'A Work of Art Absolute in Itself'

Years ago, Kenneth Rexroth almost won my heart when, in More Classics Revisited (1968), he described the work of St. Thomas Aquinas as “very entertaining reading.” But he quickly lost it when he followed with this: “The flaws in Aquinas are the flaws of the age before rigorous experimentation and before the development of an acutely sensitive humanitarianism.” Here we see the arrogance of modernity and a naïve faith in human progress. If only Aquinas had thought like us and been benevolent like us, he would have been a fine fellow. Rexroth is essentially a Romantic, the sort of poet and critic Yvor Winters would have eaten for breakfast. But when I looked again at More Classics Revisited – I have to admire, however grudgingly, anyone unafraid to make unfashionable critical judgments – and reread the chapter devoted to Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, I found this commonsensical passage:

     

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life with thorough approval and with that necessary identification that Coleridge long ago called suspension of disbelief.”

Rexroth wisely includes Parade’s End on that ten-foot shelf. With time, it has become a favorite novel, up there with Daniel Deronda, The Golden Bowl and Nostromo. Rexroth’s work will never be central to me. His thinking is too flaccid and his prose, correspondingly, is slack. Sloppy writing implies sloppy thinking. But the passage just quoted I find unexpectedly cheering. Serious readers are forever assembling that ten-foot shelf – adding, culling, building a personal canon, all the while knowing it can never be definitive. In The March of Literature, Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music:

“It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”

    

Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia, the paragraph here marked with the number 3. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.”