Imagery and engineering
Barbara Hardy
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry Donald Davie (Routledge and Kegan Paul £2.75) Critical judgments may tell us more about the judges than the judged. Fielding mocks Richardson, James criticises Tolstoy, Lawrence loathes Joyce, Eliot condemns Lawrence, Virginia Woolf dismisses Bennett. The function of such injustices is plain. Creative ego is sharpened, encouraged, advertised. Since love is usually less blind than dislike, adoptions tend to be fairer than rejections: George Eliot's Fielding, Hardy's Wordsworth and Pound's Browning are newly brightened as they are turned into Muses. Davie's choice of Hardy can't be separated from his rejection of the irrational Muse, whether in Yeats, Lowell or Berryman, and as he ingeniously presses Hardy into the required mould of his poetic and political needs, he creates a stern and grainy figurehead which bears only a partial resemblance to Hardy.
Hardy's advantage over Yeats, Eliot or Pound, as candidate for the Muse of twentieth-century British poetry, lies in his liberalism, moderate in every way, a bulwark against Left as well as Right. Davie quotes a diary entry for 1891 in which Hardy fears that just democratic government may lead to proletarian rule and ruin for the arts. In order to make this statement central to Hardy he has to ignore a lot, and while the result is an edifying dis play of the process of Muse-making, it is scarcely conceivable that such covertly qualified liberalism can have made an im pact on many writers. It is true that Hardy's was the usual bourgeois culture, but we might add that Hardy disliked the market ing of the culture and was alive to its sterility, especially in well-guarded aca demic citadels. Hardy can scarcely be made into a Three-Cheer Liberal, let alone a radical, but in Jude's advice to Sue to drop the sex-war and join with men against the common enemy, 'coercion,' I am not convinced that the mob-rule Hardy was afraid of has much to do with our students' risings, nor that Hardy would be so firmly in support of academic authority as Davie seems to imply. If one were to work selectively, a counter-image of Hardy the Radical could certainly be constructed. I don't suggest that it would be much more like Hardy than Davie's Hardy, only that such large and complex claims need a lot more support.
Davie's Hardy is chiefly Hardy the poet. The analysis of technique is often excellent, though the rejection of most other critics is not exactly winning. Davie has an apparent need to join praise with blame: his defence of Tomlinson and Fisher is full of anger with people who haven't liked them and when he refutes Yeats's admittedly obtuse comments on Hardy's ear there has to be a parenthetical jibe at Yeats's musical inferiority. Judgements seem to be made impatiently, perhaps because this is a book written in crisis. The technical observations are seldom innocent of political implication, and such a dual analysis needs more time and space to prove itself. Hardy's imagery, symmetries and flourishes are declared to be products of a typically Victorian 'precision engineering,' and Davie treats what is obviously acceptable as an analogy as if it were a consequence that needed no argument. Content of imagery is at times determined by technological products, but even imagery is not always shown to be so deprived. Symmetries and flourishes abound in Crashaw, Milton and Pope. I don't doubt that Davie could show us how Hardy's style and forms are different, but I have to complain that he doesn't.
Perhaps it is the lack of preliminary argument which makes one hesitate before the confident tone in which Davie spots the engineering skills, with their disadvantages and advantages. His judgements are generally proposed in the tone of one who doesn't expect anyone to disagree, and in a book about authority in academe, this is especially striking. The combination of assertion and somewhat abstracted technical judgement is found in the dismissal of several poems, including 'Lines to a Movement in Mozart's E-Flat Symphony,' where the alliteration strikes me as being entirely successful (to oppose one assertion with another), and 'Overlooking the River Stour' where Davie's case that the poem "provides more components than it uses " seems to rest entirely on the emphasis that he, rather than Hardy, places on mechanism in some of the images.
Hardy's mechanical virtuosity, "of a kind impossible before conditior.; of advanced technology," not only dominates and shapes the analysis but is of immense doctrinaire importance. Davie sees Hardy the technician as the applied scientist, working modestly and pragmatically, open to the radical's charge of copping-out. Davie not only is pressing what he has established as an analogy (not a consequence) but now is taking it yet further, making Hardy's skill into another instance or aspect of his liberalism. The method looks to be poetic rather than rationally lucid.
Davie sees Hardy at his best as transcending the mechanical skills, but the discussion of the 'self-excelling,' while generous and appreciative, begins with a strenuous attack on irrationality which seemed required by the critic rather than by his poet. Davie's liberalism, gathering strength and shape by the rejection of Right and Left, and by a cunning self-suspicion, is restrained by reason up to a point, but he sometimes reveals a poet's illogicality. A positively irrational terror of the numinous emerges in his rejection of Pound's account of myth as originating in the experience of vivid adventure, or 'nonsense,' which a man can't tell without being called a liar. Davie proves Pound's point by more or less calling him a liar. Pound has another definition really quite common-sensical, of myths as "explications of mood . . . only intelligible and glittering sense to those people to whom they occur. I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter, and one who understands the Laurel, and another who has, I should say, met Artemis." I don't know whether Davie is more like the man in Forster whose rationality turned his girl into a tree or like some Johnson furiously kicking at the stones of quotidian experience when he says •he hasn't an inkling of what Pound is on about, and challenges other critics to say whether they have.
Davie may encourage the least visionary of us to recognise with gratitude the terrifying or glittering or crazy moments Pound is talking about. He may cause an unfair reader to recollect Davie's own poetry at its dully rational worst, or a fairer reader to admit the inconsistency and surprise of its irrational best. I think he makes Hardy's severed head groan. Hardy certainly saw Persephone, and Artemis, and so made Tess and Sue. He even made Angel Clare — poor Angel — have that fatal vision of Tess as both Artemis and Demeter. His visions, like Forster's, are of glories and horrors. But there is no room for them in this analysis of liberal engineering. Where Hardy's poetry is too violent in pain or hopelessness or frustration, Davie either turns away from it, as too nakedly confessional, or finds in it (as in 'During Wind and Rain ') a principle of repose which settles and orders the pain. No wonder he cannot make any use of Sylvia Plath in his account of the poetry of ecology, to which she made a startling contribution.
If the literary judgements move too quickly and assertively, the political ones move even faster. It seems unfortunate that a book which has a special powerful Afterword ' addressed to American readers should deal so crudely with English politics, presenting a view of party politics and the British intelligentsia based on the unargued view that the last Labour governmen was socialist. Instead of writing in detail about the campus troubles in America and England, of which he has firsthand knowledge, he gives us a few veiled references and an anecdote about the anti-university's lack of a bursar to accept cheques. Kingsley Amis's poem, ' Masters ' seems to be misread as wholly and simply about politics, so that its final recognition of surrender is said to have only one possible moral, that we must always refuse office. Amis is also thanked for making a lastditch stand on behalf of the teacher's authority in the classroom, without a glimmer of recognition on Davie's part that a 'good many teachers still in their classrooms are agonising over the attempt to extend freedom and life without too much destruction. Perhaps the weakness of the book is best revealed in its arrogant and assertive tone. If this is the pedagogic and critical practice of Davie's much-valued authority, then I am all for questioning it.
Professor Barbara Hardy is head of the Department of English at Birkbeck College, London
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