黑蓝论坛»论坛 › 合 › 资料 › 王敖 › 艾略特为The Wheel of Fire写的序

查看: 1650|回复: 1

艾略特为The Wheel of Fire写的序

1131 主题	0 好友	1万积分

略有小成

Lucifer

Rank: 7 Rank: 7 Rank: 7

发消息

电梯直达

1^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:58:35 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

这是我从电子图书馆里弄下来的，订正过乱码。

[此贴子已经被作者于2007-6-4 9:09:53编辑过]

分享到: QQ空间 腾讯微博 腾讯朋友

分享0 收藏0 顶6 踩18

Hermes Trismegistus

使用道具举报

王敖

1131 主题	0 好友	1万积分

略有小成

Lucifer

Rank: 7 Rank: 7 Rank: 7

发消息

2^#

发表于 2007-8-4 13:58:39 |只看该作者

艾略特为The Wheel of Fire写的序

Introduction  It has taken me a long time to recognize the justification of what Mr. Wilson Knight calls “interpretation”.  In my previous scepticism I am quite ready to admit the presence of elements of pure prejudice, as well as of some which I defend. I have always maintained, not only that Shakespeare was not a philosophical poet in the sense of Dante and Lucretius; but also, what may be more easily overlooked, that “philosophical poets” like Dante and Lucretius are not really philosophers at all. They are poets who have presented us with the emotional and sense equivalent for a definite philosophical system constructed by a philosopher--even though they may sometimes take little liberties with the system. To say that Shakespeare is not a philosophical poet like these is not to say anything very striking or important. It is more worth while to point out that my notion of Dante or Lucretius as providing the “emotional equivalent” for a philosophical system expressed by someone else, is not to be pressed to a literal point for point parallelism,as in the old theory of mind and body. The poet has something to say which is not even necessarily implicit in the system, something which is also over and above the verbal beauty. In other words, the pattern of <city wst="on"><place wst="on">Cyrene</place></city> or that of the Schools is not the whole of the pattern of the carpet of Lucretius or of Dante. This other part of the pattern is something to be found in the work of other great poets than those who are philosophical--I say of other, not of all--for that would exclude Horace or Dryden or Malherbe. It is also to be found in the work of some (again, not of all) of the greatest novelists: certainly of George Eliot, and of Henry James who gave the phrase its currency. And of this sort of ‘pattern’ the most elaborate, the most extensive, and probably the most inscrutable is that of the plays of Shakespeare. For one thing, in Dante the pattern is interwoven chiefly with the systematic pattern which he set himself, and the mystery and excitement lies in trying to trace its relations and differences--the relation, and the personal variations in another mode, between for example the Thomist doctrine of Love, the poetic provencal tradition, and the direct experience of Dante with its modifications under philosophical and literary influences. But the philosophic pattern is far more a help than a hindrance, it is indeed a priori a help. Furthermore, Dante in his kind of poetry was doing exactly what he liked with his own material; and the practical exigencies of a badly paid playwright, popular entertainer, sometimes actor, and sometimes busy producer, can only confuse us in our study of Shakespeare. Then again, with Dante the philosophic system gives us a kind of criterion of consciousness, and the letter to Can Grande confirms it; just as of a lesser writer, but no less genuine a pattern-maker, Henry James, we have some gauge of consciousness in his very nearness to us in time and civilization, in the authors he studied and the constant play of his criticism upon his own work. But with Shakespeare we seem to be moving in an air of Cimmerian darkness. The conditions of his life, the conditions under which dramatic art was then possible, seem even more remote from us than those of Dante. We dare not treat him as completely isolated from his contemporary dramatists, as we can largely isolate Dante. We see his contemporaries for the most part as busy hack writers of untidy genius, sharing a particular sense of the tragic mood: this sense, such as it is, merging into the mere sense of what the public wanted. They confuse us by the fact that what at first appears to be their “philosophy of life” sometimes turns out to be only a felicitous but shameless lifting of a passage from almost any author, as those of Chapman from Erasmus. This, indeed, is a habit which Shakespeare shares; he has his Montaigne, his Seneca, and his Machiavelli, or his Anti-Machiavel like the others. And they adapted, collaborated, and overlaid each other to the limits of confusion. Nevertheless, they do seem, the best of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, to have more or less faint or distinct patterns. (I was tempted to use the word “secret”as an alternative to “pattern” but that I remembered the unlucky example of Matthew Arnold, who said much about the “secret of Jesus”,  a secret which having been revealed only and finally to Arnold himself, turned out to be a pretty poor secret after all.) In Marlowe, surely, we feel the search for one; in Chapman a kind of blundering upon one; in Jonson the one dear and distinct, slight but much more serious than it looks, pattern. There is something in the Revenger’sTragedy, but one play does not make a pattern; and Middleton completely baffles me; and as for Ford and Shirley, I suspect them of belonging to that class of poets not unknown to any age, which has all of the superficial qualities, and none of the internal organs, of poetry. But a study of these dramatists only renders our study of Shakespearemore difficult. The danger of studying him alone is the danger of working into the essence of Shakespeare what is just convention and the dodges of an overworked and underpaid writer; the danger of studying him together with his contemporaries is the danger of reducing a unique vision to a mode.         I once affirmed that Dante made great poetry out of a great philosophy of life; and that Shakespeare made equally great poetry out of an inferior and muddled philosophy of life. I see no reason to retract that assertion: but I ought to elucidate it. When I say “great poetry” I do not suggest that there is a pure element in poetry, the right use of words and cadences, which the real amateur of poetry can wholly isolate to enjoy The real amateur of poetry certainly enjoys, is thrilled by, uses of words which to the untrained reader seem prosaic. I would say that only the real amateur of poetry, perhaps, if this is not too presumptuous, only the real practitioner, can enjoy a great deal of poetry which the untrained reader dismisses as clever paraphrase of prose; certainly, to enjoy Pope, to have an analytic enough mind to enjoy even second rate eighteenth-century poetry, is a bettertest of “love of poetry” than to like Shakespeare, which is no test at all: I can tell nothing from the fact that you enjoy Shakespeare, unless I know exactly how you enjoy him. But the greatest poetry, like the greatest prose, has a doubleness; the poet is talking to you on two planes at once. So I mean not merely that Shakespeare had as refined a sense for words as Dante; but that he also has this doubleness of speech.         Now it is only a personal prejudice of mine, that I prefer poetry with a clear philosophical pattern, if it has the other pattern as well, to poetry like Shakespeare’s. But this preference means merely a satisfaction of more of my own needs, not a judgement of superiority or even a statement that I enjoy it more as poetry. I like a definite and dogmatic philosophy, preferably a Christian and Catholic one, but alternatively that of Epicurus or of the Forest Philosophers of India; and it does not seem to me to obstruct or diminish either the “poetry” or the other pattern. Among readers, probably both types, that of Dante and that of Shakespeare, suffer equal transformation. Dante will be taken as a mere paraphraser of Aquinas, occasionally bursting through his rigid frame into such scenes as Paolo and Francesca, but neither by his admirers nor by his detractors credited with anything like the freedom of Shakespeare. Shakespeare will be still worse traduced, in being attributed with some patent system of philosophy of his own, esoteric guide toconduct, yoga-breathing or key to the scriptures. Thus are the planes of order and pattern confounded.        It is also the prejudice or preference of any one who practises, though humbly, the art of verse, to be sceptical of all “interpretations” of poetry, even his own interpretations; and to rely upon his sense of power and accomplishment in language to guide him. And certainly people ordinarily incline to suppose that in order to enjoy a poem it is necessary to “discover its meaning” so that their minds toil to discover a meaning, a meaning which they can expound to any one who will listen, in order to prove that they enjoy it. But for one thing the possibilities of meaning of “meaning” in poetry are so extensive, that one isquite aware that one’s knowledge of the meaning even of what oneself has written is extremely limited, and that its meaning to others, at least so far as there is some consensus of interpretation among persons apparently qualified to interpret, is quite as much a part of it as what it means to oneself. But when the meaning assigned is too clearly formulated, then one reader who has grasped a meaning of a poem may happen to appreciate it less exactly, enjoy it less intensely, than another person who has the discretion not to inquire too insistently. So, finally, the sceptical practitioner of verse tends to limit his criticism of poetry to the appreciation of vocabulary and syntax, the analysis of line, metric and cadence; to stick as closely to the more trustworthy senses aspossible.  Or rather, tends to try to do this. For this exact and humble appreciation is only one ideal never quite arrived at or even so far as approximated consistently maintained.  The restless demon in us drives us also to “interpret” whether we will or not; and the question of the meaning of “interpretation” is a very pretty problem for Mr. I. A. Richards, withwhich neither Mr. Wilson Knight nor myself in this context can afford to be too narrowly concerned. But our impulse to interpret a work of art (by “work of art” I mean here rather the work of one artist as a whole) is exactly as imperative and fundamental as our impulse to interpret the universe by metaphysics. Though we are never satisfied by any metaphysic, yet those who insist dogmatically upon the impossibility of knowledge of the universe, or those who essay to prove to us that the term “universe” is meaningless, meet, I think, with a singularly unanimous rejection by those who are curious about the universe; and their counsels fall more flat than the flimsiest constructions of metaphysics.And Bradley’s apothegm that “metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct” applies as precisely to the interpretation of poetry.  To interpret, then, or to seek to pounce upon the secret, to elucidate the pattern and pluck out the mystery, of a poet’s work, is “no less an instinct”. Nor is the effort altogether vain; for as the study of philosophy, and indeed the surrendering ourselves, with adequate knowledge of other systems, to some system of our own or of someone else, is as needful part of a man’s  life as falling in love or making any contract, so is it necessary to surrender ourselves to some interpretation of the poetry we like. (In my own experience, a writer needs less to “interpret” the work of some minor poet who has influenced him, and whom he has assimilated, than the work of those poets who aretoo big for anyone wholly to assimilate. But I dare say that if one was as great a poet as Shakespeare, and was also his “spiritual heir” one would feel no need to interpret him; interpretation is necessary perhaps only in so far as one is passive, not creative, oneself.) And I do not mean that nothing solid and enduring can be arrived at in interpretation: but to me it seems that there must be, as a matter of fact, in every effort of interpretation, some part which can be accepted and necessarily also some part which other readers can reject. I believe that there is a good deal in the interpretation of Shakespeare by Mr. Wilson Knight which can stand indefinitely for other people; and it would be a waste of time for me to pronounce judicially on the two elements in Mr. Knight’s work. For that would be merely a re-interpretation of my own; and the reader will have to perform that operation for himself anyway. But I confess that reading his essays seems to me to haveenlarged my understanding of the Shakespeare pattern; which, after all, is quite the main thing. It happened, fortunately for myself, that when I read some of his papers I was mulling over some of the later plays, particularly Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’sTale; and reading the later plays for the first time in my life as a separate group, I was impressed by what seemed to me important and very serious recurrences of moodand theme. The old theory, current in my youth, of a Shakespeare altering and deteriorating his form and style to suit a new romantic taste, would not do; or if Shakespeare did this, then it became a remarkable coincidence that he should be able in middle life to turn about and give the public what it wanted--if these strange plays couldconceivably be what any public would want--and at the same time remain steadfast in such integrity of exploration. And the mastery of language, I was sure, was quite undiminished.  To take Shakespeare’s work as a whole, no longer to single out several plays as the greatest, and mark the others only as apprenticeship or decline--is I think an important and positive step in modern Shakespeare interpretation. More particularly, I think that Mr. Wilson Knight has shown insight in pursuing his search for the pattern below the levelof “plot” and “character”.  There are plots and there are characters: the question of “resources” has its rights, and we must, if we go into the matter at all, inform ourselves of the exact proportion of invention, borrowing, and adaptation in the plot; and so far as possible we must separate the lines written by Shakespeare from those written by collaborators, or taken over from an earlier hand or interpolated by a later. This sort of work must be done to prepare for the search for the real pattern. But I think that Mr. Knight, among other things, has insisted upon the right way to interpret poetic drama. The writer of poetic drama is not merely a man skilled in two arts and skilful to weave them in together; he is not a writer who can decorate a play with poetic language and metre. His task is different from that of the “dramatist” or that of the “poet” for his pattern is more complex and more dimensional; and with the subtraction which I have noted above, that Dante’s pattern is the richer by a serious philosophy, and Shakespeare’s the poorer by a rag-bag philosophy, I should say that Shakespeare’s pattern was more complex, and his problem more difficult, than Dante’s. The genuine poetic drama must, at its best, observe all the regulations of the plain drama, but will weave them organically (to mix a metaphor and to borrow for the occasion a modern word) into a much richer design.But our first duty as either critics or “interpreters”, surely, must be to try to grasp the whole design, and read character and plot in the understanding of this subterrene or submarine music. Here I say Mr. Knight has pursued the right line for his own plane of investigation, not hypostasizing “character” and “plot”. For Shakespeare is one of the rarest of dramatic poets, in that each of his characters is most nearly adequate both to the requirements of the real world and to those of the poet’s world. If we can apprehend this balance in Pericles, we can come to apprehend it even in Goneril and Regan. And here Mr. Knight seems to me to be very helpful in expressing the results of the passive, and more critical, poetic understanding. My fear is, that both what I say in this prefatory way, and what Mr. Wilson Knight has to say, may be misunderstood. It is a little irony thatwhen a poet, like Dante, sets out with a definite philosophy and a sincere determination to guide conduct, his philosophical and ethical pattern is discounted, and our interpreters insist upon the pure poetry which is to be disassociated from this reprehensible effort to do us good. And that when a poet like Shakespeare, who has no “philosophy” and apparently no design upon the amelioration of our behaviour, sets forth his experience and reading of life, he is forthwith saddled with a “philosophy” of his own and some esoteric hints towards conduct. So we kick against those who wish to guide us, and insist on being guided by those who only aim to show us a vision, a dream if you like, whichis beyond good and evil in the common sense. It is all a question of our willingness to pursue any path to the end. For the very Catholic philosophy of Dante, with its stern judgement of morals, leads us to the same point beyond good and evil as the pattern of Shakespeare. Morality, we need to be told again and again, is not itself to be judged bymoral standards: its laws are as “natural” as any discovered by Einstein or Planck: which is expounded by, among others, Piccarda. Well: we must settle these problems for ourselves, provisionally, as well as we can. Without pursuing that curious and obscure problem of the meaning of interpretation farther, it occurs to me as possible that there may be an essential part of error in all interpretation, without which it would not be interpretation at all: but this line of thought may be persevered in by students of Appearance and Reality. Another point, more immediately relevant, is that in a work of art, as truly as anywhere, reality only exists in and through appearances. I do not think that Mr. Wilson Knight himself, or Mr. Colin Still in his interesting book on The Tempest called Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, has fallen into the error of presenting the work of Shakespeare as a series of mystical treatises in cryptogram, to be filed away once the cipher is read; poetry is poetry, and the surface is as marvellous as the core. A mystical treatise is at best a poor substitute forthe original experience of its author; and a poem, or the life抯 work of a poet, is a very different document from that. The work of Shakespeare is like life itself something to be lived through. If we lived it completelywe should need no interpretation; but on our plane of appearances our interpretations themselves are a part of our living.  T.S. Eliot(1930)

Hermes Trismegistus

使用道具举报

返回列表

帐号		自动登录	找回密码
密码			加入黑蓝