, common in Renaissance verse, is previously approached in English fiction only in Austen (who hides it better) and in the late James; and Joyce works in a wider world than theirs. Like Flaubert, he wears gloves of antiseptic irony, but some warmth comes through from such wincing stories as ‘A Little Cloud’ and ‘A Painful Case’, where human feelings are given greater purchase. When his omission of Dublin’s hospitality was pointed out to him, Joyce added a final longer story, ‘The Dead’. This richly elaborate story is set at a Christmas party, where Gabriel Conroy presides at the table of his musical old aunts. The unheroic Gabriel, a wearer of goloshes who takes holidays in Belgium, feels culturally above the company. At the end of the evening he hears from his wife that she had once been loved by a boy from the West who had died for love of her.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

Gabriel is sympathetic, yet remains a spectator. In the next, final paragraph Joyce allows himself to write lyrically and imaginatively about the island he was leaving.

In A Portrait of the Artist, first drafted as Stephen Hero, Stephen Dedalus tells of his growing up, always in the language and range of sensations suited to each stage of infancy, boyhood, adolescence and student life. He is sensitive and shortsighted,

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and his experiences are negative: family politics, nationalist and clerical; school tyrannies; sexual experience and ascetic reaction; an invitation to the priesthood; fruitless romantic love; family impoverishment. His wit and learning earn him some respect from fellow students. He has an exalted vision of a girl wading offshore, whom he sees in the likeness of a sea-bird: ‘A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.’ This is an ‘epiphany’, a revelation. After it, Stephen

climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in gray sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant ponds.

5

He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole ...

Transposition of his ‘high’ into a low register undercuts Stephen, who is less heroic than in Stephen Hero; the artist revised the portrait of his younger self.

The private Stephen is less assured than in the epigrams he fires at his fellows. The book ends in diary form, concluding:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Stephen is about to fly Dublin; his ‘old father’ is Dedalus the smith who with his son Icarus flew away from the island of Crete on wings he had made. But Icarus fell, and although Stephen hopes to forge a conscience for his race, the bags his mother has packed for him contain ‘new secondhand clothes’. How to take this aspirant to art is unclear, but there is an ambiguity in ‘forge’ of which he is unaware. It is a portrait of a self-absorbed young man.

Ulysses

The case is changed in Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus plays second fiddle to Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising agent, who acts as a father figure to him. Much of the book consists of Bloom’s mingled impressions and reflections as he wanders round Dublin, going to a funeral, a pub, a newspaper office and other locations. He meets Stephen, whose stream of consciousness is more elevated, and helps him.

Unity of place and time is observed in this unclassical book, all of which takes place in Dublin on 16 June 1904. Ulysses ends with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in bed saying ‘Yes’, and opens in the Martello Tower, south of Dublin, where Stephen is staying.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mulligan plays the priest beginning the Latin mass, a comic blasphemy which is to be matched by a closing parody. For Mrs Bloom, who is talking as the book ends, is a comic inversion of the Penelope to whom Odysseus returns at the end of Homer’s

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Odyssey. Unlike the faithful Penelope, Molly (a singer) awaits a lover, ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Bloom is unheroic, indecent and unlike Odysseus; and Stephen is unlike Telemachus, Odysseus’ faithful son. ‘Ulysses’ (pronounced ‘Oo-liss-ays’ by Joyce) is the modern form of ‘Odysseus’ in later Western literature; Ulysses parodies much of that tradition.

This encyclopedic tendency makes it an epic (of a heroi-comical sort) as much as a novel. Its chapters shadow episodes of the Odyssey, and Joyce used ‘Proteus’, ‘Nausicaa’ etc. as working titles for chapters, and charted the correspondences with Homer’s story. These names do not appear in the text - which can be read without Homer, although one misses some of the jokes. Mulligan looks out to sea.

- God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original ...

‘Algy’ is Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote ‘I will go back to the great [not grey] sweet mother’. The Greek phrase means ‘on the wine-dark sea’. Mulligan (based on the wit Oliver St John Gogarty) coins new Homeric compound epithets, indecent in their naturalism. Dedalus reads Greek. Joyce has his revenge on Mulligan when he has an old woman ask him ‘Are you a medical student, sir?’