P E RSPEC T IV E FS Pu e Three MEASBUREFOReMEASURE ...B Frederick R. White L ITEIATURE is the ordering of mimic-events into certain fixed and significant relation- amps, the creation, that is, of an intelligible world distinct from the world about us charged with mean- ing in such a way that it is rather an interpretation or a criticism of life than a reprodetion of the unintelligible flux of reality There are, then, two profit- able poits of departure for the dis- cussion of any work of literature. The first is a consideration of the technical skill whereby the mimic-events are so ordered as to constitute an intelligible whole; the second is an evaluation of the significance or the meaning of this intelligible whole to ourselves. The first is a matter of craftsmanship and must be discussed largely in terms of con- temporary information relevant to the exercise of that craft at the particular time -of composition. The second is a matter of judgment and must be dis- cussed in the light of the best possible mode of interpretation we can bring to bear upon the work of literature. But, although the two approaches are separ- ated in discussion, one relating to the author ,and' his time, the other to the spectator and his time, it is clear that in the work of literature both intelligi- bility and order are mutually interde- pendent, since without the ordering-there could be no intelligibility, and without intelligibility there would be no means of perceiving the order. Not to separ- ate these two elements in discussion, however, introduces one of two confu- sions. Hither technique is over-empha- sized at the expense of meaning, and we have that type of criticism which, ig- noring the completed result of a pat- tern, speaks chiefly of structure, coun- terpuntaJ harmonics, and tonality; or meaning is over-emphasized at the ex- pense of technique, and we have that type of scholarship which, neglecting the relation of the part to the whole, sees hidden contemporary meanings in every lene. Though technique is con- temporary, meaning obviously is not. If it were, '.iterature coud not survive its period. Mature technique in a great master of any act tends to become highly in- dividuaized, as we recognize when we employ such terms as Homeric, Bott- cellian, or Wagnerian. All great mas- ters, however, have learned their tech- nique laboriously through the deliberate imitation of others. In technique, then, there are two elements which can be more or aess clearly distinguished: the imitative and the original. Literary history inevitably deals with what is imitative, since history seeks those ele- ments which are common to contemp- orary writers. Thus Shakespeare's early indebtedness to Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly has been sufficiently stressed. The or- iginal eement in technique, however, deserves and demands greater concern, for it is that element which has raised the artist above the level of his fellows. It is that element which, slightly recog- nizable i. immature works, slowly de- velops into a flexible instrument of ex- pression, outwardly distinguished by the stamp of an individual style. Study of an artista mature technique must be concerned chiefly with the development of this individual element, rather than with the elements he shares with his contemporaries. Meanoing which arises from the com- plete or static pattern of a work, can be understood, of course, only after the dynamic development of mimic-events is complete. In this sense it comes after and depends upon technique. It must, however, be evaluated from the outside, by some other mode of interpretation; for meaning, unlike action, does not de- velop; it exists. There is a tendency in -modern criticism to deny any defin- able xnearring: to works of literature, a tendency paralleled by the production of poems and naturalistic novels which do appear to have been written without any purposed significance. T. S. Eliot, for example, who is doubtless the most influential practitioner and critic of this tendency, has given wide credence to the dogma that literature need have no single and necessary meaning, nor any ascertainable connection with life. This is the other extreme of the scholar's insistence that literature is a transcript of life. Eliot, in "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," writes: I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a "meaning," although it would be equally false to say that a play of Shakespeare is meingless . In trutlo neither Shakespeare nor Dante slid any real thinking-that was not their job; and the relative value of the thought group of plays, as the word "Homer" denotes not a man, who may never have existed, but a body of poetry. Any long passage of language ordered to some end will inevitably be regarded as meaning- Again, there is a confusion between the words, "emotion" and "intellect," Eliot tells us that philosophy and the- ology are intellectual and have mean- ing; poetry is emotional and therefore has no meaning. But although we habit- ually use the two words as opposite, we have no current, agreed-upon psycholo- gy which will enable us to define and use the words accurately. It may be true in general that the poet arouses the intelect, if at all, by engaging our emotions, while the philosopher or the- ologian touches our emotions, if at all, - 0 Yet, never has there been a period when so many poets consciously sought to present "reasoned views of life," and when so many critics, themselves poets, paid service to poetry as the perfect guide to thought and action. Never have poetry and philosophy been so deliber- ately entwined, so that we have in Davies' Nosce Teipsum a logical and poetic dis- course on immortality, in Spenser's Faerie Queene an allegory of the good life, in Chapman's poetry, and even in his translations from Homer, a deliber- ately wrought description of the whole life of learning, in Fletcher's Purple Island an induction into the philosophy of anatomy, in the satirists, Marston and Hall, the presentation of an ethical mean, and suffused through almost all the poetry of the time a Christian-hu- manist view of life, drawing strength from the Italian -platonists, that was certainly a system of thought and was certainly associated with poetry. Milton, in his closely reasoned allegory of man's postion on earth, was following this broad tradition. Never was there a time when the critics and the practitioners of poetry so agreed in attributing philo- sophical greatness to it, so that Sir Philip Sidney was but expressing the dominant attitude of his age when at the end of the Apologie he exhorted his readers to believe, with Clauserus, the translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the heavenly Deity, by Hesiod and Homer, under the veil of fables, to give us all knowledge. Logic, Rhetoric, Philosophy, natural and moral, and quid non?; to believe, with me, that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry. which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. I do not say that Shakespeare there- fore subscribed to this point of view, which was, incidentally, also held by Jonson and Bacon. We have no sure evidence for Shakespeare's critical at- titude. But certainly his age as a whole has never been surpassed in establishing a close connection between poetry and a reasoned view of life. Here a close connection between poetry and a reas- oned view of life. Here it need not yield to the Athenians, although it may have less sanity, wholeness, and restraint in its expression. The connection between poetry and philosophy is the dominant note in criticism from Ascham to Dry- den; the conscious presentation of a reasoned view of life in poetry is the practice in almost all Renaissance poets who still are read. The modern notion, that poetry has no necessary relation to modes of interpreting reality, simply did not exist in the Renaissance; or, if it did exist, it failed to receive en- during expression. If we are justified in any age in looking for meaning in works of literature, it is during the Renaissance ... Both for its, technique and for its meaning, Measure for Measure is'among the most interesting of Shakespeare's plays. Technically, it marks his aban- donment of the illogical conclusion and the maturity of his use of dramatic irony, a device without which the great tragedies could not have been written. Its meaning, reasonably clear, is perti- nent to our own day. Happily it seems less ambiguous than its companion pieces, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet, over which such beating about of brains has taken place as to render agreement impossible. Because of a notion still prevalent, fathered by Coleridge, that Measure for Measure is a disagreeable and bitter play, it has largely escaped the classroom and the consequent min- istrations of the scholarly. Yet it is a suitable battlefield for fighting out the question of historical versus contem- porary meaning. Even a casual reading of the play suggests, that it has many Continued on Page Four current at their tine, the material en- forced upon each to use as the vehicle of his feeling Is of no importance . . You can hardly say that Dante believed, or did not believe the mixed and muddled scepticism of theRenaissance. If Shake- speare had written according to a better philosophy, he would have written worse poetry; it was his business'to express the greatest emotional intensity of his time, based on whatever his time happened to think. Poetry is not a substitute for phil- osophy or religion; it has its own func- tion. But as this function is not intel- lectualabut emotional, it cannotbe de- fined adequately in intellectual terms. This is perhaps a salutary reaction against the scholar's tendency to find all kinds of contemporary references in literature, but it reduces a poem to a bare core of "emotion" without allow- ing any significance to the ordered events which arouse that emotion. Eliot seems to confuse the "meaning" of the Divine Comedy or of one of Shake- speare's thoughts. Any statements about Shakespeare's system of thought are, of course, conjectural, since there is no evidence to draw from. But statements about the meaning of any of Shake- speare's plays may be checked against the play in question, And in this use the word "Shakespeare" is merely a convenient term to denote a play or a by stimulating our mental activity. But however ambiguous the phraseology, the result seems much the same. We return to the great writers Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tol- stoi, not in conscious search for either "emotion" or "intellect" as separable entities; but because we get from these writers a fusion of intellectualized-emo- tion which somehow enables us to understand ourselves and our lives mort fully. In reading great works I know not how to separate intellectual pleasure from emotional pleasure; they seem too closely related. Can any significant emotion-be aroused except by a signifi- cant referent, and, on the other hand, does any large interpretation of life lack deep emotional implications, whether we categorize the author as poet or philoso- pher? Perhaps the clue to Eliot's objection to reading any meaning into Shake- speare's plays is to be found in his at- tributing to the Renaissance a divorce between poetry and reason which is characteristic of our own .age: The end of the sixteenth century 1s an epoch when it s particularly difficult to associate poetry with systems of thought or reasoned views of life.