`The Making of the English Language'

Broad-mindedness in a reader should not be confused with critical passivity or the absence of standards and taste. Having an open literary mind means preserving an experimental spirit, a willingness to read work that at least initially is alien, difficult, offensive or otherwise unpleasant. Not that one will necessarily wish to reread the work in question, or even finish it the first time. Most of us can quickly smell inept or fraudulent writing. In the case of offensiveness, some writers are beyond excuses, at least in some of their work – I think immediately of Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. I return to Pound’s Cathay and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort à crédit, despite the raving anti-Semitism in some of their other works. Here’s a classic statement of this notion from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University (II. iii. 3.):

“We may feel great repugnance to Milton or Gibbon as men; we may most seriously protest against the spirit which ever lives, and the tendency which ever operates, in every page of their writings; but there they are, an integral portion of English Literature; we cannot extinguish them; we cannot deny their power; we cannot write a new Milton or a new Gibbon; we cannot expurgate what needs to be exorcised. They are great English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with incomparable gifts.”

How many readers and critics possess such generosity of spirit? Note the following passage a few paragraphs later, and further note that of the writers cited only Pope, we know with certainty, was Roman Catholic (I’m familiar with the arguments regarding Shakespeare, and remain unconvinced):

“Certain masters of composition, as Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, the writers of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, Hooker and Addison, Swift, Hume, and Goldsmith, have been the making of the English language.”

And this subsequent passage:

“How real a creation, how sui generis, is the style of Shakespeare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson! Even were the subject-matter without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid's elements or a symphony of Beethoven.”