'Countrysides or Manor Houses'

I’ve read The Winter’s Tale again and, as usual, afterwards checked to see what Auden had to say about it in his Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, 2000). I won’t rehash his judgments of the play except to quote his final sentence, which even those who have never read Shakespeare will find attractively dense with meaning: “Forgiveness is not in forgetting, but in remembering.”

Then I leafed around in the book, enjoying Auden’s casually aphoristic prose. His “Concluding Lecture,” delivered May 14, 1947, is a little marvel of celebration. Near the end he writes, “To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character.” That’s debatable but interestingly so. Best of all is the concluding one-sentence paragraph: “But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.” No debating that.

 

Auden’s blanket statement confirms my core belief about literature. Without pleasure, it’s dust. Pleasure comes in many forms, depending on the reader – consolation, laughter, self-forgetting, satirical wit, projection into those not ourselves, suspense, moral assessment. The Winter’s Tale can be read as an exulting dance of words or, as Auden writes, as even “more complicated, more like life, and aesthetically more satisfying” than Pericles. In his final book, The March of Literature, Ford Madox Ford writes of the pleasures he takes in great novels:    

 

“In such masterpieces of their genre as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, as with Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park, the personality of the author, projecting itself through the human instances he selects to render, gives one a pleasure that, seizing upon one with the first words one reads, continues to the last page. In that pleasure one omits to notice either the writer’s methods or his social or political tendencies, and his books become, as it were, countrysides or manor houses rather than bound leaves of paper impressed with printed characters.”

 

Ford died on this date, June 26, in 1939, at age sixty-five.