The Caxton Constellation

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MAN OF LETTERS by John Gross. 322 pages. Macmillan. $8.95.

"Pigsbrook" was the way Victorian Critic F. J. Furnivall referred to Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poet wrote of Furnivall as "Brothelsdyke." Vituperation, however, has gone out of style in literary controversy, and it is the thesis of British Critic John Gross that this is a pity. If men don't lose their tempers over literature (as once they did over theology), it means that literature doesn't matter much any more.

Gross has had the excellent idea of passing in review a long file of "men of letters" from Francis Jeffrey and Thomas Carlyle to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis who agreed on nothing but shared a belief that their literary squabbles were deadly serious engagements in a battle for the keys to the kingdom of the mind. Scientists, today's high priests, may regard their theories as the most important thing on earth; after all, there is the conquered moon to prove it. But once Carlyle could say, and be believed, that the man of letters is "our most important modern person." Since then, something has happened to reduce the bookman to a mere bookworm. The man of letters, according to Evelyn Waugh, belongs to an extinct species--like maiden aunts.

Literary Thunderheads. For Gross's purposes, "men of letters" are critics and journalists--as distinguished from novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative persons, though countless creators served as men of letters too. His well-read line of English literary men should really be traced back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets began the great industry of literary criticism and gossip. But what began with a bang (Johnson was capable of no lesser noise) is clearly ending in a whisper. Between Johnson and Eliot lay the great age of the literary thunderheads, roughly dated between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World War I. Then boomed and flashed the resounding literary quarterlies, the influential journalists, the great prophet-critics like Coleridge, Carlyle, Walter Bagehot and Arnold. Such cloud-capped, towering judges of culture and anarchy have dissolved in today's bland intellectual climate. But in their heyday, English men of letters could claim, in Gross's phrase, to have "written a collective biography of the national mind."

A critic-poet like Arnold could and did speak commandingly of anything and everything from various translations of Homer to Home Rule for Ireland. If he ransacked the past for a phrase like "sweetness and light" (attainable by an elite marked by good will and cultivation), his use of it ensured that it would pass into the English language --first as a slogan, then as a derisory epithet. Those were the days when the aesthetic theories of literary men like William Morris and John Ruskin could be incorporated in a revolutionary social program. Eliot was perhaps the last figure to achieve the aura of the great man of letters. His quarterly Criterion, at any rate, was almost the last literary review (among more than 100 listed by Gross) to establish a coherent critical philosophy. But by the 1930s the Criterion's High Church Toryism ran fatally against the tide of history and fashion. Eliot was leading the critical pack when he dressed down Milton in order to dress up Donne. But the serene hierarchical cultural society for which he naturally yearned failed to make its bow.

Among literary editors, the greatest was the "blatant beast," Frank Harris, amateur pornographer and Shaw biographer. Harris was too cynical to want his Saturday Review to create a school of criticism--as the Criterion and F. R. Leavis' Scrutiny were to do. But his "chorus of insolent reviewers" included almost every great Edwardian writer.

Gross's fascinating, if disorderly, progress is strewn with unsung heroes of letters who stick in the memory. One such was W. E. Henley. Respected in his day as an editor with an ungovernable temper, Henley is now mainly forgotten as the poet with an "unconquerable soul." The haunted poet-critic James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night, appears in these pages as a starving journalist subject to suicidal depressions and alcoholism, an outcast man of letters slogging across London to attend George Eliot's funeral only to be confronted by an impenetrable mushroom colony of wet umbrellas. Naturally, G. K. Chesterton turns up as an archetype of the prewar Fleet Street literary man, wittily promoting through the industrial smog a preposterous ideal of Merrie England,

Mafia Cults. Gross, curiously enough, regards Chesterton as a wittier man than Oscar Wilde. Chesterton was also one of the last great journalistic freelancers. Gross points out that making a steady living solely as a literary critic, for years easy to do in England, has been impossible since World War II. Yet the decline of economic opportunity seems to be a symptom rather than a cause of the decline of the man of letters. As a former English-teaching don at Cambridge, Gross knows and documents the depressing effect on literary delight of modern scholarship in the Mafia cults of the U.S. and the U.K. "Think of the atmosphere of suspicion," he writes, "implied by the habit of fitting out the most trivial quotation with a reference as though it were applying for a job." In England, the teaching of "Eng. lit." is a relatively new thing. (Oxford, for instance, did not have an English-literature department until 1885.) Before that, young men, educated in the classics and sciences, were expected to pick up reading in their own tongue as naturally as they learned to order dinner.

"English [studies]." sniffed one history don, "chatter about Shelley." George Saintsbury, who died in 1933, is an early example of the disease of scholarship. "A journalist transformed in middle age into the most venerable of professors," he became for generations of students the "supreme exponent of English lit." He was also the classic exemplar of the winetaster theory of literature. Saintsbury, indeed, wrote with equal learning and authority on poetry and port but, alas, as if they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate--or of professional gain--naturally detest and fear a creative man of letters like Ezra Pound, to whom poetry was a passion in which the soul was engaged in mortal questions of great consequence. Sir Edmund Gosse, for instance, a pompous Edwardian booktaster of great influence and reputation, once referred to Pound as "that preposterous American filibuster and Provenc,al charlatan." Gosse's dislikes were cordially returned. The young Evelyn Waugh saw Gosse as an "ill-natured habitue of the great world." "I longed," he added, "for a demented lady's maid to make an end of him."

New Dark Age. Are we (as Marshall McLuhan threatens or promises) on the verge of a nonverbal age, when Samuel Johnson, Coleridge and the rest will be no more intelligible than hippopotamus snorting and snuffling in jungle muck? Are we on the verge of a new Dark Age of universal literacy in which the mind, and the longing for the pleasures of literature, will drown in a plethora of print? Gross quotes the new attitude as described by a Kingsley Amis character: "If there was one thing which Roger never felt like, it was a good read." Have science and the new near disciplines like sociology--not to mention the sheer accumulation of modern knowledge that he cannot hope to assimilate--made the humanist man of letters obsolete, permanently inferior as "the last amateur in a world of professionals"?

Gross raises such questions in a wide-ranging epilogue, answering them all with a graceful, regretful, thoroughly qualified "maybe." He more or less accepts the McLuhanite theory that the art of communication is passing from the straight, hard linear man of the Gutenberg Galaxy into the noisy psychedelic womb of sound, sensation, sniff, touch and hash. But he does not accept it gladly, and the later stars in the Caxton Constellation (an English group in Gutenberg's inky way) do much to disprove his own thesis. Paradoxically, too, so will his book itself, at least temporarily, if it achieves the wide attention it deserves. "Chatter about Shelley" may be contemptible, but Shelley's chatter was often more important than most men's theses. Even lately George Orwell's essays and memoirs have achieved an influence likely to persist beyond 1984. Letters and men of letters are declining, but they are not yet entirely fallen. A shooting star or two may still be seen with the naked eye.

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