QUESTIONS OF
LANGUAGE
One ground for the special appeal of these contemporary work–
ers, of course, is the common bond of the experience and the life
of the twentieth century.
If
this
is so I need to suggest to myself that
there is a barrier to my full appreciation of, say, Donne or Raphael
(I deliberately take widely different examples) and I will never ap–
preciate them as they were appreciated by their contemporaries be–
cause I do not know their language and experience in such a full and
living way. I am helped by books it is true. I am
also
helped by the
"universality of appeal" of these works.
And now I would like to substitute the phrase "universality of
appeal" for "greatness" and then, to me at least, the problem of
comparisons becomes less obscure. Joyce has a special appeal to those
of us who know enough of his experience and of his language. But
I believe that this appeal is limited in time and place by special
technical difficulties. I do not believe that it is likely to exist in a
hundred years' time, or even in fifty years' time. I am not sure that
any contemporary can imitate Stendhal and say, "I
will
be under–
stood in the year 2000." Yet the best work of today may well need
to have "lived through" the experience of Joyce.
Let us suppose (which is unhappily far from impossible) that
either as a result of barbarian invasions from without, or as a result
of the growth of barbarism from within, our familiar Western culture
or civilization should move into a dark age. When people awoke
from such a period, after hundreds of years, and turned their minds
once again to literature, culture, and history, we can imagine they
would take an interest in our European achievements as we took an
interest in those of the Greeks. But it is highly doubtful if they would
turn particularly to our period. They would be interested rather
in the great "classical" periods of European culture. I expect they
would find much more appeal in a painting by Raphael than in one
by Picasso. I am almost certain they would be unable to make any–
thing of Joyce.
Finally, I note that what is good in the creative achievement of
our time as regards literature and the
arts
appeals only to very small
groups of people. There are now in fact two quite distinct literatures
(and kinds of painting and music and architecture) existing concur–
rently: "popular" literature and "serious" literature. Is
this
situation
to continue and become even more aggravated and paradoxical?
If
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