58
PA.RTISA.N REVIEW
interest. Unfortunately all this is far from apparent at first glance; for
there is a kind of inverted vanity at work in.Mr. Empson's book which
leads him to write as if his subject were much less important than it
really is and as he must very well know it to be.
It is true that he is in a difficult situation, for his method of analysis
is one which demands great tact if it is to be used successfully. He starts
from the assumption that the thing written is an elaborate metaphor,
what Eliot somewhere calls the objective correlative of the author's
thought and feeling. It follows from this assumption that the work of
art is, as expression, an attempt to submit the show of things to the desires
of the mind, and, as communication, an attempt to establish in the reader
the attitude of which the work of art is the expression. On this assump–
tion ,the critic's task is to analyze the structure of the metaphor so as to
bring out all its possible implications and to make it plain, if he can, why
the age which produced the work of art in question felt this complex
but unified attitude to be important.
The critic who undertakes to use this method is in the awkward
position of a man faced with the necessity of explaining a joke.
If
he
explains too much he appears to condescend foolishly to his readers,
and if he explains too little, his tacit assumption that his special
knowledge is commonplace has the effect of making him appear in the
end, not humble, but supercilious. Mr. Empson has, how consciously it
is difficult ,to say, taken the latter course by adopting a sophisticated
version of the very device he is analyzing: he presents himselC to his
readers by a pastoral device; he is the revolutionary critic in the guise
of a correspondent of
The Times Literary Supplement.
And while this
device appears in the beginning to flatter the reader, it ends by flattering
Mr. Empson and annoying the reader. Perhaps this effect was
unavoidable; certainly it is not easy to see how Mr. Empson could have
avoided it without appearing fatuous. But it has the unfortunate
consequence of forcing him constantly to belittle by implication the
significance of his own work, first by omitting almost everywhere
in
the
book a larger part of the argument than he has a right to expect the
reader to supply, and secondly by giving the subject of his book a name
which, for all its quasi-ironic aptness as a depreciatory gesture, is
thoroughly misleading.
It is characteristic of this depreciatory manner that the cruciaropen–
ing essay in the book purports to be no more than some casual observa–
tions on "Proletarian Literature." What in fact Mr. Empson is doing in
~his
essay is to suggest that the purpose common to the larger part of
our literature is indicated by what Horace Gregory has called its quality
of fable. He begins by pointing out that good proletarian literature is
using the same trick that pastoral has always used: "The essential trick
of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between
rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feeling (felt as
the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about every–
body) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the
