Alive or Dead?
- Alive or Dead?
The following essay, by one of the founding editors of The Cambridge Quarterly, was intended for publication in Scrutiny in 1953, and actually reached the stage of galley proofs, on which the present text is based. Scrutiny closed before the piece could appear, and it has never subsequently been published.1 The essay presents, in a tone and manner that are in some respects characteristic of its period and provenance, a series of reflections on the nature of literary criticism. It offers a comparative assessment of the literary-critical ideals and practice of Alexander Pope and William Empson, focused on Empson's chapter on Pope's Essay on Criticism in what was then Empson's latest book, The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Empson's critical reputation has continued to rise since the 1950s. Many of his previously uncollected essays have been assembled in book form; a large collection of his letters has appeared; and several books, including a fully documented two-volume biography, have been devoted to his work. Pope's Essay, however, though often reprinted and quoted, is still seldom regarded as a work with much direct appeal or significance for modern readers. Though few commentators today would probably be willing to endorse Thomas De Quincey's descriptions of the Essay as 'a collection of independent maxims . . . having no natural order or logical dependency' and as 'a metrical multiplication table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat traps', the poem is still more often regarded as a clever but predictably conventional epitome of 'neoclassical literary theory' than as the subtle, challenging, and organically unified poetic artefact described by Mason. The publication of Mason's essay will, it is hoped, encourage readers to reconsider both its particular judgements and the larger questions about the responsibilities of the critic that the piece so trenchantly raises. The main body of Mason's text stands as originally written, but references have been supplied or supplemented, a few points which may cause current readers difficulties have been glossed (these are given in square brackets), line numbers added (keyed to The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London 1939-69)), and a few presentational details standardised, for the reader's convenience.
- The Perfect Critic, or, Pope on Empson
This article, written in the 1950s, offers a revaluation of the Essay on Criticism, in the light of the commentary on Pope's poem in William Empson's (then) recent Structure of Complex Words. The author challenges the received view of Pope's poem as a clever but predictable and conventional epitome of 'neoclassical literary theory'. It argues that the Essay is, rather, a subtle, permanently challenging, and organically unified poetic artefact, whose key terms are not knowable in advance, and can only be properly understood in relation to one another, and to the work's overall imaginative design.
Many are spoil'd by that pedantic throng,Who with great pains teach youth to reason wrong.Tutors, like Virtuoso's, oft inclin'dBy strange transfusion to improve the mind,Draw off the sense we have, to pour in new;Which yet, with all their skill, they ne'er could do.2
With the passage of time Mr Empson has come to be regarded as no longer a budding young literary critic about whose future doubts and queries were in order, as we awaited the decisive book which would change promise into achievement, but has been insensibly transformed into a master and an Authority, the finest living approximation to the Perfect Critic. The metamorphosis may have occurred abroad (notably in the U.S.A. but the fact of the change is accepted in England). Yet, commonly, no work is pointed to as the ripened product of his critical powers. Mr Empson has proceeded M.A., as it were, without further examination. 3 Some Versions of Pastoral, which might have been thought to exert a backward depreciatory valuation on Seven Types of Ambiguity, to bring it down a class, perhaps, has somehow not counted for much in Mr Empson's growing reputation. The appearance...
