JOURNAL

OF
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
AND
AESTHETICS
A VISHVANATHA KAVIRAJA INSTITUTE PUBLICATION
VOLUME. I NOS. 2 WINTER 1978

EDITORIAL BOARD
Indian Members:

Foreign Members

K.B. Tripathy (Cuttack)

Rene Wellek (U.S.A.)

K.R.S. Iyengar (Madras)

John Fisher (U.S.A.)

V.Y. Kantak (Baroda)

Harold Osborne (U.K.)

V.K. Gokak (Bangalore)

Mircea Eliade (U.S.A.)

V. Raghavan (Madras)

T.O. Ling (U.K.)

M. Niyog (Punjab)

M.H. Abrams (U.S.A.)

J. Chakravorty (Calcutta)

John Hospers(U.S.A)

S.S. Mishra (Benaras)

V.G. Vitsaxis (Greece)

P.S. Sastri (Nagpur)

J.V. Boulton (U.K)

Horst Rdiger (W. Germany)

Managing Editor:
A.C. Sukla
Jyoti Vihar : Burla
Sambalpur, : Orissa (India)
DISTRIBUTORS:

STERLING PUBLISHERS PVT. LTD.

JOURNAL OF
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
AND AESTHETICS
VOLUME I : NUMBER 2
WINTER : 1978

In Homage to
Professor Ree Wellek
the distinguished American literary theorist, critical
historian, comparatist scholar and Sterling Professor
Emeritus of Comparative Literature of Yale University
(U.S.A.) on his 75th birthday (August 22nd, 1903)

Rene Wellek

CONTENTS
1
Rene Wellek
Prospect and Retrospect
13
Martin Bucco :
Rene Wellek : Profession of criticism
25
Remo Ceserani:
Rene Wellek
51
Murray Krieger
Truth and Troth, Fact and Faith:
Accuracy to the World and Fidelity to vision
59
Jayanta Chakravorty :
Indian Silpa Texts on the Drawing of Human Form
69
A. C. Sukla
Theory of Impersonal Art
80
Book Reviews By :
B. S. Baral and A. C. Sukla

Journal of comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Vol 1 : No.2:
Winter 1978
~
@ Vishvanatha
Kaviraja Institute:
Orissa: India

PROSPECT
RENE

AND

RETROSPECT

WELLEK

$peaking

on such a festive occasion,

feeling as I do gratitude

to those who

spoke so warmly about me and my work, I could easily be tempted to indulge in

reminiscences
which,. at my age, will inevitably
sound nostalgic,
regretful, even
sentimental.
I don't want to think of myself, however as dead and buried.
An
old friend of mine who occasionaly
visits this library from out of town wrote to
me that he had "the shock of my life in seeing books of yours exhibited
in the
Sterling
Library.
I thought
you might
have
died
and with no obituary, on

account of the newspaper strike." He was reassured when he looked closer.

I myself want to think of this occasion as a stimulus to finishing my big project
of A History of M adern Criticism. Two more volumes are to come: the fifth,
devoted entirely to English and American criticism in the first half of this
century; the sixth and last, to the continent of Europe. The fifth is far advanced. Some of you will have seen the articles on individual critIcs scattered over
several periodicals which will be used in an updated and revised form: on A. C.
Bradley, on Virginia Woolf, on Ezra Pound, on T. S. Eliot, on I. A. Richards,
on F. R. Leavis, to list those devoted to English critics, and on Irving Babbitt,
Paul Elmer More, Edmund Wilson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks,
Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, and William K. Wimsatt, to which I shall add
a speech reflecting and defending the methods of my History and a genral essay
on "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra" recently published in Critical Inquiry.
An essay on Allen Tate written three years ago has been lying about with a
German publisher of a two-volume collection of papers on all the main figures
of English and American literary theory from Sir Phillip Sidney to Northrop
Frye.
A Speech on the Occasion of the Celebration
of the Seventy-fifth
Birthday of Rene
*
WelIek, Delivered
at the Sterling
Memorial
Library,
Yale University,
on September
28, 1978.

The

sixth

volume

is far less advanced,

but

I have

written

articles

on

Benedetto
Croce, on the Classical
Tradition
in France, on Charles Dubos, on
Albert Thibaudet,
on Friedrich Guodolf and his erstwhile pupil Max Kommerell,
00 the three great
Romance
scholars
who wrote in German,
Ernst
Robert
Curti us, Leo Spitzer,
and Erich
Auerbach,
on Emil
Staiger,
on the Russian
Formalists,
on Modern
Czech
Criticism,
and
on the so-called
Prague
ScnooJ.
Many gaps have to be filled
I bave, for instance,
nothing
written yet
on Spanish criticism.
Thus my study and writing
are planned for several years
ahead.
I also have other commitments
and plans. For years I have promised
to bring out a new revised edition of my first book lmmanuel Kant in England,
which was published
by the Princeton
University Press in 1931 but was printed
in Prague. It contains many misprints as it was set by printers ignorant of English.
My own English was then still deficient
and there are errors in the transcripts
from manuscripts
I had trouble in deciphering.
Since then I have also turned
up a fair amount of new information
which I hope to incorporate.
I am also
less confident
of the strongly Hegelian
interpretation
of Kant to which I was
then committed.
Most of the book I have retyped in a revised version, but I am
still stymied by the chapter on Coleridge.
The new edition of Coleridge
from
the Princeton
University
Press, both of the Notebooks
and of the collected
writings, is far from complete.
I will not see its completion
in my lifetime, I
fear. Without the full text of the Notebooks
and without access to the so-called
Magnum Opus still unprinted,
a completely
satisfactory
account of Coleridge's
relations to Kant cannot be given.
I cannot be confident
that I shall accomplish everythin~ I plan.
There is always the proviso:
God willing.
When I look back on my work I
changes in literary scholarship and criticism
years of my writing
life.
When in 1922
Prague to study Germanic
philology,
I was
type of philological
and historical scholarship,

see today how clearly it reflects the

which occurred
during the fifty-four
I came to the Czech University in
confronted with the then prevalent
mainly inherited
from the German

tradition
with its roots in Romanticism,
implying
a glorification of the dim
Teutonic and Slavic past and of the Middle Ages.
The Professor of Germanic
philology, Josef Janko
(1869-1947),
lectured
on Gothic vocal~sm in the first
semester and on Gothic consonantism
in the second.
I came from a Gymnasium
where
I had learned to parse and translate
Latin and some Greek but had
not the foggiest idea about
phonetics.
I could not distinguish
a dental from a
labial.
The Professor of German
literature,
Amost Kraus (1859-1943),
gave a

seminar on the Minnesiirzger, patiently going through every poet, in the Manesse
Manuscript,
telling the biography
of every poet, the stanzaic
form and the
analogues of every poem. Reading the Nibe/ungenlied
in Middle
High German,
he was much concerned with the exact route the company took down the Danube
to their doom at Etzel's court.
In another
seminar
Professor Kraus distributed
letters he had collected from castles and archives
in Bohemia,
written
by more
or less well-known German and Austrian
wri ters and had us edit them: we. had
to transcribe them from the original,
which he entrusted to us freely, ascertain
the addressee,
the date, explain
allusions,
and so on.
I got a fine letter of
Christoph
Martin
Wieland,
the eighteenth-century
rococo
poet, and one by
August von Platen, the early nineteenth-century
classicist.
It was good exercise:
it let you loose in the library.

For a time I also attended the seminar of Professor August Sauer, then
the great light of the German University.
I remember having to write a report on
a proclamation supposedly written by Napoleon from Elba concocted by the
German pamphleteer and romantic Josef Garres, and being commended that my
paper was so thorough and exhaustive that "no grass can grow after Wellek.'~
It was an ambiguous compliment, and even then my attitude toward this kind of
scholarship was ambiguous, as it has remained all my life.
I found
rather
what
I wanted
in a younger
Professor of German
literature,
Otokar Fischer (1883-1938}, who had written
books on Heinrich
von
Kleist and Nietzsche.
He was a brilliant
lecturer
mainly concerned
with the
psychology of his favorite
figures in German
literature:
his book on Heine,
unfortunately
buried in the Czech langnage,
grew out of a seminar
I attended.
In 1908 he had been one of the first (or possibly the very first) literary
scholar
who had used psy.choanalysis for the interpretation
of a literary work: the dreams
in Gottfried Keller's novel Der grune Heinrich.

In 1924 Fischer founded the new review Kritika together with F. X.

Salda (1867-1937:, and there I published by very first article, severely criticizing
the Czech translation of Romeo and Juliet: a bold move for a young man as the
translator, J. V. Sladek, was a reve:-ed poet and his translations from Shakespeare
considered masterpieces.
Salda was the dominant
figure in Czech literary
criticism since the 1890's who had fought the battles for Symbolism and all forms
of modernism and who had preserved the allegiance of even the youngest avantgarde poets by his sympathy for everything new and revolutionary.
During the
3

First World War he had been appointed

Professor of Western
Literatures
at the
University (though a freelance journaJist),
and he still lectured
on French literature, reluctantly,
casually, even grumpily,
obviously considering his duties at the
University

djstractions

from

his writing.

Though

I admired

his early

writings.

I was disappointed
by his performance
in the lecture room and soon gave up
visiting him in his apartment
as he was surrounded
by a coterie of young men
and pontificated
in an overbearing
manner
I found repeJlent.
Then there was Vticlav Tille (1867-1937),
Professor of Comparative
Literature,
a subject then flourishing in the Slavic countries,
which was conceived largely as comparative
folklore, thematology,
Stoffgeschichte.
Tille had
written

successful

fairy-tales

himself

and

considered

all oral

Jiterature

to be

descended from upper-class literature.

He had an amazing
memory
for themes
and plots and was also a dreaded theater critic who would retell the story of a
play to make it sound utterly
ridiculous
and absurd.
He was a witty man,
basically nihilistic
with his elaborate
general skepticism

in his views of scholarship

and criticism. Still,
refutation
of the determinism
of Hippolyte
about causal explanation
in literary studies.

I sympathized
Taine
and his

Finally there was ViUm Mathesius (1882-1945), the Professor of English

who later became the founder and President of the Prague Linguistic
Circle. He
had been an early proponent of descriptive
linguistics, of which
I knew nothing
at. that time. But
I knew his solid
handbooks
on Anglo-Saxon
and Middle
English literature
and attended his lectures and seminars in which he expounded
the history of older English literature
soberly, descriptively.
His lit.erary taste was
determined
by his admiration
realistic English novel as his

for Shaw and

H. G. Wells; the tradition of the
general
outlook was empirical, concerned
with the

cultural and ethical values of the British

be good for his nation.

Protestant

tradition

he

thought

would

When I look baek on these teachers of mine

I consider myself lucky to
have come to the University of Prague in a time or its flowering,
when the olrl
scholarship was changing under the impact of new tastes and
the new criticism.
The University of Prague,
situated in the capital,
allowed
the collaboration
of
scholarship
and criticism which
I still feel to be the ideal solution.
But I must
confess tha t I withheld
willing to do historical

full allegiance from everyone of my teachers.

I was quite
and philological
research
but felt strongly its limitations.
4

I admired atokaI' Fischer

psychoanalytical
concerns.

immensely but drew back from his psychological

I could not become a follower of F. X. Salda as

and
I did

not share his, what seemed to me uncritical

search
for novelty.
I was quite
uninterested
in Tille's concern for oral
literature.
I could not share the view of
English literature propounded
or implied by Mathesius.
I cared then only for
Shakespeare,
the Romantic
and
Victorian
poets, and after my first visit to
Englana in 1924 for Donne and the metaphysicals.
In St. Paul's Cathedral
I. had
seen the tomb of John Donne wrapped in his shroud and picked
up an anthology
of seventeenth
century
English
poetry compiled by
J. H. Massingham which
impressed me deeply.
I was prepared by the then newly
revived
interest in
German and Czech Baroque poetry.

Heidelberg,

I had made one attempt to break away from Prague.

In 1923 I visited
heard a lecture of Friedrich
Gundolf and called on him.
I had read

Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist

and his book on Goethe
and thought that
here literary scholorship was freed from pedantry
and allowed bold judgments
and generalizations.
I shared the
new enthusiasm
for
Hiilderlin,
on whpm
Gundolf had written
perceptively.
But in Heidelberg
I was repeJled by the
atmosphere
of awestruck adoration surrounding
him: I realized that the unspoken
demand for total aJlegiance
and even abject
subservience to the ethos and views
of the George circle was foreign to my nature.
I returned to Prague
and shifted
from German literature
to English.
I became
the assistant
to Mathesius
and
wrote a thesis under his direction on "Carlyle and Romanticism,"
mainly on his
German
contacts, a topic chosen
defiantly
to run counter to Mathesius'
own
predilections.
I received a D. Phil, in June 1926 and spent then several months
in England preparing
a monograph
on my new project,
Andrew
MarveJl,
whom
I wanted to interpret in relation to Baroque
French and Latin poetry.
At that
time there was little written on MarveJl aside from the splendid
essay by T. S.
Eliot and a thin biography by Augustin Birrell. It was a great blow when I found
out, at Oxford, that a new critical edition was coming out and that a large book,
in Freneh, by Pierre Legouis was in preparation.
I had to postpone my plan indefinitely, as it turned out.
I thus welcomed a fellowship
to the United
States: to
Princeton University.
I set foot on the soil of this country for the first time in
September
1927. At Princeton
I attended
four seminars as if I were a graduate
student
(though I held a postdoctoral
fellowship).
For the first time in my life
I had instruction
in English,
had to write regular
papers and do prescribed

reading.

I was suddenly

thrown

back

into

the

type of scholarship

I wanted

to

break away from in Prague.

At Princeton at that time there was no instruction
in modern literature or American
literature.
I was severely
discouraged
from
taking work with G. M. Harper,
the biographer
of Wordsworth.
Of the five
teachprs

I had, Thomas

Marc

Parrott

taught

a seminar

on

Hamlet

where we did

nothing but make a line-by-line compa-rison of the two Quartos

with the Folio.
Charles Grosvenor Osgood
taught a seminar on Spenser mainly
concerned
with
sources and background.
My first assignment was "Spenser's
Irish Rivers," which
required looking into old maps of Ireland.
Robert
Kilburn
Root had us read
Alexander
Pope and with his ironic and sarcastic
wit,
managed
to convey
something of his ethos, and J. E. Brown, a younger
man who died vere early,
expounded
the ideas of Dr. Johnson
with sympathy.
A fellow student
praised a
fourth seminar I took then in addition to the usual load of three. Morris W. Croll
propagated
Croce's aesthetics and interpreted
English lyrical
poetry. He was then
writing a paper on English Baroque prose. A reprint says that I persuaded
him to
call it Baroque {he had called it "Attic"
before).
But Croll had read Wiilffiin and
did not need me
something about
something of the
early Van Wyck

to know
about Baroque.
From Root and Brown
I learned
eighteenth-century
criticism.
From reading
around
I imbibed
critical atmosphere
of the time.
I read H. L. Mencken
and the
Brooks criticizing the American
business civilization.
I read the

American New H~manists,

then much in the limelight. Later
I met Paul Elmer
More, who lived in Princeton; he lent me copies of the Cambridge
Platonists.
I heard Irving Babbitt lecture at Harvard
before I returned to Czechoslovakia
in
June

1930. At Princeton

I was impressed

by eighteenth-century

Neoclassicism

and

the new antiromantic

polemics of the New Humanists,
but again I con not say that
I was converted.
I realize
now that I was lucky in returning
to escape
the
Depression years and I thus remained
unaffected by the prevailing
Marxism
of
that time. I had rea? some Marxist ~riticism in Prague but remained
indifferent,
possibly because in Czechoslovakia
it was identified with the Communist
party,
rightly considered a tool of Stalin.
When I returned to Prague I had the manuscript
of my book Immanuel
Kan: in England more or less in shape.
In my two and a half years at Princeton, at Smith, and then again at Prillceton,
I had developed
an increasing
interest in philosophy:
mainly the standard
British authors
and the Germans,
Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. In Prague in my student
years I had avoided

the professors of philosophy,

who seemed to me uninteresting
.expounders
of
positivism.
As an instructor
in Princeton
( 1929-30)
I attended a seminar on
Hegel's
Logic taught
by a young Dutchman,
Veltman,
and Professor Ledger
Wood.
My thesis on Carlyle had led me to Coleridge and Coleridge led to Kant
and Schelling.
In the Widener
Library in the summer of 1928 I discovered many
totally neglected
books, articles,
and references
to Kant in the 1770's and the
early decades
of the nineteenth
century.
Stopping
over in London on my way
back to Prague I read the manuscript
of Coleridge's
Logic in the British Museum
and discovered, to my dismay, that it was nothing but a compilation
of passages
from the Critique of Pure Reason interspersed
with passages from Moses Mendelssohn and pious reflections
by Coleridge
himself.
My chapter
on Coleridge
made me the exponent of a view of Coleridge's
borrowings and his position in a
history of philosophy which was and perhaps is still resented.

Back in Prague I submitted Immanuel Kant in England as a second thesis

(Habilitation) which was necessary to be admitted as Docent to lecture at the
University on English literature. My topic was completely alien to Mathesius, but
it testifies to his open-mindedness that he accepted it, though he required me in
addition to write a paper on a medieval topic. It was then that
I composed a
little treatise on The Pearl (1933), my only excursion into medieval studies, which
confronted me with problems of symbolism and theological and ~autobiographical
interpretation
which I dismissed or solved in a way which,
I am told, is still
convincing.
When I arrived in Prague, the Linguistic Circle had been founded during
my absence. I joined it immediately and took part in its sessions. I attended a
Conference on Phonology in December
1930 and met then or before Roman
Jakobson,Jan Mukarovsky, and the other members of that splendid group. As the
new Docent I had to give an inaugural lecture: it was on "Empiricism and
Idealism in English Literature,"
strongly siding with the idealist and Platonic
tradition in English poetry. In the Prague years I came more and more under the
influence of my older colleagues at the Circle and of their models, the Russian
formalists.
But again I withheld full allegiance.
In a review of the Czech
translation of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose in 1934 I voiced many misgivings about
the extremes
Mukarovsky's

of his mechanistic
history of Czech

and in a paper on J akobson's

and
I questioned their views of literary

formalism,
versification
7

evolution.
I argued for modifications
of their formalism
in the direction of a
judgmental
criticism and an interest
in philosophical
implications.
I had read
Roman Ingarden's
Dus literarische Kunstwerk (1931) and had met Ingarden at the
International
Congress of Philosophy in Prague in 1934.
In 1935 I was again uprooted.
As prospects for a professorship at Prague
were distant,
I accepted an offer to become lecturer
in Czech language
and
literature
at the School of Slavonic
Studies of London University.
The job was
paid by the Czechoslovakian
Ministry of Education,
and
I kept my foothold at
the University of Prague as the presumptive
successor to Mathesius.
In London
I formulated
my theoretical
conceptions in a paper entitled "The Theory of Literary
History," published in English in the sixth volume of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague in 1936. I mention
this because the paper was reproduced
wi th
little change in the volume Literary
Scholarship, edited by Norman
Foerster,
in
1941 and again as the last chapter of Theory of Literature.
I held these views and
formulated
tht>m before I returned to the United States and before
I knew anything about the American New Criticism.
In England
I soon learned
something
about
1. A. Richards,
whose
behavioristic
psychology could not appeal to me, coming as I did from the Prague
school and the phenomenology
of Ingarden,
a student of Husser!.
In Cambridge
in the summer of 1936 I met F. R. Leavis and some of his friends, Lionel Knights
and Henri Fluchere. I sympathized
~ith Leavis' anti-academic
attitude
and sorm
began

to contribute

to Scrutiny.

I wrote

also a long

critical

account

of I. A.

Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis for the' Czech

periodical
,?f the
Prague circle (Slovo a slovenost). In a lon~ letter I tried, incautiously,
to persuade
Leavis that in his newly published book Revaluation
he had misinterpreted
the
philosophy of Blake, Wordsworth,
and Shelley. He printed the lettcr in Scrutiny and
wrote an answer, "Philosophy
and Criticism"
(1937), in which be took me to ta3k
as a philosopher
who did not understand
that criticism is not concerned
with
ideas but with concrete
sensitive
readings.
This piece has pursued
me all
my life: it is reprinted,
without my original
letter, in Leavis'
Common Pursuit and
is widely quoted.
I became a straw man to knock down, though I actually agree
with Leavis' general distinction
between
philosophy and criticism,
elJen lhough
I continue to object to the altitheoretical
bias of much English criticism
and of
Leavis in particular.
In addition
to my duties as lecturer in Czech, which induced me to
study the Czech National Revival, English travelers
in Bohemia,
and the influ8

ence of Byron on the Czech romantic

poet K. H. Mcicha, I pursued a scheme
that had emerged
naturally from my preoccupation
with the theory of literary
history.
I worked for several years in the Museum
on a history of literary
historiography
in Eng land. When,
after the invasion
of Prague by Hitler on
March 15, 1939, I had to give up any thought of returning
to Prague,
I decided
to emigrate
to the United States.
I secured a position in the English
department
of the University of Iowa through
the good offices of Professor Thomas Marc
Parrot.
I took with me the manuscript
of a book, The Rise of English Literary
History,
eventually
published in 1941. Before going out to Iowa I spent six weeks
in the Sterling Library in the summer of 1939, trying to finish my book. Here I
met
Louis

the

late James.

Marshall

Osborn

and

through

him

Maynard

Mack

and

L. Martz.

I knew only one person at Iowa and nothing of the University.

I even
had to look up its exact location
on a map in the British Museum.
But I was
grateful to get a foothold in this country, which was the only one that offered
a refuge from the approaching
war.
At Iowa I was immediately
plunged into
the conflict between historical scholarship
and criticism~
As I was appointed
by Norman Foerster, the Director of the School of Letters, a staunch New Humanist, I was lined up on the side of criticism
against historical seholarship.
I still
remember an encounter with one of the literary historians, who reacted furiously to
a suggestion that he had also written some criticism.
"This is the worst insult
anybody
ever paid me," he said, flushing deeply. Foerster that very year had
brought
Austin Warren
from Boston Uuiversity:
with a few younger men we
made up the "critical faction,"
and we composed
a collective
volume, Literary
Scholarship:
Its Aims and Methods (1941), to which Austin Warren
contributed
the chapter on criticism and I the chapter on literary history.
The forties brought
about the establishment
of criticism as an academic
subject in American
universities. The text book Understanding
Poetry by Cleanth
Brooks and Robert
Penn
Warren (1938) was the main pedagogical
breakthrough.
R. P. Warren
taught
twice at Iowa as a visiting professor.
At the newly founded
English institute
meeting at Columbia University
I met Cleanth
Brooks, Allen Tate, and W. K.
Wimsatt in 1940 and 1941. I was deeply impressed
by the New Criticism,
but
again I remained an outsider who had come with different preconceptions.
Austin
Warren and I felt that we had sailed under false colors when contributed
to a book
edited by Norman Foerster. We formed the project or writing a book on Theory of

Literature which would combine the new critical outlook of Austin Warren
with
my knowledge of Continental
developments.
Theory of Literature came out after
many delays partly due to my involvement
with war work (I taught
an Army
Area and Language Program in Czech) and to Mrs. Warren's
illness and d,eath.
The date of publication, January
1949, is deceptive: most of the book was written
in the years 1945-47 and much dated back in earlier
printed
work.
I mentioned
the Prague article "The Theory of Literary History;" the chapter on "The Mode
of Existence of a Literary Work of Art" reprinted an article published
in the last
number of the old Southern Review in 1942. The book was not thought of as a
textbDok, but it made its way in the American
graduate
schools,
and in other
countries, to judge
from the translations
into
twenty-one
languages.
The
newest is into Russian, of which I have not yet seen a copy.
..

At Iowa as a European with a knowledge of languages I was put to teach

a course in the European novel and I gave a seminar in German-English literary
and intellectual relations. I had long been convinced that no single literature
can
be studied without going constantly beyond its confines.
I embraced the
cause of comparative li'terature as a worthy subject alongside the old national
literatures.
An ideal of a supernational study of literature seemed to me called
for also by the bright hopes of the aftermath of the War.
When

I was called

to Yale in

1946 as Profe_sor of Slavic and compara-

tive literature
I came here in something
of a missionary
spirit.
Yale had no
chair, no program,
and no department,
and had n!'ver had one. At Harvard
and Columbia old departments
lay dormant.
At Harvard Harry Levin, in the
very same year, was entrusted
with r!'suscitating
the subject and brought an
Italian
Slavicist,
Renato
Poggioli, to revitalize
the program.
A quarterly,
Comparative Literature, began publication in 1949. The first number contair,s
my essay "The Concept
of Romanticism
in Literary
History,"
in which I
tried to refute

A. O. Lovejoy's

famous

argument

against

its very existence.

At first, the Yale program was very small.

I was the only person on a
full-time appointment.
Much later Lowry Nelson,Jr.,
one of the first Ph. D. s
of the program, was brought in, and joint appointments
with other departments
were arranged.
The program
became an independent,
full-fledged
department
as late as 1960. It has flowered
also after my retirement
in 1972 and has
10

produced a splendid array of students. I myself directed some fifty dissertations.

I trust the company who have came from the department have, whatever the
variety of convictions they hold and interests they pursue, at least two things in
common: devotion to scholarship and complete freedem to follow their own bent.
Since Theory of Literature I devoted most of my energy left over from
teaching and administration
to wrIting a large.s~ale international
History of
Modern Criticism. It seemed inevitable to look for support, justification and possibly
rectification of the theory of literature in history.
Theory emerges from history
just as history itself can only be under~tood with questions and answers in mind.
History and theory explain and implicate each other.
There is a profound
unity of fact and idea, past and present.
The volumes that have accompanied the History. Concepts of Criticism
(1963), Confrontations (1965), Discriminations (1970), and the new scattered
articles which I hope to collect under the title of a key essay,
"The Attack on
Literature," are conceived in the same spirit and try to come to terms with new
developments ill America and Europe.
Looking

back on my work I am struck

phases I went through:

historical

scholarship,

with my detachment
Symbolist

criticism

from all the

in the wake of

Salda or Gundolf, the American

New Humanism,
the Prague School shaped by
Russian Formalism,
the Le~\Vis group, the American
New Criticism.
I may be a
Laodicean,
but I hope that
I have preserved
my own integrity
and a core of
convictions: that the aesthetic
experience differs from other experiences
and sets
off the realm

of art, of fictionality,

art, while a linguistic

construct,

of Schein,

from

life;

it cannot
therefore be described
only by linguistic
telling of man, society, and nature;
that all arguments
barrier;

that we are confronted,

that the li~erary

at the same time refers to the world

as students

of literature,

that

means but has a meaning

for relativism
meet a final
with an object,

of art, out there (whatever

may be its ultimate
ontological
status)
challenges us to understand
and interpret it; that there is thus no complete
of interpretation.
Analysis,
interpretation,
evaluation
are
of a single procedure.
Evaluation
grows out of understanding.
to distinguish
between art and non-art
and should have
11

work of

outside,

the

work
which
liberty

interconnected
stages
We as critics learn
the courage
of our

convictions.
The
and what is false;
poor humanist is
proudly asserting

lawyer knows
the physician
floundering,
the life of the

or thinks he knows what is right and what is true

knows what is health and what is disease; only the
uncertain
of himself
and his calling
instead of
mind which is the life of Reason.

Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature

Yale University
Connectient

,....

~~

CHf\f'tD
PUBLISHERS
RAM NAGAR,

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12

Journal of comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Vol 1 : No.2:
Winter 1978
@ Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute : Orissa: India

RENE

WBLLEK

PRO

F E 5 5 ION

MARTIN

OF C R I TIC

ISM

BUCCa

3Jn the fall of 1978, the distinguished

American

literary

theorist,

critical

historian,
and comparatist
scholar Rene Wellek spokE' at the Sterling
Memorial
Library, Yale University,
on the occasion of an exhibition of his publications
and
the celebration
of his seventy-fifth birthday.
After out lining the main tasks ahead
of him, he looked back on his writing life over the past fifty-four years and noted
that his books reflected
the many changes in literary scholarship and criticism.
Still, he hoped that he had preserved his own integrity and a core of convictions.
Wellek, whose impulse has always been to help clarify the methodological
Tower
of Babel, once explained:
"My views and aspirations
are best expounded
in my
books."
No doubt many Indian
literary scholars
know the convictions
and
aspirations
in Wellek's twelve books, if not in all of his hundreds
of scattered
essays and reviews. In honor of his seventy-fifth birthday,
Rene Wellek's
friends
in India might like to know more about the early stages of his remarkable
development,
particularly
about the formative
years preceding
his first scholarly
publication
as an undergraduate.

Rene Wellek was born in Vienna on August 22, 190~, the oldest of three
children. In this old Hapsburg capital-cradle
of much contemporary
thought in
psychology, medicine, philosophy, politics, art, music, and Jiterature-Wellek
and his younger brother Albert (1904-1972) spent their boyhoods. The culture
ofWellek's parents influenced his development profoundly.
His father Bronislav
Wellek (1872-1959), then a government lawyer, was a Czech from a petty-bourgeois Catholic family in Prague. Known as a Liedersiinger, a Wagnerian, and
an opera reviewer, Bronislav Wellek also was an ardent Czech nationalist, a transmitter of Czech values to the Austrian consciousness, a biographer of the

composer

Bedrich

Smetana

and a translator

of the poets

Jaroslav

Vrcblickyand

J. S. Machar.
Rene Wellek's
mother, nee Gapriele
von Zelewsky
(1881-1950),
came from a different background.
Born in Rome, she bloomed
into a dazzling
beauty who spoke German.
Italian,
French,
and English.
Rene
WelJek's
maternal
grandfather
was a West Prussian
nobleman
of Polish origin;
Wellek's
grandmother
was a Swiss Protestant
from picturesque
Schaffhausen.
After the
nobleman'y
death, his wife and daughter
travelled on the Continent.
In Vienna,
Gabriele von Zelewsky met Bronislav Wellek.
In the crowded capital
the young couple and their sons moved from
apartment
to apartment.
From 1906 to 1908 Bronislav
Wellek served under the
Austrian prime minister,
Baron von Beck, to whom he gave
Czech lessons. In
1912 the Welleks settled in a lar~e house wi~h garden and terrace.
At home and
in the kaleidoscopic
Danubian
metropolis with its baroque elegance and Kaffeehaus
culture, Rene and Albert
grew up in an atmosphere rich in linguistic,
aesthetic,
political, and religious overtones. Since the Protestantism
of his Swiss grandmother
prevailed in the family, the Brothers WelJek had bpen baptized
in the Lutheran
Church. Even the agnostic Bronislav became a nominal Lutheran.
As a boy Rene Wellek

read

voraciously.

He and

his

brother

developed

"crazes" for all kinds of encyclopedic

and historical
information-geography,
science, religion, literature,
military
campaigns.'
Familiar with
Viennese
opera,
Rene Wellek also took piano lessons. At school he and his brother spoke German,
but sensed anti-Czech
feeling. At home and on vacations in the river valleys and
pinewoods of Bohemia, the brothers spoke Czech. A month
after he became ten,
Rene Wellek started Latin lessons, and for eight hours a week for eight
read much of Livy, Cornelius
Nepos, Caesar,
Cicero, Ovid,
Vergil,
Catullus, and Tacitus.

years he
Horace,

During the First World War, Rene Wellek recalls, food in Vienna grew
scarce and cannon boomed in the Carpathians.
When he was thirt~en he started
Greek, and during the next three years he read Xenophon, much Homer, some
Plato, and some Lucian. During his convalescence from scarlet fever, his father
read to him the whole of The Pickwick Papers in German. When he returned
finally to the Wahring Gymnasium, he was permitted to substitute English or
French for his interrupted Greek studies. WelJek's choice of English influenced
his life decisively. Though he still spent long hours at his Latin, he 'grew increasingly sceptical of mechanical instruction.
14

With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire in 1918, the Welleks
(and infant Elizabeth)
moved
to the ancient
cathedral
city of Prague,
that
picturesque,
gloomy settlement at the entrance to Eastern Europe. "Czechoslovakia
after the war," Wellek notes, "more
than ever, stood at the crossroads
of all
cultural influences, in consequence
of her geographical
position,
her Slavonic
language and her Western sympathies."
Like his father high in government
office,
the schoolboy Rene Wellek identified with the new Czechoslovakia.
"The outcome
of the great war, which for the Czechs meant the fulfilment of a centuries-old
desire, was a surprise and shock for the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia."
8tiII,
the first president of the Republic,
Tomas Masaryk,
hoped that Czechoslovakia
might become the Switzerland
of Central Europe and prague the Athens.

No English, howevr, was taught at WeIlek's Rea/gymnasium.

Nevertheless he, continued to read English literature at home, particularly Shakespeare
and the Romantic poets. In school he studied botany, history, geography, and
three literatures-Latin
Germ'iLn, and Czech. He read a good deal of Reformation history and became familiar with the German classics. After reading
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he puzzled over his mother's sentimental piety.
In 1922, Wellek entered
Charles
University
(the Czech Univrsity
of
Prague).
Viewing his father's legal profession as boring and his brother's
medical
interests as unappealing,
Wellek
prevailed
upon his father to allow him to study
Germanic
philology.
Academe
promised
inteIlectual
adventure
and social
responsibility,
art and learning,
passion and judgment.
At Charles University,
German historical
scholarship
still held sway bUt often it collaborated
with
criticism. Joseph Janko
lectured on Gothic
vocalism
and consonantism,
Arnost
Kraus on the Minnesiinger,
Otokar
Fischer on the psychoanalytic
interpretation
of Heine, F. X. Salda on Symbolism, and Vdclav TIlle on comparative
folklore.
From each WeIlek learned, but from each he withheld total allegiance.
Fascinated
by the judgmental
boldness of Friedrich
Gundolf's
Shakespeare und der deutsche
Geist (1911) and Goethe (1916), Wellek in 1923 visited Heidelberg
to hear GundoJf
lecture; after calling on him, however, Wellek was repelled by Gundolf's
adoring
cult of Stefan George.
At Charles University, WeIlek enjoyed the lectures on English literary
history given by the highly regarded Czech scholar and teacher
Vilim Mathesius
(1882-1945). The noble and polite Mathesius,
Wellek later wrote, was "the type
15

of the Czech scholar who grew up under Austria

in the tradition
of Czech
Protestantism,
with Masaryk as a model in mind, who devoted
himself to the
building of the nation between the wars." During Mathesius'
sudden loss of sight,
Wellek (who then cared only for Shakespeare
and the Romantic
and Victorian
poets) read portions of The Fairie Queene to him and observed
that often Mathesius' responses to Spenser went beyond the conventions
of 9th-century
positivistic
philologv.
Mathesius,
in fact, encouraged
his students
to free themselves
from
fanatic German factualism and to writ!" Czech
style of the English.
Though Mathesius seemed
ned

with

the

problem

of evil and

tragedy,

exposition
to Wellek

with

in the simple, clear

insufficiently
concer-

irrationality

and

the interior

life, Mathesius
instilled in him "a sane respect for order, tradition,
common
sense, lucidity...
distrust of the merely new, the pretentious
and opaque...a
concern for genuine discovery
for the frontiers of knowledge."
With

his father's

help

Wellek

in

1924 spent

two

months

in England

preparing
his thesis on "Thomas
Carlyle
and Romanticism"
and responding
favorably
to the Metaphysical
Revival.
The next y.ear he and other Czech
students, under the auspices of the British Union of students, visited Combridge,
Binningham,
Liverpool,
Oxford,
Bristol, and London.
As an undergraduate
W ellek began publishing
his efforts in Czech books and periodicals.
His first
essay

in

tr anslation

Fischer's

and

of Romeo

Said a's

and Juliet.

review

Other

Kritika,

took

early essays

to

are

task

J.

V. Sladek's

on Byron

aod

Czech

Shelley,

early reviews 00 various studies in Czech, English, French, and German.

Under
Mathesius, Wellek completed his thesis on Carlyl~:
Wellek ,argues that Carlyle
fought the Enlightenment
with weapons
from
German
Romanticism,
but
remained
a Puritan.
In June,
1926, at age twenty-three,
Wellek received his
D. Phil.
Supported
by the Czech Ministry
of Education,
Wellek
once more
visited England,
this time to prepare
a monograph
on Andrew
Marvell
in
relation
to Baroque
and Latin
poetry. But at Oxford, where he met Mario
Praz, Wellek was surprised
to leatn that the French scholar Pierre Legouis was
preparing
a large book on Marvell,
With
recommendations
from
Oxford,
Wellek applied to the Institute of International
Educatioo,
and in the fall of 1927
he went to Princeton as a Procter Fellow of English.
He spent a busy year in the
16

regular graduate seminars of Thomas M. Parrot, Robert K. Root, Charles G.

Osgood, and Morris W. Croll. Unfortunately,
WeIlek's seminar assignments
were much like those of his early years in Germanic philology.
At the.tirne
Princeton offered no modern or American literature. WeIlek, however, milnaged
to read H. L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, and the New Humanists.
Since there was no opening for him at Prague, Wellek remained
in the
United States and taught German the next year at Smith College.
The following
year he returned
to Princeton to teach German.
Having avoided
at Prague the
professors
of positivistic
philosophy,
at Princeton
he attended
Ledger
Wood's
seminar on Hegel's Logic. Wellek's thesis 'on Carlyle had led him to Coleridge, and
Coleridge led him to Kant and Schelling.
During this period,
Wellek decided
that the topic of his second thesis (Habilitation)
would be the influence of Kant on
English thought.
Wellek then voyaged home by way of England.
At' the British
Museum
he scrutinized
Coleridge's
MS. "Logic,"
amazed
to see the fair and
unfair use Coleridge made of Kant.
Back at Charles
University
by the fall of 1930, Wellek
completed
Immanuel
Kant in England:
/793-/838.
Though
Mathesius
had reservations
about the subject of the Habilitation, he advised Wellek to enhance his chances of
securing
a professorship
by writing
a paper on the Middle
English
poem
The Pearl.
Wellek passed his Docentura,
basing his inaugural
lecture ("The
Two Englands : Empiricism
and Idealism in English Literature")
on an entry in
Coleridge's notebooks.
Writes Wellek:
"I developed
two traditions wIth an unconcealed
preference
for the
tradition."
Still, Mathesius selected Wellek his eventual
the History of English Literature.

the contrast
between the
Platonic
idealistic
poetic
successor as Professor of

From 1930 to 1935 Wellek lived in Prague.

He became an active junior
member of the famous Prague
Linguistic
Circle, translated
Joseph
Conrad's
Chance and D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers into Czech, taught
English as a
Privatdozent,
and wrote in Czech,. English,
and German for a variety of Czech
journals.
In 1932 Wellek married Olga Brodska,
an elementary
school teacher
from Moravia.
WelJek early surveyed the work of the Cambridge
criticsI. A.
Richards,
F. R. Leavis, and William Empson -and
contributed
articles and
reviews to S/ovo a slovesnost, journal of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He further
developed his considerable
skill in textual
analysis,
formulation
of theory, and
17

reasoned evaluation.
Believing
that history can be written only from a sense of
direction,
Wellek as early as 1932 sought in his paper on "Wordsworth's
and
Coleridge's Theories of Poetic Diction" for anticipations
of the views of the Russian
Formalists and the Czech Structuralists.
Of great interest to Wellek at this time
were the theories of Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovasky,
and
Roman lngarden.
Since

prospects

for a professorship

at

Prague

seemed

remote,

Wellek

from 1935 to 1939 was Lecturer

in Czech Language
and Li terature at the school
of Slavonic
studies of the University of London.
Sponsored there by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education,
Wellek also gave six public lectures a year on
Czech
culture.
During
these
London
years,
he contributed
his important
"Theory of Literary History" to the sixth volume of Traveaux du Cercte Linguistique de Prague (1935).
Wellek notes that this essay for the first time in English
discusses Russian
Formalism
and
Ingarden's
phenomenology.
Wellek argues
against merely accumulating
facts about
literature,
against reducing
literature
to historical information
He advocates concentrating
on the actual works of art
themselves,
on bridging the gulf between content and form.
In

Cambridge

in the summer

of 1936 Wellek

for the first time met F. R.

Leavis. Though Wellek's views in many areas coincided with those of the Cambridge group, his famous letter in Scrutiny in 1937 chargtd Leavis in his Revaluation
(1936) with an inadequate
appreciation
of idealism
as it descends from Plato,
with underrating
the coherence and comprehensibility
of the RomantiC
view of
the world. Leavis wrongly countercharged
that Wellek was an abstract philosopher
with an inadequate'
apprec.iation
of sensitive,
concrete criticism.
As Bronislav
Wellek before World War I had transmitted
Czech culture
to Austria, so Rene
Wellek before World War II transmitted
Czech culture
to England.
In London
and environs, in speech and print, he sought help for his threatened
homeland
by
acquainting
the English with venerable
Anglo.Czech
relations,
with Czech
writers and values.
Several ofWellek's
thoughtful,
factual
accounts
of Czech
history and the Czech situation stem from this period.

Reich

After Hitler's troops marched into Prague

halted
Wellek's
salary.
Thomas
Parrott

Wellek's
plight.
Foerster
University of Iowa invited

in the spr"ing of 1939, the Third

informed
Norman
Foerster of

as Director
of the school of Letters
Wellek to join the English
Department
18

at the State
as a lecturer

on a one-year appointment.
on a map in the British
America

in June.

Having
Museum,

ascertained
the exact location of Iowa City
Wellek and his wife gratefully
sailed for

Before the trip to Iowa, Wellek

on the manuscript
of his Rise of English
into a newly rented house in Iowa City
War II broke out in Europe.

worked

at .Yale

for six weeks

Literary
History.
The Welleks
on September
1, 1939-the
day

moved
World

at first taught courses in the Humanities

and the
At Iowa, ''''ellek
European novel. There he met several stimulating
colleagues, among them Austin
Warren.
Reappointed,
Wellek soon taught a seminar in German-English
literary
and intellectual
relations.
In the stormy
debate in American
Universities
between scholars and critics (history versus values, facts .versus ideas), WelIek
naturally
supported Foerster's Neo-Humanist
reforms.
Like England,
America
lacked theoritical
awareness,
its scholarship
was antiquarian,
its criticism
imprf'ssionistic.
To the collective
volume .Literary
Scholar~'hip:
Its Aims and
Methods, (194l) Wellek contributed
a revised version of his "Theory
of Literary
History."
That same year the University of North Carolina
published
his Rise
of English Literary History.
Wellek became an associate professor at Iowa and
associate

editor of Philological

At meetings
Wellek met William
twice taught at Iowa
perceptions
naturally

Quarter~v

(1941-46).

of the newly-founded
English
Institute
in the early 1940s,
K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate.
Robert
Penn
as a visiting professor.
Though Continental
and American
differed, Wellek
was impressed with these "New Critics."

Sensing the limitations

of New Humanism,
WelIek and Warren decided to write
Theory of Literature, a book stressing the nature, function, form, and contents
of
literature,
as well as its relation
to neighboring
but distinct
disciplines.
The
needed book would bring together Wellek's insights into slavic Formalism/structuralism and \Varren's into American New Criticism.
To expedite the collaboration,
Wellek enlarged the scope of his reading in American
scholarship
while Warren
read more European
studies.
Meanwhile,
Wellek
accepted
Louis
Wright's
invitation
to work as a Fellow at the Huntington
Library during the summer of
1942-on
what Wellek imagined would be the second installment
English Literary History (since Thomas Warton to the present).

19

of his

Rise

of

Though Wellek naturally

lost touch with the Prague
fied his theoretical
interests.
At the center of his convictions
of the aesthetic experience,
the human meaning of art, the
sible interpretation,
the interdependence
of theory and
interconnection
of analysis, interpretation,
and evaluation.

Circle, he intensiwere the autonomy

necessity for responexperience,
and the
In the spring of 19.13

Wellek's son Ivan Alexander was born.

From 1943-14, Wellek was Director
of
the Laliguage and Area Program in Czech, his function
to produce
translators
for the U. S. Army.
Wellek was promoted
to full profE'ssor in 1944, but his
grinding stint as language director had retarded progress on Theory of Literature.
With support from the RocKefeller
Foundation,
however,
Wellek and Warren
spent the bright post-war summer of 1945 in Cam bridge, Massachusetts.
Enthusiastically, the Czech and the American
wrotE', exchanged,
discussed,
and revised
chapters.
Of Austin Warren as writer and teacher, Wellek observes:
"Working
with him was a course in style, in the art of exposition, in the clarity of formulation,"
In the fall they returned
to Iowa,
but Wellek, having
learned
that
Mathe,;ius had died shortly before the liberation,
com ide red returning
to Prague.
Yale University, however, offered him a post, and Wellek
became
American citizen in May, 1946. That same year Yale presented
honorary M. A. de~ree, and he joined the editorial board (1946-:0)
Language

a naturalised
him with an
of the Modern

Association.
Still working

on Theory of Literature,

Wellek

in the fall

Professor

of Slavic and Comparative

Literature

program,

no department

WellE'k sensed that the time was growing

for expans;ofi.
Novel.

thE'n, but

Soon there would

WeIJek rightly

insisted

at Yale.

be 125 undergraduates
that we cannot

There

of 1946 became
was no

chair,

no
ripe

in his Survey of the Russian

study a single

literature

in isola-

tion.
All literature
is interdependent,
particularly
the literature
descending
from Greece and Rome. Ideas, forms, genres, themes, motifs, techniques,
metrics,
stock characters,
and much
more cross all language
barriers.
Professors
of
literature

in whatever

supE'rnalional

history

Warren

or

languages

in

New

must

recognize

as

an ideal

the

of Literature.

visitf'd Wellek

illness arid death

originally assigned
tion date, most

language

Haven

the next two summers,

but

the

of Warren's
wife necessitated
that
Wellek write chapters
to Warren. Thou"gh Theory of Literature
bears a 1949 publica-

of the

book

was

written
20

between

1945-47,

and

it incorporates

earlier papers, including Wellek's well-known

chapter
"The
Mode of Existence
of a Literary Work of Art," first published in the Southern Review in 1942. In the
summer of 1947 Wellek lectured on literary theory at the University of Minnesota,
and in the summer of 1948 he lectured on the history of criticism
at Columbia
University. He returned
to Yale in the fall as chairman
of his department.
Meanwhile,
Warren left Iowa for the University of Michigan.
Though not conceived as a textbook,
Theory of Ulerature
caught
on in
American graduate schools. In a short time, it became a vade mecum.
Today it is
an academic best seller, in twenty-two
translations.
Thanks to the fusion of the
German-Slavic
and Anglo-American
critical
traditions in Theory of Literature,
students and professors of literature
the world over have become cognizant of
essential distinctions and with the cardinal idea that "a literary
work of art is not
a simple object but rather a highly
complex organization
of a stratified character
with multiple
meanings
and relationships."
To the first issue of Comparative
Litt!Ta/ure, on whose editorial
board he was a member,
Wellek
contributed
his long
essay, "The
Concept of Romanticism,
in Literary
History,"
his
well-known
refutation
the unity of Western

of Arthur
Romanticism.

O. Lovejoy's
argument
in
In the summer
of 1949

1924 against
Wellek joined

John
Crowe
Ransom,
Allen
Tate,
and
Yvor Winters
as a Felllow
at
the Kenyon School of Criticism.
After th~ publication
of Theory of Literature,
Wellek put his greatest labors after teaching and administration
into his projected
five-volume
(later projected six-volume)
History of Modern Criticism: /750-1950.
The books survey
English,
French,
German,
Italian,
Russian,
and American
developments
in criticism.
Limitations
of space allow only brief mention of Wellek's major publications, activities, and honors since mid-century.
He taught a weekly semiQar in the
Enlightenment
at Harvard University in the spring of 1950, and in the summer
he gave nine guest lectures in the Gauss Seminar
in Literary
Criticism
at
Princeton University. That year he also became a Fellow of Silliman
College at
Yale and a Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters. As a Guggenheim
Fellow, he
devoted 1951-52 to writing his History of Criticism in New Haven and afterward
travelled briefly in Italy, Switzerland,
and Germany.
Still Chairman
of the Slavic
Department
at Yale, he became Sterling
Professor of Comparative
Literature
in
1952. He again became Visiting Professor at Harvard
(1953-54)
and again was
.
elected to the editorial board (1953-54) of the Modern Language Association.

In 1955 Yale University Press published the first two volumes of his
"monumental"
History of Modern Criticism-The
La/er Eighteenth Century and
21

The Romantic Age. Praise was high and wide.

For 1956-57 Wellek received his
second Guggenheim
Fellowship,
which enabled
him to work in New Haven
without
interruption
and to visit Czechoslovakia.
Lawrence
College bestowed
on Wellek the first of his twelve honorary doctorates.
The next year Wellek accepted the Distinguished
Service Award
from the American
Council of Learned
Societies.
Language

For 1959-60 he was elected to the Executive Council of the Modern

Association.
He also was chosen Fulbright Research
Scholar
in Italy,

mostly in Florence

and Rome.

In 1960 Wellek received honorary degrees from Harvard

the fall he became Chairman
of his outstanding
Department
Literature
at Yale. In 1961 he received an honorary degree from

and Oxford. In
of Comparative
the University of

Rome and was visiting

professor at the University
of Hawaii.
During the next
two years he was elected president of three large organisations
: the International
Association
of Comparative
Literature
(1961-64),
the American
AssocIation
of
Comparative
Sciences

Literature

in America
For

(1962-65),

and

the

Czechoslovak

society

of Arts and

(1962-66).

his sixtieth

birthday,

the society presented

him

with the publication

of his key Czech writings in English:

E.ssa}s in Czech Literature
(l963). Wenek
was Visiting
Summer
Professor at the University
of California in Berkeley in
1963, the year another
collection-Concepts
of Criticism
was published,
a work
which defines problems of method and periodization,
sets conceptual
ideals, and
measures
results
against
literature
itself.
Grants
from the Rockefeller
and
Bollingen
Foundations
allowed Wellek to take another
leave from academic
duties in 1963-64. The University of Maryland
in 1964 awarded
him an honorary
degree. That year he also
became
vice-president
of the Modern
Language
Association.
A year later Princeton University Press published
his third volume
of essays, Confrontations:
'Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations
Between
Germany, England, and the United States durin!: the Nineteenth Century,
prompting
Howard Mumford
Jones to declare
that "Wellek
is the most erudite man in
AmericCl
"

published

Boston
College
conferred
the
third
and
fourth'

Transition

and The Later Nineteenth

an honorary
degree
volumes of his critical
Century.

22

in 1966, and Yale

History-The
Age of

In 1966-67, on his third

Guggenheim,

Wellek

again

visited

Italy,

mainly,

\,yellek died. The next spring Wellek

Rome

and

married

Sicily.

In the

a Russian

emigre,

most vital person

and herself a professor, of comparative
University honored Wellek with a degree in 1968, and
Fulbright Distinguished
Lecturer in Germany.
The

1970s began

for Wellek

with

degrees

fall

of 1967 Olga

Nonna

Shaw,

literature.
Columbia
that summer
he was

from

the

Universities

of

Montreal
and
Louvain
and with
the publication
of his fourth collection,
Discriminations:
Further Concepts of Criticism.
Wellek's
own bibliographies
in
Essays on Czech
ing range. He
surveys, and
ideas, literary
methodology,
phies refer us

Literature,

Concepts,

and Discriminations

reveal

his astonish-

often culls the substance of his books from his profusion

of articles,
notes on European
and American philosophy,
aesthetics,
history of
theory, history, criticism, periods, developments,
movements, style,
pedagogy, critics, scholars, and personal
reflections. The bibliograto Wellek's
introductions
to literary
and critical
texts and to his

many reference-book

entries

on writers,

natiunal

literatures,

and,

of

course,

concepts.
His numerous
reviews on American,
English, German, Czech, Polish,
Russian, French, and Italian criticism are crisp and balanced.
His letters and
comments

in learned

journals

contribute

to

critical

inquiry,

to a sense of

intelle-

ctual community.

program

In 1972, at age 69, Wellek retired from Yale.

in comparative
literature
since 1947, he had

As director of the graduate

directed
over fifty Ph. D.

dissertations,
many now published. Wellek once wrote: "I trust the company who
have come from the department
have,
whatever
the variety
of conviction
they
hold and interests
they pursue,
at least two things in common:
devotion to
scholarship
and complete
freedom to follow their own bent."
Indebtedness
to
\Vellek has been expressed in the form of anniversary
volumes,
special
issues,
dedications,
acknowiedgments,
and ubiquitous
footnotes.
His membership
in
learned societies includes the British Academy, the Royal
Netherlands
Academy,
the Italian National Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
Bavarian
Academy,
the Connecticut
Academy,
the American
Philosophical
Society, and the Linguistic Society of America. As a member of the editorial board
of the

splendid

nine penetrating

Dictionary

articles

of the

History

were substantial.
23

of Idt!as,

his contribution

including

Munich

In the ~ear of hi~ retirement

from Yale, the Universities of Michigan and
conferred degrees, and Wellek was chosen Senior Fellow of the National

Endowment
for the Humanities.
At home and abroad,
Wellek continued -and
continues - to lecture in his rapid, Czech-accented
clarity. In 1974 he was visiting
Professor at Indiana
University
and that year in London he became president of
the A10d~rn Humanities
Research Association.
The following spring he returned
to the University of Iowa as Visiting Professor, and in the summer the University
of East Anglia accorded
the irresistible
critic
of critics
his twelfth
honorary
degree.
In 1977 Wellek conducted
a seminar
at Cornell University
as Senior
Fellow of the Society
of the Humanities.
He continues
to serve on several
committees and editorial boards, including
the editorial
board of this journal.
Recently he has read papers in Italy at conferences on De Sanctis and Vico. At
the Yale celebration
last fall, Rene Wellek defined as his central
pursui ts the
completion of the fifth and sixth volumes. of his History
of Criticism
and the
revision of his early Kant in England.
academic duties at Yale, the sturdy,
"I enjoy it but miss my vacations."

When asked how he likes

indefatigable,
white-haired

Professor of English
Colorado State University
Fort Collins : Colorado (U. S. A. )

retirement
scholar

from
quips.

Journal of comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Vol 1 : No.2:
Winter 1978
@ Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute : Orissa : India

R ENE' W ELL E K *
REMO

CESERANI

In the following pages, Theory of Literature,

1962), is quoted as TL; Concepts of Criticism
CC; Essays on Czech Literature (The Hague:

'm:his portraitvery imprecise,

it should

Third ed. (New York: Harcourt

(New Haven:
Yale University
Mouton, 1963), as ECL.

be said frankly

and while it will try to delineate

numerous

writings

from the very outset-

certain

leave others in the shade.

This is mainly due to
not have the tools (not even the linguistic ones)
varied areas of his experience
and knowledge.
manifest reason for the indeterminateness
of this

Brace
Press,

features

and Co.,
1963), as

will be

of the figure, will

the fault of the writer who does

to follow Wellek into the highly
There is, however,
another
less
portrait.
While reading
Wellek's

and the many that speak about him (and

also

reading

among

the writings of WelIek some perfect "intellectual

portraits"
of philosophers
and
critics) the author of these pages
has felt, more than on other occasions,
the
enormous difficulties that one encounters in tracing an intellectual
portrait
of a
personage of our times who has lived at the center of a rich interlacing
of cultural
experiences, of relations with often very different environments,
of ideological and
emotional
commitments,
friendships, loyalties, polemics in the midst of profound
tensions.
And he has perceived that in order to fill the lacunae
it i~ not enough
to have approached
his "subject,"
who have spoken with him, to have seen him
living among his students and colleagues,
to have felt cordial
admiration
and
sympathy
for him.

(Nine pages on the Italian

Translated
from
the
Italian
*
September 1969 PP. 547-78.

paper,

reaction
published

to Wellek
in

are left out.)

Belfagor,

Vol.

XXV.

No.5,

30

Let us try to briefly delineate an "intellectual

history" of Rene Wellek.
He was born in Vienna on August 22, 1903, of parents
who were not Austrian.
His father
Broni'slav came from
Prague;
though
an official in the Austrian.
administration,
he felt himself to be strongly tied to his original
fatherland
and
culture (among other things, he wrote the first biography of the composer Smetana
and translated
poems of Vrchlicky and of Mach'lr into German),
and he returned
to Prague with his family in 1918 after the fall of the Empire.
If from the side of
his father the motif of attachment
to national culture (accompanied
by liberal and
humanitarian
sentiments),
typical of much cultured
bourgeoisie of the nineteenth
century, prevailed,
from the side of his mother,
the motif of
cosmopolitanism,
corresponding
more than to ideological choice, to the experiences of many members
of the European aristocratic
classes, seemed to prevail. The daughter
of a noble
Prussian (of Polish origin) and of a Swiss lady of Schaffhausen,
Rene WeIlek's
J;nother was born in Rome in 1881. In Wellek's
family the Protestant
religion
predominated,
in conformity with the sentiments of his mother
and grandmother
(a fact of noteworthy importance,
the family being Czech.)
After
finishing
his studies in a Prague gymnasium,
the young Wellek
entered the Caroline University of Prague, registering
in courses of English and
Germanic
philology. Prague was culturally
very much alive as a city and the
Caroline University included
among its professors some figures of considerable
importance.
There was the great critic
F. X. SaId a, professor of Western
literatures, who had done much to renovate the study of Czechoslovak
literature,
going
through its tradition with a modern taste, rearranging
many values and contributing to encourage
the new literature
of the early twentieth
century.l
The
germanist Otokar Fi-scher was there, author
of books on Kleist, Nietzsche
and
Heine (besides being a good translator,
poet and man of the theater).
He was very
much interested in psychological
problems
(and also, among the first in Europe,
in psychoanalysis)
and was concerned with the reflections which
the convolutions
and amhiguities
of the psyche have on literature
even on the formal aspects of
literatUre. 2 Vilem Mathesius
was there, professor of English and a brilliant linguist, founder
a few years later of the Linguistic Circle of Prague.
The young
Wellek, attracted by the most "modern"
among his teachels,
already
from
that
I. Wellek writes extensively on Salda in ECL,
and his works in Czech periodicals
and, on
Slavonic Review, XVII (1938), pp. 215-18.

26

pp. 179-87.
2. Wellek has written on Fischer
the occasion of his death, in a profile for the

time felt an instinctive

in the more retrogressive
marked interest for the
(following the powerful,
philosophical
problems
Prague,
but Masaryk
philosophy).
He made
1925, and, in June

1926,

Carlyle and Romanticism.

aversion for those studies of a positivistic nature, cultivated

academic
sectors of the University.
He also showed
technical, linguistic and stylistic study OJ the literary
work
inspiring example
of Mathesius)
and for the study of
(the Kantian and Herbartian
tradition
was prevalent in
had introduced
some of the themes of Anglo-Saxon
two trips to England
for research
and study in 1924 and
he received

his doctorate,

In the meantime,

writing

he had already

a thesis

on

Thomas

begun to contribute

to

Czech literary journals, with articles and reviews on Shakespeare,

Byron, Shelley,
Vrchlickly,
Heine, Tennyson, and on the History of English Literature
by Legouis
and Cazami an.
Wellek spent 1927 in England,

doing

research

in the British

Museum

on

what was to become his Habilitation

thesis: Immanuel
Kant in England. In
September of 1927 he left for -the United States to become a Procter
Fellow at the
Princeton
Graduate
SchooL
His aim was to specialize in English literature
and
to return
to Prague as a professor of that subject.
He therefore
followed the
courses of Thomas M. Parrott, Charles
G. Osgood, R. K. Root, and Morris W.
Croll.
This latter man (who concerned himself with stylistics and metrics,
had
written a study on the prose of Euphues and a little later was to publish a very
fine study on the style of English Baroque
prose) made a most vivid impression
on the young Czech.
Still in 1960 Wellek
recalled,
with appealing
irony,
CroJl's efforts to teach him the so-called
musical theory of English metrics (today
generally
declining
in popularity
both with critics and with linguists):
"When
I was a student at Princeton thirty years ago, one of my teachers,
Morris Croll,
who was, incidentally,
one of the finest students of stylistics...
(especially
seventeenth century prose style), in this country
taught me musical metrics.
But I was
always
restive
" 3 On
the
cultural
atmosphere
of the studious
and
secluded Princeton
there blew the gentle breezes of the New Humanism,
the
literary
movement of Babbitt and More, who had retired to live in his neoplatonic hermitage
precisely at Princeton.
An aristocratic
vision of culture
was
typical of the New Humanism,.
together
with a violent
polemic
against all of
the literary
movements
of the nineteenth
century,
from
romanticism,
to
3. R. Wellek, "Closing Statement," in Style in Language, edited by Th. A. Sebeok, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960, p. 414. Cf. also TL, pp. 224-26.

'.

27

naturalism,

determinism,

and to scientific

positivism.

They had a classicistic-

in

Eliot's senseand severely ethical

conception
of man and experienced
a sense
of revolt against the new industrial
and democratic
civilization,
and a strong
need to escape to a more serene and ordered
world than the turbulent
one in
which they lived.
The young Wellek, who had felt the touch of similar
breezes
in Prague
(the Protestant
and liberal
tradition
founded
on a strictly ethical
conception
of education
and self-control,
but above all -in
literature
and in
historical studies-a
strong impatience
with
typical of the positivists), showed some interest
Since, for the moment,

there

the pedantry
and worship of facts
in the neohumanistic
milieu.4

was no opening

for a professor

of English

at the University
of Prague, Wellek decided to remain in the United
States for
two more years, as an instructor
of German
at Smith
College (1928-29)
and at Princeton {1929-30).5
Then in 1930, he returned to his homeland.
He left
behind
himself a country
rocked by a very grave social,
economic
and
ideological

crisis

volume-manifesto

and
of

a literary
the

milieu

neohumanists

that

was stirred

Humanism

by deep polemics;

and

America,

edited

the
by

Norman Foerster and with essays by Foerster, Babbitt, More, T. S. Eliot, etc.
came out precisely in the year 1930; and also the counter-volume,
The Critique
of Humani.ym, edited by C. Hartley
Grattan,
with essays by critics who adhered
to Marxism
or, at any rate, who were more interested
in social problems,
like
Edmund
Wilson and Lewis Mumford,
appeared;
and in that same
year
the
volume of the "Southern
Agrarians,"
the first nucleus of the
New
Critics,
I'll Take My Stand,

taking

was published.

After a new sojourn in London,

Wellek returned
to Prague
in 1930,
with him the manuscript
of the book Immanuel Kant in England (published

in 1931 by Princeton University Press), which permitted

him to become Docent
of the history of English
literature
at the
University of Prague.
During the
preceding years, he had only sent to Prague
journals a brief
article on English
4. Later on, Wellek tried to indicate
the bond
that kept the various
antipositivistic
movements united (assigning to Croce a preeminent place, of chronological
anteriority)
in the
Yale lecture of 1946: "The Revolt against Positivism in Recent European Literary Scholarship,"
in CC, pp. 256-81 (to be completed for the American part with certain
pages of the esasy
"American Literary Scholarship,"
in CC, particularly
pp. 304-305.
in which Wellek advances
certain criticisms of the New Humanism).
5. "Comparative

Literature

Today,"

in Comparative

28

Literature,

XVII

(1965), p. 326.

universities and another, also brief, on the differences

between
Czechoslovak
universities.
But now, he came back into full touch
of his own country. At the University,
as a teacher of English,
the instruction of th~t language;
he published
many
articles
American
literature in reviews and newspapers (on the medieval
on the poetic theories of Wordsworth
and Coleridge,
Yeats, T. S. Eliot, on Joyce and on many contemporary

American
and
with the culture
he presided
over
on English
and
poem The Pearl,

on Blake,
Oscar Wilde,
novels;) he also translated

into Czech novels of Conrad and D. H. Lawrence.

But above all, and this was
his most important
intellectual
adventure,
he came into direct contact
with the
Linguistic Circle of Prague, founded by Mathesius in 1926, which was in full bloom
at that time. Roman
Jakobson had brought the ideas of the Russian
formalists
to Prague; Jan Mukarovsky
had amply developed them in the domain
of literary
theory, conceived by him to be a part of the general theory of signs (semiotics),
and had also faced the problem of the relations
between
literature
and society
and of literary history as being a working
area which should be kept
strictly
distinct from criticism.
Wellek followed all of those discussions
with interest but
greeted Mukarovsky's
theories witb some reservations,6
and when he contributed
to the Travaux du Circle linguistique
de Prague
(VI [1936], pp. 173-9l)
an
essay dedicated precisely
to the problem
of literary
history
("The
Theory of
Literary
History")
he tried to take a median
position
between
the extreme
demands
of the formalists
and the historiographical
ideas of the historical
tradition.
In 1935, after spending
five years in Prague,
WeIlek moved to London,
as a lecturer of Czech language and literature
at the School of Slavonic
Studies
of the University of London. His studies on Czech literature
or on the relations
between
Czech and English
literature
mainly date back to this period.
His
conference
at the School on February
25, 1936,
"The Cultural
Situation in
Czechoslovakia"
(in Slavonic Review, XIV [1935-36J, pp. 622-38),
is important
in offering an overall view of the culture of
his country (the organization
of
schools, the formation of cultural dlites, the diffusion
of mass culture,
etc.).
He
6. An echo of these
perplexities
in ECL, p. 190; TL, pp. 200 and 339;
CC, pp. 48--49,
279--80. As is known, Mukarovsky later embraced Marxism
(elIciting harsh comments from
Wellek; Cf. ECL,
pp. 195--97). On the entire
question of the Prague
Circle Wellek has
written a long article,
"The
Literary
Theory and Aesthetics of the
Prague School," in
Michigan Slavic Contribution/1 (ed._ L: Matejka), Ann Arbor, 1969, recently published.
29

intended

to remain

in London

for a few

years to conduct

research

for his book

The Rise of English Literary History, which was in preparation

(a note on the
subject :. from a theoretical
discussion
on the possibility of writing a literary
history, Wellek passes to an examination
of the literary histories
already
written,
beginning with seventeenth
century
England).
Wellek's
contacts
with Prague
periodicals continued to be very frequent,
and in addition to the article on the
Travaux he published
journals of his city.
In England,

essays and reviews,

Cambridge

generally

on

was the most 'lively

English

center

topics,

of literary

in various

discuss-

ions. I. A. Richards
(Principles of Literary Criticism,
1924; Coleridge on Imagination, 1934) had already left Cambridge,
however,
and after a series of trips
and a sojourn in China,
he was about to establish himself in the other Cambridge, across th,,: Atlantic.
His young disciple,
William Empson
(Seven
Types of

Ambiguity,

t930; Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935) had also

Orient,
and
desired
a change of air.
Both, at
mal d'
profound
marks
on the Cambridge
literar'S' scene.
And
importance
they attributed
to poetic language
and to

fallen victim to the

any rate,
had
left
both,
verbal

because of the
analysis,
had

the power of attracting

the interest
of Wellek, who was fresh from the linguistic
experiences
of Prague.
However,
he could
accept neither
the experimental
psychology
of Richards
nor the enthusiasm
for Marxism
and psychoanalysis
which permeated
Empson's second book.
Moreover, there were F. R. Leavis
(New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932; Revaluation,
1936) and the whole group
gathered
around
the review
Scrutiny,
founded by Leavis in 1932. The new
poetic taste elaborated
by Eliot and the technique of verbal
analysis developed
by Richards were combined in the criticism of Leavis and gave excellent results,
allying themselves
with a strong ethical sense of Arnoldian
provenience.
Wellek referred

to the work of Richards,

Empson,

and

Leavis

(evidently

the most interesting critics in the English

panorama
for him) in an article for the
review of the Prague
Linguistic
Circle,
Slovo a Slovesnost,
III [l937],pp.
108-21. But he also had more direct contacts with Leavis. When
Revaluation was
published, he wrote a brief article entitled
"Literary
Criticism
and Philosophy,"
which
appeared
in Scrutiny
together
with
Leavis'
answer
(cf. Scrufiny,
V [1937], pp. 375-83).
While
acknowledging
Leavis'
many
meritstWellE~
accused him of using terms without rigorously
definiqd
t~lem and of expressing

30

unsubstantiated
London, Penguin

judgments.
Leavis answered
(Cr. now
TM
Books, 1966, pp. 211-22) making a distinction

Common
between.

Pursuit,
criticism

and philosophy. He evidently

intuited the presence
of a fahrender
Scholast, the
subtle
logician,
in the young Czech, and he proclaimed:
"Dr. WeUekisa
philosopher/"He
added that "words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and
judge, but to 'feel into' them and 'become'-to
realize a complex experience that
is given in the words." In spite of this polemical
exchange,Wenek
was lat~r
invited to contribute
to Scrutiny with some reviews. One must not forget,however,
that among the English critics who attracted
Wenek's attention,
next to those of
Cambridge,
there was the Oxford critic F. W. Bateson,
author in 1934 of an
impOItant
book, English Poetry and the English Language.
Bateson's
conception
of a literary history marked
by linguistic rather than social changes, .and his
reevaluation
of Baroque
English
poetry must have
appeared
to Wenek
in
some respects
closer (even if independent)
to some of the experiences
of the
Russian and Czech r.ritics.
The

years

of sojourn

in England

were also those in which

Wellek

felt

himself to be most directly involved in political life. While Hitler fanned the
flames on the question of the Sudeten,
and German
propaganda
aired dusty
nationalistic
and racial myths, Wellek wrote an article for the journal German
Life and Letters,
II (October
1937),
pp. 14-24, on "German
and Czechs in
Bohemia"
now in ECL, pp. 71-80; cf. also the review to K. Bittner,
"Deutsche
und Tschechen,"
in Slavonic Review XVI
[1937-38], pp. 481-84),
in which
he defended the peaceful
and liberal policy of his country toward
its racial
minorities.
There are other studies connected
with the political
atmosphere,
of a literary
though
unusual,
charactf'r
for WelJek,
such as the extensive
one on "Bohemia
in English
Literature"
(1937,
now in ECL, pp. 81-147)
in
which he patiently
reconstructs
the image
of Bohemia
entertained
by the
English

through

the centuries.

The Munich ep.isode (September

1938) was a serious blow for Wellek.
Chamberlain's
concession
hUed him with indignation.
The myth of Masaryk
had been
brutally
broken into pieces.
"I could not thinK of returning
to
Pragl1e,"
In .June

he says, "nor of staying in England

after the Munich
of 1939, I emigrated
permanently
to the United States."

capitulation.

In America

and

professor of English,

WelJek established
at the University

himself,
of Iowa

3~

first
when~'

as a lecturer
NOrP1~l1

then

Foerster,

as
the

neohumanist
scholar, was the director
of the School
of Letters.
Among
colleagues, there was a con~nial
friend, Austin Warren. A scholar of English
American
volume

literature,

author

of several

Rage for Order, 1948), Warren

met More at
T. S. Eliot's
and already
being at the
journal, the

Princeton,
and to that
established
University
Philological

fine essays

(afterwards

had been one of Babbitt's

gathered
students

his
and
in the

and had

but had then moved to a position

that was very close to
of the New Critics (very much on the rise in those years
in some important
universities).
One of the advantages
of
of Iowa was that of having
at one's disposal a good
Quarter/y, which was published there; Wellek wrote many

articles and reviews for it. The war was shaking the world and deeply upsetting
consciences. But the School of Letters of the
University of Iowa was an oasis of
peace and study, "a real intellectual
community."7
As Wellek recounts:
The conflict between literary history and criticism was very acute and
even bitter at Iowa. I still remember vividly how I and Austin Warren
met a highly respected member of the department,
a good historical
scholar, and tried to suggest to him that, in writing
about Milton and
the English essay in the seventeenth century, he had also written some
criticism. He turned red in his face and told us that it was the worst
insult any body ever had given him. I was, by conviction
and in the
academic
constellation
of the place and time, classed as a critic and
I collaborated,
under Norman
Foerster's
editorship,
in a volume,
Literary Scholarship, published
in 1941 by the University
of North
Carolina Press,
Mr. Warren (author of the chapter
on "Literary
Criticism")
and myself were somewhat
dissatisfied
with the volume.
We felt that we sailed under
false colors. We could not endorse the
neo-humanistic
creed
of the editor, though we shared most df his
objections to current
academic
practices
and enjoyed
teaching the
humanities
courses which he devised.
Homer, the Bible, Greek
tragedy,
Shakespeare,
and Milton were t~ught to freshmen
anQ
sophomores in compulsory
courses long before the present
vogue of
far-ranging
world literature
courses. I myself taught a course
in the
European novel, which started with Stendhal and Balzac alld reached
Proust and Mann via Dostoevsky and Tolstoy......
7. Austin Warren, Preface to Rage for Order, Opecit., p. lll.
32

Theory of Lituature
was thus born as an attempt
to reach a synthesis
between the literary conceptions that Wellek had brought with him from Europe
and the American
ones elaborated
in the circles of the N~w Critics, of which
Austin

Warren

acted

as bearer

Notwithstanding

common

aims,

the

differences

between the two existed and were perceptible.8

Toey did not try to conceal them
and specified in the preface which of the two was principally
responsible for the
individual
chapters. But it is clear that of the two, Wellek held the predominant
position, as is also indicated by the order in which the two names appear on the
title page; one might infer that the conceptual
structure, the very ordering
of the
chapters (with the distinction
between "extrinsic
methocIs" and "intrinsic
study"
of literature
that caused so many discussions),
were his. The last chapter of the
book (already published separately in 1947), on "The Study of Literature
in the
Graduate
School," contained an analysis of the serious defects in the programs
and methods
of study of literature
in the United
States and a number
of
suggestions for reform. It is a sign not only of the success of the book, but also of
its profound harmony with the preoccupations
and conceptions
that were victoriously spreading in America, that in the second edition (1956) the authors
judged
that they could now omit it, "partly because some of the reforms suggested
there
have been accomplished

in many places."

In the summer of 1946, Wellek moved from the University of Iowa to the
far more pI'estigious Yale University. From 1947 to 1959 he was Chairman
of the
Department
of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
but also, at the same time,
director
of the comparative
literature
program.
In 1952, he was nominated
Sterling Professor of Comparative
Literature;
in 1960 he became chairman
of the
8. The third chapter, written by Warren, has a strong "Eliotic"
tone, which seems to distinguish it from the rest of the book. And it is not by chance that the eighth chapter, on the
relationships
between psychology
and literature,
was written
by Warren (although it may
contain much
information
obtained, almost certainly,
by Wellek).
To have proof of the
differences
between the two critics, it is necessary only to compare two of their essays on
the same subject:
R. Wellek, "The Criticism of T. S. Eliot,"
in Sewanee Review, LXXIV
[1956], pp. 398-443; A. Warren,
"Eliot's
Literary Criticism,"
in Sewanee Review, LXXIV
[1966], pp. 272-92; that of Wellek is an attempt to systematize
Eliot's ideas and to carefully evaluate his work as a critic; Warren's article is a fragmentary
discussion
in different moments between 1940 and 1966), fully conformable to the thought
("I can no longer quote, from his criticism,
without dubiety
him or expressing my own views.")
with the explicit denial

33

(also written
of its author

whether
I am
paraphrasing
of any systematization.

Department
of Comparative
Literature,
newly founded as an independent
unit,
and this is the position
he still holds today.
To describe
his activity
at Yale,
still extremely
intense, would be a long undertaking.
It is enough to mention
Wellek's
activity as a professor of research,
the many comparative
literature
theses
prepared
under
his direction,
his
formation
and
selection
of many
young scholars,
the always increasing
influence
exercised on the organisation
of studies at Yale and other universities,
the ever more
frequent
visits
to
various places in the United
States and Europe for courses,
conferences,
and
congresses,
the work of direction
and consultation
engaged in for many
authoritative
periodicals
(Comparative
Literature,
Philological
Quarterly,
PMLA,
Studies in English Literature,
The Slavic Review, etc.), the part he had in the
organisation
of the "American
Comparative
Literature
Association"
(of which
Wellek served
as President
from
1961 to 1964).
The
general
educational
climate, in the meantime,
had decidedly changed;
many of the ideals propounded by Wellek had begun to be realized
(if anything,
there were new and
different dangers):
"In my own experience
of the American
academic
scene,
the contrast
between
the Princeton
of 1927-28, where even eminent
scholars
seemed hardly
aware of the issues
criticism
and its problems
are our
("Philosophy
and Postwar
American

of 'criticism,
and
Yale of
daily bread and tribulation,
Criticism,"
in CC, p. 317).

1962, where
is striking"

During this whole period, the best energies of Wellek as a scholar were
dedicated
to the composition
of his imposing
History of Modem
Criticism,
which has now reached
the completion
of the fourth of the five or six contemplated volumes.
Again there occur.s a shift of
The plan of the History is ambitious
(the
between 1750 and 1950, in Germany,
France,
States and Spanish-speaking
countries)
and is

i~terest from "theory"

to "history".
tracing of the history of criticism
England, Italy, Russia, the United
carried forward with great energy.

The evolution of Wellek's

intellectual
history seems to obey the influence
of two contrasting
forces, that of attachment
to his own roots (Czechoslovakia)
and that of attraction
toward
cultural
traditions
of other countries
(cosmopolitanism).
Let us attempt
to follow the two trails.
Czechoslovakia
life experienced,

for

friendships,

Wellck
etc.

is first

And

of all

a place of private

I will nOt attempt

34

to penetrate

memories,
into

this

area.
But Czechoslovakia
is also something
more than a private experience.
Prague,
his former university,
the cultural
circles and reviews, are the places
and
symbols
of
a corner
of Europe
which many
Europeans
10 the
years
between
1918 and 1928 looked upon
with
admiration.
It was a
republic rebuilt
after centuries
of dismemberment
and enslavement,
a peasant
country in the process of strong industrial
development,
an example
of a
bourgeoi~ and social-democratic
state in the midst of countries
that had fallen
or were about to fall under the rule of fascist dictatorships,
a tradition of liberalism, a crossroad
of cultures,
a sort of second European
center Of the artistic
avant-gardes,
after Paris:
and seated on the chair of the Presidency
of the
Republic,
a good father for all, a philosoph;r
like the one in the Republic of
Plato.
It was easy to make
face of Masaryk.

it into a myth,

a myth which

had the

benevolent

It is interesting
to read Wellek's essay on Masaryk
("Masaryk's
Philosophy", in Ethics, 55 [1945], pp. 298-304, now in ECL, pp. 62-70), an essay, it
should be noted, that was written
in 1945, that is during a moment
in which
the history of Czechoslovakia
was
about to move forward
again after
the
terrible
wounds sustained, but in a situation
now very different,
from which
Wellek was not merely physically
removed.
Having decided to stay in America
(he
obtained
American
citizenship
the following
year),
in that moment
of
laceration,
the review

Wellek tried to evoke the youthful

of "T. G. Masaryk"
by Zdenek

myth once again.

(But see also
Nejedly,
in Slavonic Review, 14

L 1935-36],
pp. 456-62).
The e~say presents
itself as an "objective'"
profile that
wishes to describe with rigor
the positive
and negative
aspects of the figure
under examination.
But one feels it to be pervaded
by an unusual
concurrence and sympathy.
In the absence of more direct expositions-written
in the
first person-of
Wellek's
philosophical-political
ideology, one is tempted to read
the essay as an exposition
of his ideology,
to be conjectured
in filigree beneath
the exposition
of Masaryk's
ideology.
Given the differences
(which are both
many and profound;
o.ne is still left with the feeling that there exists a basic

common
orientation
between
Masaryk and
of man and of society, an almost instinctive

Wellek in terms of their

agreement.

conception

I.. Masaryk's philosophy, in his peculiar mixture of empiricism and

moral rigor, good sense and flexibility, paternalistic sympathy for the popular
35

masses and respect for elitist traditions,

one may perceive many of the elements
animating
Wellek's secret loyalties and his basic choices. With regard to Masaryk,
for example,
he says that for him philosophy was "a fight against spiritual, moral,
and political anarchy",
(ECL, p. 64). In the field of the historical
and literary
sciences how can we avoid
remembering
the frequent
occasions
in which
Wellek has taken
a stand against the "anarchical"
excesses of "relativism",
against the "tower of Babel"
of the many methodological
proposals?
He has
often acknowledged
tioned by historical

that literary judgments

are invariably
and subjective reasons, but he has always

energy that a scale of values exists, and that

The most insidious danger for literary
criticism
that of relativism:
"a general
be the result."
(TL, p. 42)

anarchy

"relative",
maintained

permanent
aesthetic
has often appeared

or rather

a levelling

condiwith

truths exist.
to him to be

of all values

must

Wellek presents the religious conception of Masaryk

(a religion,
it must
be
understood,
which
is substantially
ethical
and
humanitarian,
not
identifiable
with formally
instituted
religions
even if nearer to the Protestant
religion than to the Catholic)
in the following terms:
The ethical starting-point
of his religion is obvious:
the difference
between right and wrong was something
so absolutely
clear and selfevident
to him, something
so immutable,
independent
of utilitarian
considerations
and inexplicable
on such grounds,
that he was driven
to look for a sheet-anchor
in religion.
The concept of God
and
immortality
is for him a guaranty
of this eternal
difference
between
right and wrong. (ECL, p. 64)
Having
pointed out the necessary
distinctions
between
philosophy
and
literary studies, one is tempted. to compare the convictions,
of Masaryk
described
above with a few statements
made by Wellek, in polemic with the "relativism"
of
certain historicists such as Auerbach
:
Actually the case of knowledge
and
even of historical
knowledge
is
not that desperatE'.
There
are universal
propositions
in logic and
mathematics
such as two plus two equal four, there are- universally
valid ethical
precepts, such, for instance, as that which condemns
the
36

massacre of innocent
people, and there are many
tions concerning
history
and human
affairs.
between
the psychology
of the investigator,
ideology, persp~ctive and the logical
structure of

neutral true proposiThere isa

difference
his presumed
bias,
his propositions.
The

genesis of a theory
does not necessarily
invalidate
its truth.
Men can
correct their
biases, criticize
their presuppositions,
rise above their
temporal and local
limitations,
aim at objectivity,
arrive at some
knowledge and truth.
The world may be dark and mysteriuus,
but it
is surely not completely
unintelligible......
Relativism
in the sense of a denial
of all
many arguments:
by the parallel to ethics and
that there
truths.
Our
what is just,
true.
Our
imperatives,

objectivity
is refuted by
science, by recognition

are
aesthetic as well as ethical
imperatives
and scientific
whole
society is based on the assumption
that we know
and our science on the assumption
that we know what is
teaching
of literature
is actually
also based on aesthetic
even if we feel Jess definitely
bound by them and seem

much more
hesitant
("Literary
Theory,

to bring
Criticism

these assumptions
out into the open.
and History,"
in CC, pp. 14. and 17)

Wellek presents
MasaryK's
struggle
froots, on the one hand agaimt a mythological
and on the other hand against an indiscriminate

as being one that Occurs on two

and theological vision of the worJd,
exaltation of the social sciences:

Masaryk
admits
that science and the scientific view is a necessity
both for a truthful mind and as a useful tool, but he does not admit its
solution of all philosophical
problem~. He objects to naturalism
because
it undermines
human personality,
makes man a mere product
of natural
processes, explains consciousness and human
ideals as merely biological
functions, denies the validity of moral laws and norms, deprives
man of
his responsibility,
and paralyzes his action
by a false belief in fatalism.
Masaryk then fights on two fronts:
against both mythical
religion and
naturalistic
science. (ECL, p. 66)
In the light of this interpretation,

one is reminded

of the

many

analogous

state-

ments by Wellek, typically "third force," and one thinks of Theoryof

Literature,
built entirely on the hypothesis of a struggle on two fronts. When, furthermore,
we read of Masaryk's rejection
of Marxism, of his conviction,
that "ideas are just

37

as influential as economics and are by no means dependent on them," of his

attachment to the cultural tradition of his people, of his predilection, among
the cultural traditions of other peoples, for the Anglo-Saxon, we perceive a very
strong analogy with certain of the presuppositions of Wellek's cultural work.
There is a point on which Wellek differs distinctly
from
Masaryk,
nevertheless,
and it is the one concerning
the autonomy
of art. According
to
Wellek, Masaryk too often reduces literature
to the status of a vehicle for and a
means of propagating
ideas and assigns pedagogical
functions to it. He instead
feels the need to safeguard the autonomy and specificity
of the literary
work, in
conformity with the tendencies of the formalists
(trying, however,
not to espouse
their extreme theses). In the greater part of his writings and critical disquisitions,
which in fact are almost all concerned
with the literary
work, we feel that
the humanitarian
philosophy
of Masaryk
has faded into the background,
has
become the presupposition
for his own private actions and loyalties
(has become,
in Marxian terms, "ideology");
whereas in the forefront
we find literature,
and
theory of literature,
and literary criticism, and literary history,
and the history of
criticism: ~his is the "profession"
publicly
chosen (in Marxist terms, the "piece"
of work assigned

to the scholar

within

the general

"division

of labor.")

In this regard. two more of Wellek's essays are very indicative,

a more
general one on "The Two Traditions
of Czech Literature"
(1943, now in ECL, pp.
17-31), the other, more detailed
and closer to directly
lived experiences,
on
"Twenty Years of Czech Literature:
1918-1938"
(1938; now in ECL, pp. 32-45.)
The "two traditions"
of Czech literature are the pragmatic
and rationalistic
one
on the one hand,
and the poetic and aesthetic
one, on the other.
Masaryk,
precisely

in his endeavor

to "syssematize"

both literary

history

and the history

of

the whole of Czechoslovak:

civilization
(in certain aspects similar to that of De
Sanctis) had given preference- to one of the two traditions,
exalting
the Hussite
period, considering
the sect of the "Bohemian
Brethren"
to be the most beautiful
historical
realization
of humanitarian
ideals, interpreting
the Revival
at the
beginning of the nineteenth
century as a direct
continuation
of the Reformation.
Wellek

recognizes

the

importance

of Masaryk's

reconstruction

bUt he

knows

that many of the studies written in the meantime

have
corrected
Masaryk's
seheme and have revaluated
the other tradition,
the "poetic" one, which touch",d
points of high realization
in the fourteenth
century,
in the flowering
of the
38

Baroque in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the poetry of Macha

and in that of symbolists such as Brezina. The two traditions, Wellek observes,
have a history which is not aligned with civil history: "the times of artistic
creativeness do not coincide or coincide only rarely with times of intellectual
advance and political good fortune."
(ECL, p. 30) The consequences of the
dichotomy are openly recognized: "Both traditions have achieved much, though
there is little doubt that the empirical, ethical lineage has done more for the
nation and humanity in terms of practical benefits. But we as literary critics
as lovers of poetry, cannot forget the other tradition: the voice of literature
as fine art, the voice of poetry, and imagination."
(ECL, pp. 30-31)
In the other essay, which reviews the story of Czech literature
between
1918 and 1938, the necessity
of keeping the two levels and the two traditions
distinct is confirmed and the exigencies of literature
as art are forcefully
made
to prevail.
The background
social panorma
traced
by Wellek, above all for
the first years of the Republic,
is rich in positive data:
the whole of society.
was pervaded
by a new enthusiasm,
by a faith in life and in progress, and there
was a great diffusion of culture.
However
the reservations
on the political
movements,
which found many followers among the young Czechs of the time,
were not lacking : Wetlek speaks of "naivete"
and
"youthfulness"
and says
with regard
to the "proletarian
poets"
that "their communism
was rather an
anticipation
of a curiously
idyllic earthly
paradise
than anything
typically
Russian."
(ECL, p. 38) In any case, examining
the poetic results of the period,
WeUek never renounces
the autonomy
of critical
judgements.
His judgement
concerning
the "proletarian
poets" is on the whole negative,
even though he
recognizes their contribution
to the simplification
and modernization
of language,
the utility of their rediscovery
of certain
"popular"
genres,
the fine
quility

of Wolker's

poetry.

Very

severe,

surprisingly,

and

full

of reservations

is instead his judgement

on the Svejk of Hasek:
"The book is not much of a
work of art, as it is full of low humor and cheap propaganda;
but the type
of the foolish, smiling,
cowardly
Czecn 'Sancho Panja, who' goes unscathed
through the military
machine of the Empire is difficult to forget, however unheroic and uninspiring
he may be."
ECL, p. 41) One perceives a certain
severity
also in his judgement
on the "poetism"
movement,
and this is still more
surprising.
Just think of what the "poetism"
of Prague was,9
that extraordi9. cr. Poetismus, edited by K. Chvatik and Z. Perat, Odeon, 1960.
39

nary

and enthusiastic

of exaltation
revolutionary

crucible

of Apollinairian

and

futurist

suggestions

for the Russian revolution,

of celebration
of the imagination
instrument;
one might
direct one's thought
to the short

and
as a
circuit

instituted
between poetical
experiments
and the linguistic
research
of the theorists of the Circle, to the dense network
of interchange
between
the arts, to
the great season of the theatre, of the cinema, of the marionettes,
of the Czechoslovak clowns,

to

the

great

taste

for the festive

and popular

life. And

read

instead
what Wellek writes on the poetry
of Nezval,
the "protagonist,"
the
"extraordinary
virtuoso in poetical
fireworks":
"a painter
of little colourful
pictures,
an inventor of fantastic rhymes, illogical associations,
grotesque
fancies,
whole topsyturvy
worlds...
The playful charm of Nezval's
talent should not,
however, conceal a certain vulgarity and bad taste which is most apparent in his
fantastic novels.
"Poetism"
in Czechoslovakia
seems less the refinement
of an
over-subtle
society than the plaything
for rather crude young men without intellectUal ideas or traditions."
(ECL. p. 39) This judgment
reveals
a taste in
Wellek that one might be tempted
to define as "Eliotic"
in its tendency
to
measure
every linguistic and poetic experimentation
according to a fundamentally neoclassical
or at any rate intellectualistic
yardstick.
Such a taste carries
Wellek to reject the results of that epoch which, even with all of its limits, was
perhaps the only time in the literary history of his country
in which the "two
traditions,"
in paradoxical
ways, but with vigorous
enthusiasm,
tried to fuse.
And I would say that from such an enunciation
of taste there transpires
an
element which clearly separates
Wellek from the most coherent of the formalists
and structuralists
of the Prague Circle.
What he genuinely
accepts from .the
teaching
of such men as Mukarovsky
is the invitation
to a careful study of
literary
techniques
and to the construction
of a "theory
of literature."
After
\948, in any case, the break with the literary
world of Prague is complete
for
Wellek.
He continues
to follow the studies of the critics of his country
from
afar, but the points of contact,
which every once in a while reappear,
are
substantially
less numerous
than the points of divergence. 1 0 The only thing
that is left him, melancholically,
is the "Czechoslovak
Society of Arts
Sciences in America"
(of which Wellek was President from 1962 to 1966).

and

Let us try then to follow the other trait:

Wellek and the United
States.
One is immediately
reminded
of the phenompnon
of the emigration
of so many
European
intellectuals
to America
in the 30's and 40's, and
one thinks of
40

Jakobson
and Cassirer, Borgese and Castro, Spitzer and Auerbach,
and of the
many philosophers,
artists, musicians
from Germany,
Spain and
from othe,r
countries.
The affinities are there; but WeIJek's case is different.
Also in him
one perceives
some of the characteristics
common to many of those emigrants ,:
that of remaining
European despite everything,
the feeling of being rootless and
errant, with ideas to defend but also to diffuse, and thus suspicious of and at the
same time curious about their new environment:
a whole story which has yet
to be written. But in Wellek the reactions
were less dramatic,
without
abrupt
upheavals.
The greater
part of those men, with some exceptiuns,
remaineq
isolated
Spitzer,
(also

in America,
for example,
because

Princeton

he

they were "different."

(The
books of
circulated
widely only after their death.)
was

ar,d in England)

an integral part
functions.
One
disseminate
the
known, both by
books in journals.

a profes~or
inserted

of his new
must, indeed,
work of the
quoting
them
1 1 Moreover

of

English

himself

literature

more easily

and
into and

Auerbach
and
Wellek, instead,
had

studied

slowly

at

became

environment,
often as~uming important
directive
recognize
his merit in having often helped to
"others,"
in having contributed
to make them
often in his own works and by reviewing
their
he speaks not only about the better known figures,

but also' about some of the more isolated

Kridl, a follower of Ingarden and of the

ones, such as the Pole,

Russian formalists,
or the

Manfred
German,

10. Cf. "Recent Czech Literary History and Criticism" (1962), III ECL, pp. 194-205, to
which one must add the more benevolent "New Czech Books on Literary History and
Theory," in Slavic Review, XXVI (1967), pp. 295-3CJ!. In both these studies Wellek's anticommunism appears very strongly. Thi5 phrase, in regard to a book on Capek by Alexander
Matuska, is typical: "It seems to me to be patently absurd to speak of the 'opaqueness
of human rf'lations in capitalist society' (p. 197) or of the standardized, leveled face of
men such as it developed under the pressure of bourgeois civilization" (p. 241), as if the
world behind the curtain were less standardized and leveled than that of the West and as if
human relations were more open where people look over their shoulder and lower their
voices when speaking within eanhot of a stranger." (New Czech Books, p. 298) This
"retaliatory" reasoning is typical of that period of the cold war, but the denunciation of the
capitalistic and bourgeois society remains valid despite the failures of the eastern European
countries; and for the person who lives in the United States there is no need to institute
comparisons.
II. On Cassirer in Rocky Mountain Review, IX (1945), pp. 194-96; on Auerbach in Kenyon
Review, XVI (1954), pp. 299-307 (Italian translation by P. Longanesi, in II Verri II [1957]
pp. 13-24), and in Comparative Literature, X [1958], pp. 93-94; on Spitzer in Comparative
Literature, XII (1960), pp. 310-34 (Italian translation by M. L. Spaziani, in Convivium,
XXXIII [!965j, pp. 238-51.)
41

1\.1:artin Schutze,
literary
sly in
Archon

author

of a book strongly

denouncing

positivistic

methods

in

scholarship,
which appeared
in 1933 and was republished
posthumou1962 with a preface by Wellek:
Academic Illusions (Hamden,
Conn.,
Books, 1962).

Besides the tendency

toward integration
however, there remains in Wellek the tenacious

into his new environment,

preservation
of his original

characteristics.
What is certain
is the fact that he received his philosophical,
historico-cultural
and literary bases in his native homeland
and thus took an
already organically
structured
outlook with him to America.
For this very
reason his position became unique
and exceptional,
that
of
the
mediator
between
two different cultures, European and American,
that of the "builder
of
bridges."
To a person who observes

him as he lives through

one

of his full

days

he may appear,
for example,
as follows (we are however on the level of the
anecdote,
of the light profile etched with much affection
and
a touch
of
malice).
"To his colleagues
he seems to live completely
in the region of books
and ideas.
His readin~
is wide in all languages... Yet he is more
read the last novel of a visiting British lecturer. than most other

likelly" to have
literary profe-

ssors. He prefers conversation

to all other recreation."
The anonymous
author
of this "vignette"
depicts Wellek
while, engrossed
in
deep conversation,
he
entertains
a visitor from Italy or ~nother
country at lunch, or as he attends
to his voluminous
correspondence,
or when he gives proof of an "astounding"
knowledge
of the news of the academic
world on an extremely
wide front.
According
to this observer,
Wellek's
world rests on two poles:
books and
people.
He also puts into relief Wellek's
"interest
in beginning
scholars
and
'their
writings,"
proof of a cordiality
of character
and of a sincere humanistic
1
2
ideal.
These reasons and preferences which one might think of as being almost
private concerns
are not, however,
really different
from those concerns
which
12. Cf. "Vignette"
LXIX in PMLA, LXXVII
(June, 1962), p. i; a successive "Vignette"
LXXXVI Ibid., LXXX (March 1965), p. 46, added some retouches to the picture:
"[Some
of his friends]-point
out that [Wellek's]
enthusiasm
for literature
is matched hy a deep
concern for hoth European and American politics and a serious fondness for both
music
and painting."

42

on the level of literary theory

and of cultural affairs have inspired
the mainstays
of Wenek's
battle in favor of comparative
literature
of general

literature.

This is a battle

which

he had

continued

and have been

and, indeed,
and

still

conti-

nues to wage, which has had its evident victories

(the foundation
of departments of comparative
literature in many American
Universities,
organised
on
the bases suggested by Wellek), but which has been accompanied,
also in recent
years,

by many

polemics.

and in this conception

wrote Wellek in Theory

"Literature

is one,

humanity

are one;

lies the future

of historical
Ii terary
studies;"
thus
(TL, p. 50). On the other hand, he does not ignore the

historical
reality
of national
literatures;
more than anything
else an aspiration
education
and scholarship
are
concerned
broadest
possibleof perspectives
must
present moment,
it is a real necessity.
The history

as art and

of themes

international
history...
up with the individual

and

forms,

general
and universal
literature
is
pertaining
to the future.
As far as
however,
an internationalismthe
be decidedly
encou,raged
from the

devices

and

genres,

Even the history of metrics, though

linguistic
systems, is international.

is obviously

an

closely bound
Furthermore,

the great literary

movements and styles of modern
Europe
(the Renaissance, the Baroque, Neo-Classicism,
Romanticism,
Realism, Symbolism)
far exceed the boundaries
of one nation, even though there are significant national
differences
between
the workings out of these styles.
(TL, p. 51)

of literary

Thus the hi~tory of ideas, the history

movements,
the history of styles,

themes,

the history

of metrics:

all

should

of critical
conceptions,
the history
the history of forms, the history of
have

an

international

perspective.

"What is needed in the whole area of literary studies [is] a thofOughly

discussion of methodological
problems which would ignore artificial

informed
political

and linguistic barriers and bring new viewpoint.> and methods

within the sight
of the student,"
(review of S. Skard,
"Color
in Literatur'e,"
in American
Literature,
XVIII
[1947J, pp.f342-43).
And speaking
of the
Autobiography
of Vico (in Philological
Quarterly
XXIV
[1945 ],
pp.
166-68)
and
of the difficulty in establishi'ng
the real extent of the diffusion of his thought
in
eighteenth century Europe, he writes:
"A dictionary
of unit-ideas
on historical
principles,
c.omparable to the OED, with dated quotations,
may be a dream
for
a distant future..."
( but evidently for him a desir.e and a necessity).
'And on
43

another occasion, reviewing

an anthology
of Korean poetry
H. Lee (in Compatative
Literature,
XII [1960], pp. 376-77),
dreamed of ultimate, general
would be represented,"
and,
"most

instructive

material

compiled
he speaks

by Peter
of "that

poetics and history of poetry,

in which all nations
even in the far removed
Korean
poetry, he finds

for a study of poetic themes

and forms."

Parallel to this persistent

defense of a general
literature,
based on a
common minimum denominator
of "norms" and also of "values,"
is the assiduous
condemnation
of the old way of studying comparative
literature,
the one practiced
for example, by the group of French
scholars gathered
around
the Revue de
litterature comparee. Very severe criticisms of these "accountants"
of literarv study
(which keep the "ledgers"
of influences, exchanges,
trips, sources, etc.) were first
voiced by Wellek in 1952, in a brief article,
"The Concept of Comparative
Literature,"
which appeared
in The Yearbook
of Comparative
and General
Literature, II (1952), pp. 1-5, then, at greater length, on the occasion of the second
congress of the International
Association of Comparative
Litf'rature
at Chapel
Hill in September
1958, with a talk entitled "The Crisis of Comparative
Literature" (now in CC, pp. 256-95). Many polemics followed, 1 3 above
all from the
side of French comparatists
and those of the socialist world (tbe long battle in the
Eastern
countries,
conducted
sometimes
with good reasons, but often with
dogmatic
obtuseness
against
"bourgeois
cosmopolitanism"
and in favor of a
literature anchored to concrete national historical
reasons, is well known). Lastly,
Wellek's
answer followed:
"Comparative
Literature
Today"
(in Comparative
Literarure, XVII [1965], pp. 325-37).
In this latter writing, many of the basic motivating
reasons at the bottom
of Wellek's work come once again to the surface: as, for example,
the defense of
13. Cf. M. Bataillon,
"Nouvelle
jeunesse de la rhilologie a Chapel
Hill,"
in Revue de
Litterature Comparee, XXXV (1961), 290-98; La litterature
comparee en Europe Orientale
edited by I. Soter, Budapest, Akademiai Kiado, 1963 (particularlv
the co:ltributions
of 1. G.
Neupokoeva,
Maria Janion, L. Nyuo and Rene
Etiemble:
the latter with some effective
argumentation,
adva'nced from a Marxist point of view, against the "superficial"
concept of
bourgeois cosmopolitanism);
L. Nyiro, "Problemes de la litterature
comparee et Thtorie de la
litterature,"
in Litterature hongroise-Litterature
Europeenne, Budapest, Akademiai
Kiado, 1964,
pp 505-24 (who, despite the criticisms is very close to Wellek).
But cr. also the paper, "The
Name and Nature of Comparative
literature,"
and Richard B. Vowles
(Waltham,
Mass.,
Colombo in Belphagor, XXII (1967), 125-51.

in Comparatists at Work, W. Stephen G. Nichol

1968), 3-27. Italian
translation by Rosa Maria

44

the autonomy
of art and literature,
the Eliotic classicism of his taste (tempered,
however, by a great intellectual
curiosity and vastness of experience),
the call for
a new approach to the study of comparative
literature,
the neohumanism
nourished by Masaryk's
thought and by that of the Babbitt-MoreEliot tradition (even
this, however, accepted with many reservations
and corrections,
and mixed with
many other experienc~s).
The whole enterprise

of aesthetics

distinction
between
known to the Greeks
cvncept of art as one
matter of our discipli

the
but
of
ne,

and

art is being

challenged

today:

the

good, the true, the beautiful,

and the useful
most clearly elaborated
by Kant,
the whole
the distinct
activities
of man, as the subject
is on trial......

Whatever the merits of these criticisms of the great tradition of aesthetics

may be -and
I am willing to grant much to the critics of its obscurities,
verbalisms,
and tautologies -the
main conclusion,
the abolition of art as
a category, seems to me deplorable
in its consequences
both for art itself
and for the study of art and literature.
We see the consequences
today at
pvery step; the new sculptor displays heaps of scrapmetal
or assembles
large grocery
early works,

boxes, Rauschenberg
and an enthusiastic

exhibits clean white canvasses as his

critic, John Cage, praises them as

'landing-places
for lights and shadows.' The composer of 'concret~'
music
produces
the noises of machines and the streets,
All
distinctions
between art and reality have fallen. All arts tend towud
self-abolition.
Some of these acts or works obviously need not be taken seriously. They
are elaborate hoaxes as old as Dada or as Marcel Duchamp. ,
1 hope
I am not suspected of lack of sympathy with modern art, the avantgarde,
or experimentation
when I judge that art, in these symptoms, has reached
the zero point and is about to commit suicide.
It is time for us to return to an understanding
of the nature
of art.
A work of art is an object or a proceSs of some shape and unity which
sets it off from life in the raw. But such a conception
must apparently
be
.
guarded agains~ the misunderstanding
of being 'art for art's sake,' the
ivory tower, or asserting the irrelevancy
of art to life. All great aestheticians have claimed

a role for art in society and thought

45

that

art flourishes

best in a good

society.

They

knew

that

art humanizes

man that

man

becomes fully human

only through
art.
It seems to me time that
literary study again recognises the realm of art and stop being all things
to all men, that it returns
and transmitting'literatUre.

to it3 old

task

Otherwise

of understanding,

it will

dissolve

into

explaining,
the

study of

all history and all life. I know that students -and

not only young
students -are often restive with such apparent
limitations.
Literature
for
them is simply an occasion or a pretext for the solution of their personal
problems and the general
problems
of our
civilization.
But literary
scholarship,
as organized knowledge. needs such limitation;
Every branch
of knowledge must have a s.ubject matter. Only, through the singling out
which does not mean
complete
isolation -of
the object can there be
advance in understanding
and penetration.
The page cited is indicative
continuos:y

upheld

by him during

of Wellek's

faithfulness

to certain

the whole course of his career.

principles

His insistence

on

the autonomy of the field of literary

study and on the specificity
of the methods
that must he employed are typical.
But in this page, there also occurs a shift of
emphasis, one perceives less enthusiasm
for the technical
aspects of the literary
work (a smaller dose of "formalism")
and a tendency
to attribute
greater
significance to the neohumanistic
conception of art. In addition, one may observe
the presence, on the whole, of a detached,
calm, almost academic tOne. From this
page there transpires a love for the "humanizing"
qualities
of literatUre which
here reveals itself to be greater in Wellek than what might
have been imagined.
One was led (forgetting his contributions
in the first person as a critic and his va~t
knowledge of so many texts of world literature)14
to emphasize the detached and
critical tone, the intellectual
and conceptual
rigor, the tendency
to introduce
successive operations of reduction to "specifirity":
from literature
to the criticism
14. One of the areas in which Wellek intervened in the first person as a critic is that of the
European novel
(especially the Russian) of the
nineteenth
century.
In addition to the
seminars for the students of Iowa and Yale, he has also dedicated some
writings
to this:
"Introduction"
to N. Gogol, Dead Souls, New York, Rin,-hart, 1948, pp. 'V--Xl;
"Introductions to Balzac, Flaubert,
Dickens,
Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy,
Chekhov,'
Ibsen," in World
Masterpieces, edited by M. Mack, New York, Norton, 1956, II"pp,
1693-1727; "Introduction:
A Brief History of Dostoyevsky
Criticism,"
in Dostoyevsky, a Col/ection of Critical Essays,
edited by R. W., Englewood
Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1962, pp. 1-15 (a history of Dostoyevsky
criticism); "Why Read T. A. Hoffmann ?" in Midway, VIII (1967), pp.48-56.

46

of literature
criticism,

to the

criticism

of the criticism

to the

criticism

of the

criticism

of

etc.

Actually one finds in Wellek those quaJities which we already pointed out
and which are recognized by all : the capacity of capturing
the essential nucleus
and the discriminating
line within the complex of ideas and attitudes of a whole
culture,15
or the ability to reconstruct
thE' fundamental
system of ideas and taste
of a poet or of a critic (without,
at the same time, renouncing
definitions
and
judgments
-so much so that if in regard to the French comparatists
we spoke of
"accounting,"
in regard to Wellek one might speak of a "court
of justice," not of
a high court, full of exaggerated
gravity, but instead of a court of the English type,
with a good-natured
judge who believes in certain
fundamental
"values,"
and
then judges facts and motives empirically).
Or one might. note, additionally,
his
ability

in conducting

confrontations

and

discriminations

-Confrontations

and

Discriminations-and
also t~e great lucidity,
as is demonstrated
by his many
reviews, in repo,:ting the content of a book, judging
its merits and defects, 1 6 and
his extraordinary
tale~t of knowing how to summarize
in a precise
and synthetic
judgment,
or in an encyclopedia
"entry," 1 7 the history of a concept, 1 8 or the
many aspects of a problem, or the entire work of an author, of a movement,
of an
entire literary period. But there are also some other qualities in Wellek which are
complementary
to the preceding:
a great intellectual
curiosity for every aspect of
the history of culture and of human behavior, a flexibility in comprehending
the
most diverse situations,
a capacity
for observing
even: question
from different
side" even contradictory,
and a substantial
"good sense,"
him weigh right and wrong,. good qualities and defects, etc.

which

always

makes

Someone has spoken of eclecticism.

Wellek would prefer to present
a mediating position and, according to requirements
of logic, will continue

his as
to fall

15. Excellent examples, in addition to the books on Kant and on modern

criticism, are to be
fil,und in the essays gathered in Confrontations, cit. A careful examination
of the pro blems of
method for this type of study in Confrontations, pp. 163-66.
16. WeIlek's reviews are exemplary:
terse, to the point, almost pedantic in indicating oversights and errors, at times devastating but always careful in pointing out news contributions.
17. Wellek has written many encyclopedia
"entries";, see, for example, those on Czech and
Slovak literature and on many writers in A Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited
by Horatio Smith, Columbia University
Press, 1947 (partly transJatd into Italian
and published in the encyclopedia

II Milione,

Novara,

Istituto

76-78).
47

Geografico

De Agostini,

1960,

IV,

pp.

back on the healthy necessity of always

discriminating
and evaluating.
Perhaps
one of the ways of understanding
his position is to measure it against that of so
many other critics or theorists of literature whom he ha s dealt with; every time,
for every encounter,
one can gather
motives of concurrence
and motives of
rejection, and a dialectical
game between the desire to come nearer to the author
studied and the necessity of taking one's distances in order to judge him.

published
described

Take, for example,

Wellek's
reaction to Cassirer,
when the latter
his American
book,
An Essay on Man.
After having
synthetically
the contents and defined its merits, here are the reservations:
Cassirer distrusts
naturalism
nineteenth
centUry positivism

in the sense that he sees the weaknesses

as he can criticize
them, for instance,

of
in

the simplications
of Taine. But substantially
he does not seem too distant
from certain forms of pragmatism
and instrumentalism:
we hear little
of his earlier

emphasis

that there is a primeval

activity

of the

spirit in

all these symbolic forms and that his philosophy of symbolic

forms thus
vindicates the fundamental
thesis of idealism. Something has happened:
one can only guess that Cassirer, possibly under the influence of his new
American environment,
has given up the metaphysical
implications
of his
position. I, for one, cannot help feeling that his earlier views were more
coherent and more convincing.
Take
publicly
18.

There

the

relations

in the reviews

and

between

Wellek

and

writings

of both

men,l

is a whole series of essays dedicated

by

Wellek

Auerbach,
9

to the

which

and also
History

appeared

privately

of a concept

in
or of

a term,. in particular
of the terms
designating the great literary
movements
of modern
Europe: Baroque ("The Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship"
in CC, pp. 69127);
Neoclassicism
("The
Term
and Concept
of Classicism in Literary
History,"
in
Aspects of the Eighteenth
Century, edited
by E. R. Wasserman,
Baltimore,
The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1965, pp. 105-28), Romanticism
("The Concept of Romanticism
in Literar~
History,"
in CC pp. 128-221), Realism
("The
Concept Realism in literary scholarship,"
in
CC, pp 222-255). An essay on symbolism
is in preparation.
To this type of research,
essentially directed to the tracing of the History of a:1 idea or of a term indicating
as in a
repertory the dates and names of those who expressed
such an idea or used such a term
in history, one can contrast (once having recognized the instrumental
utility of the research)
a famous statement by Whitehead on the existence in each epoch of conceptions
so diffused
and rooted in the collective
consciousness
that nobody
feels the need to express them
(Adventures of Ideas, New York, Macmillan,
1956, pp. 12-13).
48

conversations

and

discussions

during

the years in which

both

taught

at Yale.

"Vellek's judgment
on Auerbach is composed of agreement
and dissent, enthusiasm
and differentiation.
"I admire the book [Mimesis]
greatly,
and I have said so in
public
but the book is hardly
criticism in the sense of judgment
as it rather
uses (legitimately
for its purposes) stylistics, intellectual
history, and sociology for
a history of the human
[1960], p. 349.)

Leavis,22

condition."

(Letter

to B. Heyl, in Sewanee

Review,

LXVIH

And take, in addition,

Wellek's
reaction to Croce, 2 0 to Richards,2 1 to
to Lovejoy, 2 3 to N. Frye, 2 4 to Emil Staiger2/)
and to many others.

The very History of Modern Criticism is wholly conducted

according to the same
criterion of assigning to each critic a precise place in history, of defining his merits
and defects, of measuring his relevance with respect to the problems of today. The
volume on the twentieth
century
which we all await with
impatie'nce,
some
chapters of which have already
been previewed,26
will to a greater
degree than
the others put its author to the test. Wellek will be directly
involved in a dialogue
with many of his contemporaries
on the theories and critical
preferences
in the
midst of which he himself had had to operate.
Sympathy,
understanding,
severity
of judgtbent,
the ability to contrast and discriminate
will be once again, we may
be certain, the most outstanding
characteristics
of the scholar.
19. Cf. WeIlek's review of Mimesis already cited (1954); Auerbach's
review of the History of
Modern Criticism, in Romanische Forschungen, LXVII
(1956), pp. 387-97; many
passages of
WeIlek's CC (ad indicem)
and the obituary in Comparative Literature,
X (1958). pp. 93-94.
20. Cf. "B. Croce: Literary Critic and Historian,"
in Comparative
Literature,
V (195,3), pp.
75-82. 21. "On reading
I. A. Richards,"
in The Southern' Review, n. s. III
(1967), pp.
533-54. 22, Cf. the article cited in Scrutiny, (1937) and in CC p. 358.
23. Wellek often
speaks of Lovejoy
and of his "history of ideas" ; cr. the review of Essays in the 'History of
Ideas, in Germanic Review,
XXIV
(1949), pp. 306-10 and what he says in the review to
M. H. Abrams, The 'Mirror and the Lamp, in Comparative Literature,
VI (1954), pp. 178-81.
24 Cf. the review of Fearful Symmetry, in Modern Language Notes, LII
(1944), pp. 62-63
and CC, pp. 337-38. 2S Cf. the review of M. Wehrli, Allgemeine Literatur wissenschaft,
in
Erasmus, VI (1953), p. 365.
26. One may find the overall scheme previewed
in the essay
"The Main Tren ~s of Twentieth Century Criticism,"
in CC, pp. 344-64 and above all in the
long article "Literaturkritik"
for the German
Encyclopedia
Lexicon der Weltliteraturim 20.
Jahrhundert, Freiburg im Breisgau, Herder, 1961, I, pp. 178-261 (published since in Encyclopedia
of World Literature in the 20th Century,
1969. Vol. II. pp. 284-328.)
Scuola Normale
Pi,a ( Italy)

ed. W. B. Fleischmann,

~ew York, Frederick

Ungar,

Translated by : Marie Antoinette Manca

Italo-American
Medical Education Foundation,
Via Boncompagni
16 R.orna, Italy.
49

Journal

of comparative

Vol 1 : No.2:
@ Vishvanatha

Literature

and Aesthetics

Winter 1978
Kaviraja

Institute

: Orissa:

India

TRUTH AND TROTH, FACT AND FAITH

ACCURACY TO THE WORLD AND FI DELITY TO VISION *
MURRAY

KRIEGER

".hat
is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."
The story of education and of letters and science is the story of those who stayed
for an answer, the story of those who, in their search for truth, honored it as did
Sir Francis Bacon, who opened his essay, "Of Truth,"
with the sentence' I have
just quoted.
In that essay,
however,
Bacon reveals that his devotion if; to a
truth conceived too simply and singly and
absolutely.
It is because he had
unquestioning
confidence in the firm singleness of that truth and its accessibility to
us that he rejected a more skeptical
outlook. Thus his irritation
with Pontius
Pilate's contemptu~us
suggestion that truth is indefinable,
unknowable.
Next to
such
an
austere
and fixed sense
of truth as Bacon's, even
the
poet's
imaginative
flights are found not altogether trustworthy
by him in that essay. This
attitude should
perhaps not surprise us when we think of Bacon's
devotion to
empiricism,
the doctrine
that truth can be derived
wholly from generalizations
drawn from the raw data of our sensory experience.
From such a perspective
the
poet as imaginative
fiction-maker
can be seen as a downright
liar; and this is
about what Bacon suggests.
But let us look at a poet's less confident,
if perhaps
more human
and
complex, attitude
toward
truth as he seeks to be more than just a teller of lies.
One of Bacon's contemporaries-in
fact, some misguided souls think Bacon wrote
the works we attribute to this poet-wrote
the 'following
commentary
on truth:
Shakespeare's
Sonnet 113. In it two truths are at war:
the truth of the world and
the truth

of the mind, or put otherwise-the

An address delivered
* on June 16, 1978.

to the first Honors

truth3 sponsored

Convocation

by fact and by faith.

at the University

of California,

Irvine,

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;

And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function
and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flow'r,
Of
Nor
For
The
The
The

'The final

or shape which

it doth latch

his quick ohjects hath the mind no part,

his own vision holds what it doth catch;
if it see the rud'st
or gentlest sight,
most sweet favour or deformed'st
creature,
mountain or the sea, the day or night,
crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
Incapable
of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus mak'th
mine eye untrue.

line ("My

most true mind thus mak'th

mine eye untrue")

couples

the

two kinds of truth, and they are mutually incompatible.

Only one of them would
satisfy Bacon, whose commitment
to inductive
knowledge
riveted his interest
to
empirical reality, to the exclusion of anything less tangible and unambiguous.
The
speaker in the sonnet has yielded up the usual truth of the eye-or rather his eye
sees a truth other than what is presumably
there to be seen-seen neutrally,
that is,
as if it were independent
of our idiosyncratic
vision. The objects of our daily
experience are thus being seen by the speaker not as what they are, but as what
the mind, filled with love and with the sole object of that lov.e, must have them
be. So the eye, though it "seems seeing", "effectually
is out",
having
abandoned
its place and retreated
to the mind. But it has abondoned
its role along with
its place.
Its truths are no longer those of sight, but those of thought.
Yet the
eye still "seems seeing", still appearing
to capture
birds and flowers
and the
rest of common experience.
But it now sees those things only by means of-under
the aegis of-the
visilln and love of his beloved.
All objects of sight, however imperfect,
are adapted to the perfection of
the beloved. In effect, all has been collapsed into love's vision of goodness, a vision
suddenly become the poet's sole reality. Hence the variety
of the world, and its
many differing

values as we move through

has .to offer, aLl are reduced

the stages

from the worst to the best it

to that ~ingle perfection.

For if it [the eye] see the rud'st or gentlest sight,

The most swee~ favour of deformed'st
creature,
52

The mountain or the sea, the day or night,

The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
All the world's oppositions, its good and evil, are merged into one sublimity as all
the world's objects are equally shaped to the one set of features.
Everything is seen
through

the one lens which reads the

world as if beauty

were

the

only

reality.

Oppositions like the crow and the dove melt into the oneness of a vision regulated
only by love's fidelity. The Manichaean
reality, which splits the good and evil of
the mixed

world

poet's mind

we all know,

permits

dissolves

into

the

one

flawless

reality

which

the

the poet's eye to see.

At the same time, the poet makes it clear that the opposed dualisms still
exist in the empirical
world, however he may read them. Filled only with his
friend's goodness so that he can see nothing
else, the poet yet acknowledges
the
untruth of that vision fostered by being "true" to the beloved:
Incapable
of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus mak'th mine eye untrue.
But in this single line the criteria for what is "true"
are shrewdly
double. The
truth of the eye has been traded, not for error,
but for another
truth, the truth
of faith. It is not that one is true and the
true (and the other false) under specified
poem recognizes that, as lover, his vision
seen by himself as lover and the worldly
Thus the two truths

are in

other false absolutelJ"

but that each is
conditions.
And the poet who writes the
is limited. He sees doubly, both the truth
truth he thereby distorts.

conflict

with

one

another,

the

warm

truth

dictated
by love's faith against
the cold truth
seen by the ruthless eye of
empiricism.
That older notion of truth
which we u.:;ed to call "troth"
(or faith)
resists the newer truths unmodified
by faith in an historical conflict between world
views and concepts
of value.
The chuice seems to be between
being true to a
person and a belief and being true to a dead world, a world of inhuman
objects.
And the two truths seem incompatible
with one another, even though history has
seen the word "truth"-in
"advancement
oflearning"
expense uf faith.

accordance
with
the
scientific
spirit
of Bacon's
-pretty
well appropriated
by literal reality at the

Still, even now, for Shakespeare,

our experiential

world,

turning

the faithful,

brass into gold, resists

53

trothful
yielding

vision

that

gilds

to what a grimmer

realism (the realism of the Baconian

scientist)
may insist
Upon as the only truth.
If this gilded version of reality is taken as actual
and not just as iIlusionarythen, as Shakespeare
is to suggest, the lover is a successFul alchemist
in that he
has literally transmuted
impure materials into pure gold, elixir of the life of the
spiri t. His golden vision, a world seen through the idolatrous
eyes of love, is
thus treated as an alchemical
transformation
of the workl,
which has truly, and
not just metaphorically,
turned all dross into gold.
But even if the poet is

_.

persuaded of the alchemy, is he not aware too

that it is also a deceptive flattery of the world
it deserves? The next sonnet in the sequence,
by confronting just this neE'd to decide whether
thus a new
untruth.

and

miraculous

truth

-or

is

-in his more skeptical momentswhich raises it to values higher than

no. 114, completes
the argument
the golden vision is alchemy -and

mere

flattery,

and thus a deceptive

Or whether
doth my mind,
being crown'd
with you,
Drink up the monarch's
plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye scWth true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubios
as your Sweet self resemble,
Creating

every bad a perfect

best

As fast as objects to his beams assemble?

0, 'tis the.first!
'Tis flatt'ry in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare
the cup.
If it be poison'd, 'tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.
To turn "monsters"
into "cher?bins,"
thus creating
"every
bad [as] a perfect
best," would indeed be an act of alchemy, one produced
under the influence of
a transformed
vision of truth such as faith alone allows. Still, the poet concedes
that his special vision may be no more than flattery of the world, and
hence an
inaccurate
exaggeration,
at least when it is viewed from the world outside
faith.
So his eye is forced to be the flatterer, feeding flattery's
poison to the love-smitten
mind in response to its dema.nds. But, the poem ironically
concludes,
though a conscious flatterer -is so enamored
of the beauteous
golden
obediently

creating

for the mind that it begins to worship

54

the eyevision it is

that vision itself,

taking

it as if it were the

alchemical

reality

indeed.

In effect, the eye

becomes

self-

deceived before it begins to deceive the mind about the heightened

nature of
reality. It believes its own vision which it began by creating to sooth the visionary
needs of the love-sick mind. Its flattery becomes its truth, an that it is capable
of
seeing as its reality, at whatever expense to the eye's old naked truth.
Shakespeare,
at once pious and skeptical about the poet's
vision (or rather the vision of the poet as lover), sees it as perhaps
from the world's cold fish-eye of objectivity,
though as vision it is
he has, a truth
which he rushes to embrace.
The beloved,
as

and
false
the
the

the lover's
if viewed
only truth
poet's god,

cannot countenance
anything in the world that falls short of perfection.
Through
the beloved, love transforms the poet's mind into a sun god which alchemizes
all
it toucheS', like the sun turning
everything it shines upon into gold (or is it only
the appearance
of gold ?).
Thus, we are told, the mind creates
"every bad a
perfect best/As fast as objects to his beams assemble."
This is what Shakespeare
in another sonnet has called the "heavenly
alchemy"
of the sun, the god which
transforms our imperfect world, a god empowered
by the faith engendered
by the
perfection of the beloved.
'this vision is so persuasive
that it persuades
the eyes
themselves, despite their normally
world-bound
character as the prime
agent of
empiricism.
The eyes trade their passive, receptive role for an active, transforming
role.
But if, as Shakespeare
here suggests, Our illusion -as
our reality, thanks to the persuasion of our act of faith, then
for us (if I may retum to Pilate's question)?
Our visionary
faith,

is that

which provides

the lens for the

world we see.

our vision -becomes

what indeed is truth
god, inspirer of our
What we seem to find

there for us to see derives from Our faith in the view of the world to which we
devote ourselves,
whatever our field of interest or avenue of approach
to our
reality.
As the love poet's world is a vision shaped for him by his faith in his
beloved as the god who makes his reality, so we have our OWn faiths and gods
creating visions which become the coherent
realities
within which we operate.
Indeed, Shakespeare's
conviction that the eyes themselves,
though the would-be
agents of naked empiricism,
fall prey to the illusion
permitted
by the lens of
consciousness may remind us of recent
that empiricism
is itself a fiction.

acknowledgements

in the realm of science

To say empiricism is a fiction is to admit that it also rests On

though many scientists
have never questioned their assumption
that faith, even
theirs is a
privileged
series of claims which alone are in touch with naked,
illusion-free
55

) is
reality.
This concession
to the plurality
of scientific
fictions (or "truths"
essentially
what is given us by the philosopher
of science, Thomas
Kuhn,
in his
influential
book, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions,
when he insists that
universally
accepted
"facts" of scientific common sense are actually
constructs
within one of many possible scientific "paradigms"
(to use his word).
In effect,
then, our, notions about a neutral and immediately
available
"objective"
world
are seen as inventions,
fictions-as
much dependent on our faith in the controlling paradigm
as our more spectacularly
illusionary
worlds of faith like the poet's.
Similarly,
Karl
Popper's
famous critique of empiricism
may remind
us that
our experiential
among

objects

generalizations
we observe,

but

are

actually

on our

based, not on discovered

expectations

which

stage

repetitions
the

necessity

of the repetitions.
Our experience
thus becomes shaped by what our hypothetical model of experience permits, so that the raw data of experience
is anything
but raw since, rather than being simply "given," the data have been created
in
response to the demands of that model. The patterns we think we find in them are
those
vision
rather
world
with

which our expectations,

governed by the model which our hypothetical
imposes, have created so that we may find them. So in Popper as in Kuhn,
than thB neutral world itself, what we confront
is our illusion of what the
must be for us to constitute
it for ourselves as our world -in accordance
our faith (or fiction) concerning
what it is seen by U8 as being.
In other

position

words,

of Shakespeare's

do not receive

passively.

all truth

is really

a form

lover. We can see only

There

is, from the

of troth:

actively

perspective

and

we are

all in the

transformingly;

of those

viewing

we
it,

no

neutral or naked world -only the world dressed in our vision of it as our faith
constructs its paradigm of it so that it may be brought
to life for us. And so the
arts and the sciences proceed,
tioing the marvelous things they have in their
history done in their faithful service of their various
promising -which
is to say
productive-paradigmatic
visions. Viewed this way, the similarities
among the
arts and sciences stand out more than their differences do. It is no wonder that, as
we view their flowering variety
through the centuries, we look more admiringly
at Shakespeare's
complex version of the problematic
of truth than we do at Bacon's
unilateral
commitment
which traps him within his own monolithic fiction. If this
pluralistic notion deprives science of its privileged place with respect to truth and
therefore leaves science not much better off than poetry, my own faith as a literary
critic must think that this is a pretty
good place to be left, that science has not
thus been made to suffer as much as some of my scientific
friends might fear. On
the contrary,
I see this fellowship
between
the arts and the sciences in the
56

visionary
truths
opening-outward.

they

share

as

an

elevation

It is in this sense that the literary

in that-

as we saw in my treatment

student

for

science,

as well

as

an

has his role to play here today:

of the two Shakespearean

sonnets

-he

deals

with written works created expressly for the illusionary fiction' or vision itself. Out
of this visionary capacity, fully ex}\!loited for its own sake, emerge the arts and
sciences and the individual
works.m them all, each as its own maker of vision for
human 'comfort, for human use, and for human understanding.
Perhaps this is one
of the messages which the poet -as the original player with fictional metaphor
as
his instrument
offaith -brings
to the rest of us : that as we approach our own
activitit s we are to r~cognize, and not to fear, our own visionary
metaphors
and
the act of faith that activates them.
For they are the mark of our humanity,
whatever our field of visionary study, and through
them we begin our control over
the otherwise dead objects of a world unimposed upon by human vision.

As it does with visiont art also teaches us, and the scientist in us to take
the concept of illusion seriously, as more than a make-believe
deception. As
creatures locked in the egocentric predicament -with
access to experience only
through our senses and the subjectivity behind them -we have illusion as what
we have to live with when we live in our world. In the spirit of the great art
historian, Ernst Gombrich, author of the ground-breaking book, Art and Illusion,
we must come to appreciate
both the, source of art in its illusionary nature and,
conversely, the source of all our illusionary
obsessions in what art offers us. The
association of art with appearance -with what the Greeks called
oesthesis or
the 19th-Century
Germans called Schein -is as old as our study of the arts: I
suppose we have always known that the arts help us to see and to find a human
reality in what is apparently -even
if only fictionally -there.
According to this
aesthetic
tradition, art teaches us not to associate
illusion with error or
deception -in short, with delusion. We thus learn to compare an illusion (in the
sciences as in the arts) not with an inaccessible "objective" reality -that neutral

fiction beyond all illusion

but with other illusions, recognizing
(as humanists all
of us) that we are dealing with a world of human
constructs.
What we must
attend to, then, are all our multiple human realities as they are created by all the
visions which frame our consciousness. And perhaps it is the daring of the poet to
confront the illusionary
nature of his activity
which
leads the way by giving
illusionary courage to the rest of us.

57 '

Using Shakespeare's example as our allegory, then,

I have tried to
talk about faith and love -not sentimentally,
I hope, but in accord with our
profoundest and most human capacity for original vision. We have looked at what
our reality becomes as it is touched by faith in the peculiar god we have chosen
to define our consciousness. This unconscious choice of our "necessary fiction" (as.
the poet Wallace Stevens calls it) frees our capacity to see (to see by shaping) a
more meaningfully formed world than the one we have been "given." Faith and
vision are thus humanistic value\! which can be shared
(indeed are shared) by all
creators in sciences as in the arts, perhaps more than ever \.and more desperately
than ever) shared in these often inhumane days. Should our education, in whatever field, be about anything except faith and vision in these special senses? Not
if it is to lead outside ourselves to the troth beyond. For faith and vision. shape for
us the world we know, with the especially daring metaphoric'al visions of the poet
leading the way, and with his critic creeping along behind him.

Professor of Eng1ish &

Director, Schoo1 of Criticism and Theory,
University of Ca1ifornia,
Irvine ( U. S. A. )

58

Journal of comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Vol. 2 No. II Winter 1978
@Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute: Orissa: India

INDIAN

SILPA

ON THE

TEXTS

DRAWING

OF HUMAN

JAY ANT A CHAKRABAR

]'$uman
particularly
and

vision

of

the

but

while
to

motfara,

of

On

valid

because

than

the

one
all

than

and

painter

of 14th

century,

has

also

expressed

is

forms,

neglected,

embodied

the

forms

will

them

cannot

to

find that
will

observed.

Detailed

instructions

from

idea

hardly

represented

the

appearances

of

in the

Vi~1}udhar-

that

the
of

we
Li,

object

will

but

those

painting
If.

this
who

forms.

all is lost"

forms-

their

the idea
idea

IS

can successBut

3 It was

master
the appearances,
one cannot
to understand
and express
the spirit
of human

the
poet

Mountain'

"Though

He

other
of

doctor,

ofHua

Nevertheless,
fill out

a
is

speak

a Chinese

them.

in

something

should

represented).

without

not form

avoided

"composition

my picture

avail.

citre

be

statement:

(of the

the idea

find that

by Indian
artists that unless one can
into the forms and consequently
fails
thing

following

be expressed

the

direct

should

implicit,

in his 'Introduction

cannot

through

appearances

not

by 'idea'

and

recordt'd

mentions

Wang

in the

in

references
have

(of an object)

were

date,

feeling,

spirit

is also

early

"sammukhatvamathaite~am

appearances."2

an idea

and

It

texts:

an

and

see, they
the

from

mood

taken

be, logic::llly,

if this

the

or

artists.
study

art

expressed

as we

silpa

must

Indian

have

character

representation

in forms

I epresent

forms,

the

it is dominated

mere

fully'represent
cannot

such

might

Coomaraswamy

itself;

rather

generally

close

appearances

'references'

represents

is,

occasion,

appearance

are

extant

That

of

because

They
inner

by

early

pivot
simply

the
the

expressed

vivarjayet."

painting.

artist
form.

Only

the

the

period,

representing

be

one

been

Gupta

Indian

as such.

are found

has

of human

model

yatnad

the

an

"appearances"
nature,

TI

form

from

FORM

proportions,

he who
believed
go deep
of the
stances

1. Vi~~udharmottara, Part III, Ch. 43, Verse 30 b. 2. A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Figures of

Speech or Figures of Thought, ch. XIV, footnote I of P. 213 (appears on p. 215).

or postures

and angles of vision \ foreshortening)

texts.
A self-imposed restriction
apprentices.
These instructions

are, therefore

found

PROPOR TION AND MEASUREMENT

are frequent

thefi/pa

was a necesssary discipline for the beginners and

seem to be concerned
more with the work of a

sculptor than with that of a painter,

because there was every
stone being damG1ged if the artist did not have any precision.

There

in

references

possibility

of the

to proportion,

that is, mana

or pramii1}a, in

the Hlpa texts in connection

with drawing in general and human
form in particular.
This proportion
may mean the relative measurement
of forms as also the
mental proportion
or measurement
by which an artist decides how much of the
background
or the foreground has to be introduced
in a painting,
or which figure

has to be made larger or smaller according to the demand of the subject.

The
mental proportion
or measurement
depends on the intelligence,
perception
and
experience of an artist, whereas
the relative
measurement
of forms is a guiding
principle for the artists in general and assures the maintenance
of a standard.

The Vi$1}udharmottara classifies human forms into five types4

according
to their nature and proportion. The names of the classified types of the male are
Harhsa, Bhadra, Malavya, Rucaka and ~afaka (harhso bhadro'tha malavyo rucakaJ,.
fafakastathii / vijneya~ puru~a~ panca
).
The

broad

measurement

of these

five

types

are

given

in

terms

of angula5
measurement.
This a;egula, as a unit of measurement,
appears
to
mean the measurement
according
to one's (artist's)
own angula (svenaiviUcgulamiinena).6
So practically
there was no standard
measuring
unit since the shape
and thickness

of angula were liable

to vary

from

person to person.

3. Arthur Waley, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting, London,

4. V.D., Part III, ch. 35, Verse 8.

The

vertical

1923, p. 245.

The table of the measuring length (as noted by Shrigonrlekar in the Manaso/lasa, Vol. II.
*
Introduction, p. 8) is given below;
I. a7!gula or matra
Sukraniti.) .
I.

4.
3

8 yavas

(or

of

mu~!i or closed

fist according

to the

2 angulas or matras
I bhagn
matras or 12 angulas
I tala.
bhagas or 12 angulas

golaka

or kala

5. angula is one-fourth of a mus!i or closed fist (cf. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Sukranitt,
trans., 2nd ed., AUahabad, 1923, p. 169.) 6. V.D., Part III, ch. 35, .Verse 9b.
60

measurements of the five types are noted as folIows-Ha1?lsa is 108 aftgulas, Bhadra
106 angulas, Miilavya-104 aftgulas, Rucaka-100 aftgulas and Safaka-90 angulos.
The Brhal Samhitii7

also dassifies

human

but their measurements,

as noted in the text,
102, 105 and 108 angulas respectively.

form into the

are almost

inverse,

same

five types,

that is, 96, 99,

It is said in the V,snudharmottara

that the height and the breadth
of a
figure
would
be equal
(ucchriiyiiyamatulyiiste
sarve jneyilfJ,
promiinataM. 8
Dr. Kramrisch
explains it as 'the length of the body is equal to the length across
the chest along the out-stretched
arms from the tip of the right middle finger to
the left'. 9
The Vi{T}udharmnttora

then states the proportion

of the various

parts and

limbs in terms of tiila measurement.

'The liila is stated to be 12 digits in extension'
(dvadafiiftguJa v;stiirastiila ityamidhi)'ote).1
0 The height of the foot (padacchriiya)
upto the ankle is one-fourth of a tiila, i. e., 3 angulas.
The shank is equal to two
talas or 24 digits. The shank knee is equal to one pada, i. e., 3 digits. The thigh
is 2 talas. The navel is one tala above the penis.
The heart is one tala above the
navel, and the base of the neck is one tala above the heart. The neck is one-third
of a tala and the face is one tala. The distance between the crown of the head and
the forehead is one-sixth of a tala.
The penis should .be (placed) in the middle.
The arms (above the elbow) is 17 digi ts each and the forearms
are also of the
same length. Half of the chest is 8 digits (angulas.)
This is the measurement
of the
J:Iamsa type according to breadth.
The measurement
calculated
in accordance
with this (proportion) .11

ments

detailed

The Sukraniti Siira 12 supplies

of the oth~r types of male figure

instructions
in detail

of other types

regarding

(verses 196-255

relative
and

should be

measure3t,1:l-402).

The measurement
of a Haf!1sa type (stated above is followed by the
measurements
of different parts and limbs in chapter 36 of the Vi.fT}udha-

7. H. Kern, 'The Brhat Samhita'

(Trans),
JRAS, Vol. VII, 1875, pp.93-97;
also Stella
Kramrisch,
The ViUlUdhamottaram Part Ill,
Introduction,
p. 12. 8. V.D., Part IU, ch. 35,
verse 9a. 9. Stella Kramrisch, The VipiudharmottaremPart III, p. 35 (foot note)
10. V.D., Part III ch. 35, Verse llb.
I\.
V.D.,
Part III, ch. 35, Verse Ib (the verse_
begins after 26 linps which are written in prose), also see Priyabala
Shah,
Vi~,!udharmortara
Puriina 3rd Khantf,a, Vol. II, p. 106. 12. Vide Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Sukraniti (trans.)
pp. 178-182 verses 341-402.

61

rmottara 1 S in the
The forehead

fQllowing

order-The

is 4 digits in height

and their height

( haT}u ) measures

and

circumference
8 broad.

The

of the head
temple

is 32 digits.

(Sankha) measures

is 2. The cheeks (garpJa) measure

5 digits each and the jaw
4.
The ears measure 2 each with a height
of 4 digits.

The nose measures 4; at the tip it is 2 in height and its breadth

is 3. The extent
of the nostril is one digit and the width is double. The position between
the nose
and the lip measures
half a digit.
The mouth is four digits in breadth.
The
lower lip is one. The eyes are one each in extent and 3 in width.
The blaLk orb
is one-third of the eye and the pupil is one-fifth.
in width and 3 digits in length etc. etc.
This is the
measure

in relation

measurement

of the

As regards

Harilsa

to which the measurements

out. (This h'l~ been done, we have alrf'ady

the female

The eye-brows

type,

of other

are

half

a digit

and it is the standard

types

are to be worked

nOled, in the SukranIti

Sara.)

form, ch. 37 of the Vi~I,1udharmottara

states at the

very beginning that like the men, women are also of five types.14
But the respective names of the female types are not recorded.
It may be that the female
types were also known by the same terms (as that of the males) in their feminine
forms.
In a few erotic literatures
of India, however, human forms (according
to
their nature) are found to be classified into several males along with the corresponding
female types. Vatsyayana's
Klima Siitra (VI, I, 1-2),
for example,
mentions three types of menrespective counterparts-mrgi

sasa (hare),
vr~a (bull),
asva
(doe), vac;lava (mare) and hastini

(horse)
(female

and their
elephant).

A few other information

of the female form, of course, are stated
in the
15 which describes
that 'a woman should be placed near her
Vi~I,1udharmottara
male partner so as to reach his shoulder.
The waist of a woman should be made
thinner by two digits than that of a male and the hip should be made wider by 4
digits. The breasts are to be made attractive
and proportionate
to the chest' 16.
The proportions
of the female form are given' in further
detail in the Sukraniti
Sara which mentions that 'the height and thickness of the breasts of women
five digits... The limbs of the females have all to be made up in 7 talas. In
13. The major
consisting of six
Vol. II,
pp.
14. V.D., Part

are
the

part of this chapter

(36) is only written in prose (except the last portion
Slokas); the translation
of this portion by P. Shah, (VD. puriitfa-3rd
KhatfrJa,
106-107) has been utilised with occasional
modifications,
as necessary.
III, ch. 37, Verse I b. 15. Ibid., Part III, ch.38, Verses 2-3.

62

image of seven tiilas the face is to be (made)

female has all the parts of her body fully
male in the twentieth.

twelve arigulas or one tiilal 7. The

developed
in her sixteenth
year, the

Detai led instructions

regarding proportions
and measurements
of human
forms are also furnished by the Miinasolliisa in the ta la lak~a.t;la (Verses 193-205a)
and the siimiinya citra prakriyii (Verses 234-686) sections.

p~s I DRES OR STANCES

Different postures (sthiinas) or stances are referred to in
mottara,
the Samariiriga.t;la
Sl1tradhiira,
The Miinasolliisa"
the
also in a few Agama texts.
All these texts agree that the major
These nine postrures
are (stated
in the Vi~.t;ludharmottara,
ch.
(I) rjviigata
(2) anrju (3) siiclkrta
sarira (4) ardhavilocana
(6) pariivrtta

(7) pr~thiigata

(8) parivrtta,

the Vi~.t;ludlfarSilparatna
and
stances are nine.
39, Verses 1-32):
(5)piirsviigata,

and (9) samiinata.

The present
text of the Samariiriga.t;la
Sl1tradhiira
is so corrupt
and
multilated
that it is very difficult to say anything
definite,
particularly
about the
stances.
Only this much can be guessed
(from tbe description
of the ch. 79,
Verses 1-4) that there are nine typf'S of human poses.
The Miinasolliisa
and the
Silparatna,
on the otherhand,
give more or less a clear idea ab<?ut the stances.
Both the Miinasolliisa
and the Silparatna
propose five varieties
of principal
stances
and the names of the stances, noted in both the texts, are practically
identical.
In the Miinasolliisa
they appear as rju, ardharju,
siici, ardhiik~i and
bhittika;
whereas
in tbe Silparatna
the principal
stances are noted as rju,
ardharju,
siicika, dvyardhak~i
and bhittika.
The Silparatna
also adds that apart
from these five stances there are four other types of pariivrtta
or dorsal
poses.
Thus it appears according to the Silparatna
that the total number
of stances is
nine. Among them five are frontal and the rest four are dorsal or back view, and
this also agrees with that of the Vi~.t;ludharmottara.
The Miinasolliisa
and the Silparatna
refer to the sthiinas or stances which
are to be calculated
on the basis of the positions of the brahma siitra (central axis
line) and the two pak~a siitras (side lines). But the nine stances of the Vi~.t;ludharmottara are Dot classified with the help of brahma
siitra and pak~a siitras.
The
16. Stetta Kramrisch,
The Sllkraniti, p. 179.

The Vi~Z'lldharmottaram

Part Ill, p. 39

63

17.

Benoy

Kumar

SarkaI',

position of the diffprent limbs

that the prescribed poses are
dhak~a-sthana
may be cited
or sthana, (which is almost a

are so vividly
described in the Vi~l).udharmottara
easily comprehended.
The Ardhavilocana
or Adhyarhere as an example. The description
of this posture
profile pose), is as follows 18.

In the face half-eye is shown and the other half is not shown (or dropped),
so also the eye-brows.
The contracted
forehead
should be of one matra
or one
angula. The essential part of the body, which is to be shown, should be exhibited
little. The cheek should be meamred
one-half of an angula and the other half is
derpinished.
The line of the neck should be shown oneangula,
while the chin
should be exhibited one yava, ie., one-eighth of an al).gula. Half of the front part
of thr chest should be shown and the (other) half
one.angula
should remain
from the navel cavity.
are to be shown
half.
also called chayagatam.

The adhyardhak~a

is recognised

After mentioning
the nine postures
these nine poses should be understood
for
various other poses can also be imagined and
It is also stated that the background
should
stances should be depicted in accordance
with

The different

stances or postures

should be omitted.
Similarly,
The waist and whatever
else,
by its very shape.

This is

the Vi~l).udharmottara
opines that
characterizing
a particular
mood;
depicted by superior
understanding.
be properly
divided
and then the
the measurement
(of the space). 19

are said to be represented

the Miinasolliisa
and the Silparatna)
with the
brahma sutra or madhya sutra, i.e., the central
two pak~a sutras, i.e., side lines. According
which begins from kesanta (where hair ends on

(according

to

help of three imaginary

linesexis line or the plumb
line, and
.to the Manasolliisa,2o
the line
the forehead)
and passes through

the middle
of the eye-brows, the tip of the nose, chin, chest and navel to the
middle of the two feet Ccovering from head to the ground~, is called the brahma
Sutra21
or the central exis line. The two side lines or the pak~a sutras (in case
of strictly
either side.

frontal

pose) are usually

They start from

six angulas

the karnanta

away

from

(top of the ear)

the

brahma

and pass

sutra
along

on
the

18. V.D., Part III, ch. 39, Verse 111-112; also see trans. of Priyabala Shah, Vi~ryudharmortara
Puriina 3rd KhantJ.a, Vol. II, Gaekwad's
Oriental
Series No. 137, Baroda, 1961 p. 113.
19. Ibid. Part III
ch. 39 Verses 33-37. 20. Vol. II, ch. I, Verses 177-192. 21. G. K.
Srigondekar (ed.), Abhilasitiirtha Cintiima[li or Miinaso/liisa, ',Gawkwad's
Oriental
Series, No.
LXXXIV,
Baroda, 1939, pp 7 and 8 (Introduction).
64

chin, the middle

and tbe second

part of the knees, outside skin (joint

finger near the toe to the ground.

between the central

distinguished.

axis line and the two sid~

lines

the

of the chest and the arm),

With the varying distance
five different

poses

are

It is already
noted that in the perfect frontal pose (I) rjusthana,
the
distance between the central
exis line and pak~a sUtras or side lines is six digits
on both sides (II). Ardharju sthana is that in which the distance from the central
axis line (or plumb line) to the one pak~a sutra or side line is eight aJ).gulas on
one side and four digits on the other. (III) The saci sthana
is that in which
the distance from the brahma
sutra to one pak~a sutra is ten digits on one side
and two on the other. (IV) In ardhak~ika sthana the distance
from fhe central
axis line to one of the side lines is eleven digits and one to the other.
Bhittika
sthana is that in which only two side lines would be visible and the brahma
sutra (also known as lamba sutra)
would dis8ppear,
that is to say, oDe of the
side lines (pak~a sutra)
would merge
with the central
line or brahma sutra.
In the tiryanmana
lak~aJ).am ;;ection of the text (Man., Vol. II, ch. I,
Verses 205-234a)
there is a description
of how to prepare
graph-like
horizontal
lines which help in depicting paravrtta (dorsal) poses, as well as proper placing of
nose, eyes etc. In fact, the tiryanmana
with its horizontal
lines and the three
imaginary

vertical

lines (brahma

siitra and two pak~a siitras)

would

combinedly

give a perfect idea of tbe position of-different

limbs and their
parts in different
movements; it is the easiest process of preparing
a proportionate
drawing,.
and
helpful fo:- an amateul or beginner.
The lines-horizontal
and vertical-in
fact
supply the exact co-ordinates of any point or location in the picture,
thus helping
production
of any necessary enlargement,
reduction or exact reproduction.
The Silparatna
(Part I, ch.46,
Verses 60-110)
also prescribes an
identical
process of representing
the different
stances
with the help of three
imaginary vertical lines-brahma
siitras. It also mentions
that in rju sthana of
or perfect frontal pose the distance between the brahma
sutra or central axis line
and/the two pak~a sutras or side lines is six angulas each; and in different
stances
the distance of one palqa sutra from the central
brahma
sutra would gradually
increase, while the other decrease. In this way the two side lines or pak~a sutras
being shifted from the central axis line would at last form the bhittika
sthana in
which only the two pak~ sutras would be visible and the brahma
sutra would
disappear or merge with one of the pak~a sutra. Th'e only difference
between the
Manasollasa
and the Silparatna,
on thii particular
point, is that the Silparatna
65

gives a more comprehensive

description of the different parts of the body
which the three vertical imaginary
lines pass while showing
the different

through
stances

in the drawing.
After the description

of the five principal

stances,

the

Silparatna

speaks

of another four stances and thus makes a total number of nine stances.
The four
stances stated later, are the dorsal {paravrtta
or paravarta)
poses. These dorsal
views can also be drawn
(even by an apprentice)
with the help of the three
imaginary
lines The four dorsal poses are named,
after the first four frontal
poses, rjuka, ardharjuka,
saci, and dvyardhak~i.
In these cases the front side of the
body should be turned towards the wall and the back side would be visible.
The SiljJaratna

further

states tha.t there may be numerous

mixed (misra)

poses, apart from the nine poses or sthanas.

The text also cites an example
that
while the face is in rjusthana,
the body below the neck may be in another stance.
Of course, there cannot be any restriction for an experienced
or talented artist.

He is allowed to draw any pose which he thinks suitable for his expression.

22

LAW OF FORESHORTENING
chapter

After discussing the different stanGes, the Vi~l).udharmottara;

in the same
(39, Verses 38-46), deals with the principle
of foreshOl H'ning ~k~aya-

vrddhi) which is also universally

recognised
as one of the fundamental
rules of
drawing
an object.
This aspect of drawing, stated as k~aya-vrddhi
(principle
of
diminishing
and increasing),
appears
only in the Vlsnudharmottara.
An artist
applies this principle to dipict his figure in different
angles and posps-dynamic
or static.
An Indian painter uses it for other purposes too. He uses the principle of ksaya (diminishing)
and vrddhi (increasing) in his composition and makes his
figures smaller or larger according
to their relative
importance
in tBe subject.
Therefore visual perspective is almost absent in his drawing.
It is the multiple
perspective
or better to say the mental
perspective
which
regulates
the
drawing of his compusition.
Ksaya-vrddhi,

of course,

generally

means

the process,

with

the

help

of

which the different poses of a figure can be drawn

Therefore it may be regarded
as another
expression
of the same process which is involved in the execution
of
different stances. It is natural,
therefore
that some of the names of k~aya-vrddhi
22. Silparatna, Part I, Ch. 46, Verses lIGb-lIla.
66

coincide with some of the stances.

The k~aya and vrddhi are applied
for showing different parts and limbs (of a body) with which thirteen
sthanas or sathsthanas
are said to be composed.
These thirteen
samsthanas
are: (1) dr~tagata
(2) onrjugata
(3) madhyardha,
(4) ardhardha
(5) sacikrtamukha
(6)
nata.
(7) gaI;l<;laparavrtta
(8) pr~thagata
(9) parsvagata
(10) ullepa
(11) calita
(12) uttana and (13) valita.
It is said that these are to be done according
to the need of different
<..ornpositions and' maI;lgalas.
The
maI;lgala
(which
is a distinct
physical
movement of the body) is to be shown through the movements
of the legs, and
maI;lgala

has

been rendered

by Dr. Kramrisch

as 'legs in circular

motion'Z

3.

Regarding
the representation
of female form, the Vi~I;ludharmottara
that a sportive woman should be represented
with one leg in even and

says24

steady pose and the other languid ( vithvala 25); the body in motion (sariram ca
salIam) should be shown with -a leaning ( ava~tambha
) or somewhat
running
( drutam)
at times.
The hip (jaghana)
should be broad
and gracefully
twisted.

silpa
Bagh,

The laws of proportion,

stances
and foreshortening
texts, are found to be utilized
by the Indian mural
Badami,

Sittanavasal,

EIIora,

Tanjore

and

other

damsels that appear in the court-scenes

at Ajanta, or in
or at Tanjore or other places would show how different
body are beautifully
rendered
applying
the canonical
sta!1ces etc. and the artist's
own ingenuity.
In actual
mixed stances and frontal poses are generally
found;
hardly

seen in mural

practically
includes
balance

painting,

though

in sculpture

prescribed
in the
painters at Ajanta,

places.

The

dancing

the feast scene at Bagh

poses and bends of the
formulae
of proportion,
execution
of painting,
complete
dorsal pose is

it is not completely

unknown.

The different
sthanas
and bharigas
(deflexion)
of human
forms are
the keys to their movement
in space.
'Ceaseless
movement
which
pauses and stances, is a subtle
and difficult
exercise in the control
of
and weight2 6', and the sthanas, bharigas and mudras (position of hands

23. Stella Kramrisch,

The Vi~YJudharmottara-Part
Ill, p. 41.
24.
49-50. 25. This particular
way of standing with one leg engaged
free (languid) reminrls us the well-known contrapposta or counterpoise
phorus by (gr) Polyclitus was executed [cf. H.W.janson,
History of
ed. 1962), p. 102.]
26 & 27. Niharranjan
Ray, Idea and Image in
.
1973, p. 92.

67

Part III, ch. 39, Verses

(steady)
and the other
pose in which the. DoryArt, New York, 1965 (1st.
Indian Art,
New Delhi,

and fingers), as Dr. Niharranjan

Ray observes, 'are but devices as much for the
correct distribution
and control of balance and weights as for the evocation of the
desired bhiiva and rasa through
well-known and understood
symbols. This too,
holds good as much for sculpture and painting
as for dancing27',
since dance
means a movement,
full of rhythm,
cadellce,
harmony
and balance.
This may
explain why the Vi~I.}Udharmottara
mentions that knowledge
of choreography
is
essential

for proper

understanding

of a painting.2

8 Dr. Kramrisch

also

observes,

'what is meant by the derivation

of painting from dancing
is the movement
in
common.to
both these expressive forms...
The moving force, the vital breath,
the
Ii fe movement
(cetana),
that is what is expected
to be seen in the work of a
painter,
to make it alive with rhythm and expression':.I 9.

earlier

A casual reader of Indian

silpa texts may
period could not give free reign to their fancy

the possible details

forms, are specified
Indian
early
rigid
would
close
hints

of measurements
and pre-defined.

think that Indian

and imagination,

artists of
since all

and drawing
of forms, particularly
human
There is no doubt that a broad section of

silpa texts contains

instructions
in detail, but the extant specimens of
Indian art do not give the impression
that the artists had to follow any
or non-flexible
formulae.
Had it been so, the entire story of Indian
art
have been an endless repetition
of a set stereotyped pattern.
In fact, a very
and minute study of the silpa texts would sh~w that there are very subtle
strewn here and there suggesting
the imaginative
and working freedom of

an artist.
Indian

artists

and restheticians

know it very well that

unless

one

studies

the appearances
and objective
reality,
one cannot reach at the deep spiritual'
unity.
It is for this reason that every detail of the form is mentioned
to be
studied,
particularly
by the trainees and apprentices,
in order to avoid all unsavoury inaesthetic
effect of a work of art.
In the actual execution of form, we also
find that the ancient Indian artists are not ignorant of the anatomy,
the law of
balance or the 'rhythmic vitality' and yet, as great artists
they never emphasise
on the mere form or appearance
28. cr. V.D., Part III, ch. 2, Verse 4.
III, Calcutta 1928, p. 10.
Kala-Bhavana
P.O. Shantiniketan
Pin-731235

by sacrificing

its spirit.

29. Stella Kramrisch

(W.B.}

68

The Vi~,!udharmottara--Part

Journal of Comparative Literature

Vol. 2 No. II Winter 1978
@Vishvanatha

Kaviraja

Institute:

and Aesthetics
Orissa:

India

.
THEORY OF IMPERSONAL ART
A. C. SUKLA

'athe purpose

of this essay is

not to trace

any

history

of the

idea

of

impersonality
in art, nor does it aim at offering any 'final solution' of the problem.
It proposes to make an attempt at clarifying
some of the 'intricacies
in the views
of the latest pleader of this theory by throwing some light through
the arguments
of the ancient Indian critics.

I
In continuation

of the anti-romantic

movement

of Hulme

and

Pound,

in rejection of the romantic concepts that poetry expresses the personal feelings and
emotions of the poet, that the poet the creator
is very much present in his poem
the creation, that there are specIfic emotions, feelings and subject-matter
suitable
for poetry and analysis of poetry needs an analysis
of the 'genius'
of the poet
Eliot gave a final shape to the modern classicistic idea of the impersonality
of art
i. e. the poet is as impersonal
as the scientist
and poetry is a sort of inspired
mathematics
"which gives us equations for the human emotions." 1
In spite of

the

highly

eclectic

character

of Eliot's

mass

of critical

writings and a number of knotty and confusing

critical
phrases and jargons it is
not difficult to summarise
systematically
the basic ideas of his poetics from some
major
portions of his. writings,
particularly
his essays "Tradition
and the
Individual
Talent",
"The Metaphysical
poets", "Perfect
Critic" and "Imperfect
Critic" and the essay on Hamiel."
Tradition
and the Individual
Talent gives us
the key-note
to his critical assumptions which he tries to justify
in other
essays.
He stresses two points there:
a poet is not ari isolated
individual,
as no other
individual
is, from others of the society or country or from the humanity
as a
whole. Each and every moment
of the immemorial
and unending
Time is
1. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of the Romance, London 1910 p. 5.

interdependent;
thus past is not buried in the dead past, nor is future something
new and uncertain.
Past, present and future are in a way causally
and logically
related though without losing the significance
of each moment
in the eternal
flux of this Time.
Thus a poet as an individual
and as a part of his tradition
must be assessed simultaneously
at the time of judgment.

The second
the nature

point deals with the

of po~tic creation
The material

and thereby

material,

the process

of all artistic

for all art is emotion,

creations

but it is not the

and

finally

with

in general.

personal

emotion

of

the anist. Logically, it follows from Eliot's major assumption

stated above that as
the artist is not an isolated person from the whole tradition,
the emotions that are
the materials of his art cannot be also strictly personal.
They must be impersonal
in the sense that they must represent
the emotions
of the whole tradition
(the
typical emotions) of which he is an organic part. Thus the romantic view, that the
poet directly expre3ses his own personal emotions i. e. his experiences
of sorroWs
and miseries,
happiness
and
suffering,
is
impersonal emotions as significant emotions.

rejected

hy

Eliot.

He

terms

his

Now the poetic process or the method of artistic

operation: it is neither a
recollection of the emotions in tranquillity,
nor a spontaneous overflow ofpoweiful
feelingsthus straightly a rejection of the Wordsworthian
formula.
The artistic
operation involves three principlesthe principles
of correspondence
or transmutation, coherence
and comprehensiveness.2
This
operation
takes place in
mind; but unlike the romantic critic
Eliot disbelieves in the substantial
unity of
soul or mind i. e. the suffering
mind of the poet cannot be identified
with his
creative mind; hence there is no question
of recollection
of the poet's personal
sufferings and joys. Mind is a mediuma medium of operation.
The diversed
feelings and emotions cif the poet are identified here (principle
of comprehensiveness) and, all the parts being integrated
into a whole (principle of coherence),
are finally transformed
into completely a new thing which is poetry (principle of
transformation).
Though there is some affinity of this operation with the romantic
concept of the Secondary
Imagination
there is nothing mystic in it. The operation
is just a technical one quite common in chemical
sciences.
Mind of the poet is a
catalyst

which

which combines

itself being neutral

oxygen

and sulphur

and unchanged
dioxide

into

like

a filament

sulphorous

acid,

of platinum,
transmutes

the

2. F. P. Lu, T. S. Eliot; The Dialectical Structure of His Theory of Poetry, Chicago, 1966.
Chap. 2.
70

raw material of poetry (i. e. emotions

neither
powerful,
nor something
new or
specific, just ordinary ones). Emotion thus transformed
is significant, is impersonal,
and when expressed in the form of a poem (or art) has its life in the poem itself,
not in the history of the poet.

only

But how to express this transmuted

emotion
in the form of art ? "The
way of expressing
emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective

correlative";
in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula
of that particular
emotion;
such that when the external
facts, which must terminate
in sensory experience
are given, the emotion is
immediately
evoked."3
Eliot's ideas about the impersonality
of ar t and particularly
his theory
of 'objective correlative'
have been variously criticized by critics like Rene Wellek,
Susanne Langer, Ranson, Praz, Eleseo Vivas, S. E. Hyman
and others.
But the
Indian thinkers, who debated
on a parallel problem
centuries
ago, would have
raised the following
points:
Eliot is not precise as regards his idea of emotions
and feelings i.e. whether they are the states of our mindper~anent
or transitory

and in what

way they

are

related

to

experience.

Sometimes

emotion,

feeling and experience appear synonymous

and interchangeable;
at others the
distinction
is rather confusing
and
inconvincing:
that
emotion
signifies
the responses
of the poet's mind to the external
and internal
stimuli
which
furnish the poet with the raw material
which he transforms
in poetry ; and
feeling stands for the responses of the poet's mind which originate
not in the
external
or internal
stimuli but are occasioned
by the study of literature.
Secondly,
the poetic process i.e. the transformation
of personal
emotions into the
impersonal
poetic emotions
is also obscure.
Without
giving any logic of this
transformation
Eliot gives an analogy which may be very alluring,
but is surely
invalid. A living human mind can never be as neutral as a filament
of platinum
which is simply a piece of lifeless matter;
and this analogy f:rom chemical science
is incapable
of eXplaining
a sensible affair like the process of poetic creation.
Besides, why should art approach the conditions
of science at all? Finally,
the
method of objectification
of the impersonal
emotion and its implication
that
aesthetic enjoyment necessitates the evocation of this (impersonalized?)
emotion
in the connoisseur
appear misleading
from its application
to one of the masterpieces of world literature
(Hamlet)
judging it as an artistic failure.
3. Eliot, Hamlet (1919).
71

II
In Indian aesthetics,
too, emotions (bhiiva ~ are the materials
of poetry,
drama,
rnusicand
all other arts ; and poetry is the objclctification
of the
impersonalized
emotions
of the poet. This means that:
(1) emotions
will transcend the personal
afflictions or interest of the poet himself i.e. it must belong
to all so that (2) others will take interest in them
attached
to them
because
of their
generalization

without
or

being personally
impersonalization

(siidhiiraTJya). (3) This generalization

takes place as none-' neither
the poet nor
the reader-takes
any utilitarian
interest in these emotions
their causal
efficiency (arthakriYiikiiritva)
being lost. This is know~ as the transformation
of
bhiiva (personal emotion)
into Rasa (impersonalized
or generalized
emotion)
or
poetry through a medium which is a complex
of character,
their actions and
transient
emotions
or feelings (Vibhiiviinubhiivavyabhiciirisarilyogab).
4

mental
(sthiiyi)

This needs a little elaboration.

Emotions are defined by the Indians
as
states (ciltavrtti)
which may be of two typespermanent
or primary
and transitory
or secondary
(vyabhidirI)
that
depends upon the former.

Permanent
emotion is defined as 'the emotion which is not swallowed
up by other
emotions
whether
friendly with it or unfriendly,
which quickly dissolves
the
others into its OWn condition like the salt-sea, which endures
continuously
in the
mind,.."5
The permanent
emotions are nine in numberLove, Mirth, Sorrow,
Anger, Courage,
Fear, Aversion,
Wonder
and Serenity.
The transitory states
of mind accompany
the durable states emerging from it and being again submerged in it and they cannot endure for any length of time without
attachiog
themselves
to one of the durable
states.
They are as many as thirty-three
in
number
Shame

like Indifference,
etc.
It appears

Doubt,

Jealousy,

that the transitory

Pride,

emotions

Inertia,

may

Patience,

be roughly

Passion

identified

and

with

the feelings of western psychology

though
the permanent
emotions
are something different from the emotions.
They are the qualities and activities of both
sense and intellect and they form the
whole of one's experience
inherited
or
rather evolved biologically
from last lives and are on constant
modification
and
purification
until their final extinction
when one achieves liberation
sacrificing
aU his desires sensual or intellectual.
The Sarilkhya exegetes plead for a subtle

4.

Bharata, Prose after Karika 31. 5. Dhanaiijaya,

72

Dasarilpaka IV 34.

body. or an ethereal form the material of which is ego (ahamkiira) that contains
these primary
emotions as conditioned
by the activities (karma) of a man.
This
ether::al form IS the substratum
of all the essentials that a man inherits
from hig
continuous tradition (samskiira) from time immemorial,
from the very day of his
birth -soul's
confinement
in a corporeal body,
Thus the permanent
emotions
differ in their degree3 and intensity
from person to person though
they are the
same in kinda combination
of three gU1}as, sattva, rajas and tamas.
The root of the poetic process is only one permanent
emotion
(out of
nine) or an emotional
complex
when a single emotion is predominant.
The
process involves a stimulant
which strikes a particular
emotion
in a man with
strong sensibility.
When thus struck, the man who is called a poet, expresses that

emotion in language which again evokes the same emotion in another ,man
who reads the poem.
Two points are to be noted carefully here
(1) there may
be a personal
element in the poe's being struck by the stimuli,
but the moment
the poet attempts at expression
of this emotion it must be impersonal as it loses
its personal
attachment
with the stimuli or with the effect thereof.
Otherwise
expression
would be simply impossible.
Commonsense
will prove that a lover
who is over-whelmed
by the sorrow due to the death of his beloved cannot express
his emotion
in poetry.
The Indian critics would not agree with Words Worth
that a recollection
of the emotion in tranquility
will explain
logically
this state
of impersonality.
Recollection
of a powerful
emotion
may rather sometimes
move the man much more than before.
The only logical explanation
of such
impersonalization
utilitarian
impact

is that the stimulant

losing
its
upon the poet.
The loss of causal

causal
efficiency
lacks the
efficiency is proved
by the

fact that instead of moving the poet blitterly

an emotion like sorrow gives him a
wholesome
pleasure.
The reason of the striking
of the stimulant
is not its
personal relation with the poet but the poet's extraordinary
sympathetic
power.
It is this sympathy
(sahrdayatii), the root of all aesthetic
appreciation
which
makes the poet's emotion roused by the stimuli and the reader's
emotion evoked
by the poet's
expression of the emotion.
The second
ment of the emotions

point to note is that the intensity and degree of the move-.

of the poet and the reader may vary from case to case as

the traditional
modification
(sathskiira) of their emotions are necessarily
different.
Hence the impact
of the same stimuli will strike different
poets with varying
intensity
and again th~ intensity
of the same emotion in the readers
will abo
vary accordingly.
73

Abhinavagupta

( 10th C ) gives a very brilliant

process in his commentary

on the Dhvanyiiloka

analysis

of this

of A.nandavardhana.6

poetic

The ~rigin

of the Riimiiya1'}a, the great I.ndian epic written

by the first Indi,an poet, sage
Viilmlki
is the lamentation
of a hE.-crane for the death of its she-bird due to
shooting
of.a' hunter at the time of their erotic meet.
The sage of the purest
heart noted it and was deeply touched
by the sorrow of the bird for which he
cursed the hunter to remain unhappy
for ever in his life. '1 hus the permanent
emotion in this sage struck by the lamentation
of the bird is sorrow
when exprEssed in language, this emotion
is manif~sted
as poetry
centr al theme of which is the separation
Abhinavagupta

asks:

of the hero and heroine

whose sorrow is manifested

(soka) and,
(sloka), the

ending

in poetry?

in pathos.
is it the

poet's personal
emotion?
and answers in the negative.
It is not the person'al
emotion of the sage poet;
had it been so, there would be no question of poetic
activity
obviously
because a man personally
affiicteo
by sorrow cannot write
poetry. The lamentation
of the bird of course stimulated
the permanent
emotion
of Sorrow in the sage-poet.
But Abhinava
suggests that an artist's observation is
different from others' in so far as his is an impersonal or detached
but sympathetic
one, The artist observes things and events as if he is witnessing a drama.
Hence
he is always compared
with a yogin in Indian
aesthetics
because
both of them
observe and experience the worldly phenomena
indifferently
without any personal
involvement
(tiitasthya).
They share others' sufferings
and happiness
by an
identification
(tiidiitmya) with others which is based on sympathy only.
A step further:
it is not also the sorrow of the bird that
they identify
with. The bird is only an instrument
of this stimulatiun.
Through the bird's sorrow
they identify with the emotion in its universal form.
It is very interesting

to note here that

himself is primarily
an aesthete who first
and then only expresses this relish in his
opens the drama by hunting the bird.
(vibhiival who expresses its permanent

according

to Abhinavagupta

a poet

relishes the events of the world-drama

poetry.
In the above case the hunter
The he-bird
is the prin~ipal
character
emotion
of sorrow by lamentation,
its

symptom (anubhiiva) and the sage perceives the whole scene as the audience of this
drama. The sorrow of the bird touches the sage and being sympathetic
hrdayasathuiidi he identifies
generalization
6

his emotion with that of the bird and thus by this process of
siidhiira~ikara1'}a the identified
(or generalized or impersonalized)

Gp. cit, 1. J.
74

permanent
emotion (sorrow) of the sage is transformed into Kar711Jarasa (or tragic joy)
which he relished himself; and when it became
abundant
it overflowed in the
form of poetry (sldka) being regulatpd by the compositional
principles
of prosody
etc. 7 Thus the epic Rt1mt1ya1Jais the verbal manifestation
of this generalizf'd
(or depersonalized)
or aesthetic emotion of sorrow (Karu1Ja rasa). It is by the same
procf ss. again, thaI the reader's
generalized
(or depersonalized)

permanent
emotion
of sorrow
which he enjoys finally.

is evok(ed

and

Two questions may be raised here: (1) is then the reader's

enjoyment of
poetry inferior to that of the poet as it is twice removed from the perception
of the
world-drama
or, in other words,
as it is an enjoyment
of enjoyment?
(2) If
emotion is the source of poetry, should its intensity
arid degree
condition that of
the creation and enjoyment of poetry? That is to say, can we admit that a poet
with more powerful emotion of love can write love poems better than others and,
similarly,
a reader
with intense
passion can enjoy it better
than others ?
Abhinavagupta
perception

would

answer

that

of the poet it does not mean

though
that his

the reader
enjoyment

perceives

through

will be inferior

the
to the

other's. The intensity of the enjoyment depends upon the intensity of Samskt1ra and
upon the degree of identification
or generalization
of the emotion concerned.
Thus
the reader's enjuyment may be even sometimes more than the Poet's while less at
others. As the poet as well as the reader
enjoy the same
emotion
there is llO
question of any removement
of this enjoyment.
Similarly,
the answer to the
second question
is that the creation and the appreciation
of art do not depend
only upon the intensity of an emotion.
The more powerful
factor being identi,
sahrdayatt1
fication and generalization
of the emotion by the power of sympathy
it is meaningless to say that a lusty man can write and enjoy love poems
buffoon can write or enjoy comedies
or a hero can write and enjoy
poems better than others.

or an
heruic

The method of impresonalization

of emotion
in Indian
aesthetics
is,
then, based on logic and common psychology.
There is little mysticism
of the
romantic
and symbolist thinkers
or any scientific technicality
of the modern
classicists in it. Though
the Indian thinkers talked of a poetic genius
(pratibht1)
it meant a power of varied perception
and ability for novel creations
and the
idea of super naturality
(ataukikatva) of the poetic genius differs from
Coleridge's
7. ibid; see also Abhinavabhiirati,
of thp manifestation
of rasa.

VI. 15 and thp same on

75

rasas17/ra for a dctailpd

analysis

sense of the term.

Art 1Ssupernatural
in the sense that all the natural
phenomenaemotions,
idea., impulses
and events when transformed
in art in their
generalized
form lose their causal efficiency or the pOWEr of personal
affiiction.
Love loses shamf',
all in their

its immediatl'

impersonalized

reaction,

aversion

hatred

and

sorrow

form give the poet and the reader

pain;

and

a wholesome

joy.

of 'Objective

Corre-

III
Some Indian

scholars

have paralleled

Eliot's

idea

lative' with the idea of rasa "The

emotion
here is Rasa, the ~et of objects, the
vibhiii'as, the situation their patterned,
organised
presentation
and the chain of
events indude not only the episodic stream but also the stream of emotive reactions
of the characters
to them the amlbhiivas and the Samciiribhiivas."8
But the first
objection
to such view is that l'ibhii1'aJ anubhiiva and samciiribhiii1a must be taken
together
as a complex whole
to produce
rasa where as Eliot's Oc does not
demand such a complex.
For him, it appears,
anyone
of the threeobjects,
situation and a chain of events-may
serve the purpose.
Besides, a set of objects
may be a parallel
for vibhiiva, a situation
for uddiPana, hut a chain of events is
is never a parallel
for the Indian
idea of anubhiiva and vyvbhiciiribhiiva. Abhinava
gupta's idea of the relishable
(iisviidayogya) state of the impersonal emotion
in
the poet whieh he expresses in poetry and similarly its evocation of the same
impersonalized
emotion in the form of rasa in the reader is foreign to Eliot and
other propounders
of the theory of impersonal
art in the
west.
Abhinava's
analysis of the problem
is far more subtle and precise than Eliot's.

judgement

Eliot's application
of Shakespeare's

failure.

Eliot's

arguments

(i) Hamlet
inexpressible,

(the man)

because

is dominated

it is in excess

(ii) Hamlet's
not an adequate

of the objectification
of the impersonal
emotion to the
Hamlet, Abhinavagupta
would
argue
is a great
\)
against the success of the play are:

disgust

equivalent

is occasioned

for it;

remains

(iv) The poet

wanted
in art.

to express.

8. Krishnachaitanya,

an

of the external

Shakespeare

facts that

envelops

of disgust

he

which

but

his mother

is

her.

cannot

objectify

it,

experience

which

he

action.

did not understand

of an emotion

the
which

he could not

Sanskrit Poetics, Bombay, 1965 pp. 19-20. 9. Hamlet (1919).

76

is

have to express it.

and exceeds

understand;

to poison life and obstruct

It is the buffonery

ernotion

by his mother,

his disgust

(iii) It is a feeling which he cannot

and it therefore

by

express

And Abhinava's

answers

(i) No

as such is inpxpressible,

emotion

The truth is that in poetry

suggest it by indirections.

to thl>se arguments

would

nor

statement

been:

is it in excess of thl' facts.

facts etc. do not state the emotion

directly.
They
This point needs a little elaboration:
Ananda-

vardhana
pleads for an indirect
way of expression
or
language (pratiyamiinilrtha or dh1'alli) as the soul of poetry.l
meanings
(a) the etymological
or direct
meaning
used
statements
such as in history, philosophy
and in all
indirect
meaning
which is otherwise
called dhvani (or
direct

have

is subordinated

to the new oblique

mental state or emotion

emerges
ions regarding
the
reaction's
marriage-

into view.
of maidens

the suggestive
use of
0 'Words have two
in all informational
sciences
(b) and the
Vyanjanil).
When the

meaning

the

impersonalized

Take for example,

two expresson hearing
the talk about their

"When there is a talk of bridegrooms,

maidens hold their
heads down
in bashfulness
but there is a percepti ble thrill in their bodies, which indicates
pleasure in listening to such conversation
and their willingness
to the proposal
(sPrhil).

"

Here the reaction, the willingness

of the maidens
being directly
stated
is just an information
where the poetic value is negligible.
But in another
case
in KiiJidiisa's Kumilrasambhavain when ParvatI
listens
about her marriage
from
sage
Angirii
in front of her father
the same
reaction
of her is stated
indirectly.

father,
lotus

"As the
hang her

she was playing

Her

ParvatI,

sage made this proposal,

head down and began

who was sitting

counting

silently

(ii)

hanging

down of

Hamlet's

head

mother,

and

absorption

who caused

equivalent

need that the cause or stimuli

(iii) Rasa or aesthetic
of an emotion

beside

leaves

her

of the

with."
into

are suggestive of her willingness

and rapture
at the prospect
to the great Lord Siva whom she loves and adores so much.
expression necessary for poetic emotion.

not be an adequate

the

or feeling

the emotion

or means of expressing
should

in the

of disgust
this emotion.

be the means of expressing

emotion

does

vibhilva.

not require

Confused

10. Dhvanyaloka I. 4.
77

trivial

feelings

occupation

of being married
This is the type of
in him
There

may
is no

the emotion.

a clear

understanding

and emotion

can

be

very well traJ.smutrd

(or generalized)
aesthetically
when expressed
obliquely.
Anandaval dhana
gives a very striking
example of such type. 1 I Knowing
that
the husband has been attracte:i
i}y sane dther L\d.. and ha~ already
enjoyed
her and gUfssing again the state of agitation
and anxiety
in her husband for a
me' ting with his beloved the wife is in a confusion whether she should request her
husband

to cut

off all his relations

extramerital
love of her husband.
suggested in her speech.

with the

This confused

beloved

feeling has been

"You go (to your beloved).

Let me alone
lamentations.
You have betrayeo
me, but I don't
suffer, like me, for your separation from her."
Though

the wife allows her husband

or should

tolerate

very successfully

suffer from long sighs

want
that you should

for his nH:.etillg

this

with

the

and
also

beloved,

her intention is not so for how can a wife tolerate willingly

the free love of her
husband?
Nor can she refrain him from going also, because
when he has
already betrayed her, how can she expect that he would care for her request?
Rather she would feel more offended
if he avoids her request
again. Thus a
confused feeling is not beyond the poetic expressiorJ, rather it enhances
the pOl tic
beauty Camatkara when exprt>ssed through suggestion.
(iv) In Hamlet Shakespeare

fully understands

the emotioil

that

he wants

to express.
It is aversion
of Hamlet. which is strengthened
and enriched
by
other mental states and has been fully revealed
to us by the significant actions
anubhavas and drifting
thoughts
(sarhcaribhavaso). Prof. S. C. Sengupta,
a very
renowned
Shakespearean
criti c of India
has very brilliantly
exposed that
Shakespeare
has very successfully
projected
Hamlet's
aversion
largely through
this dhvani i.e. through
Hamlets'
characterhis sporadic
activity,
his deep
disgust, his subtle but confused
logic, through
the descriptions
of the court of
Elsimore,
situations
in Denmark,
Hamlet's
encounter
with the ghost
and
Ophelia etc. 1 2
IV
All this having bf'en said, an important
point of argument raised by T. S.
Eliot for the readers and critics of poetry still requires examination
: "Honest
criticism
and
sensitive
appreciation
is directed
not upon the
poet but
not of
upon the poetry." 13 Inspite of the fact that poetry is the manifestation
11. ibid gloss to I. 4. 12. Sengupta, Aspects of Shakespearean Tragedy, O. U. P. Calcutta,
1972, p. 158 fr. 13. S. W. p. 53.

78

the personal emotion of the poet but of the emotion impersonaJized

how far can
we exclusively
depend upon the text or the verbal structure
without
any reference to the poet whatsoever?
In answer to this question
the Mimamsaphilosopher's
argument
is very suggestive.
Apadeva
(17th c.) states that the
absolute
verbal
autonomy
or impersonality
is possible only in those cases
where the author is unknown.
This is possible only in Lase of the Vedic texts
which are simply visioned by the sages, and not writtf'n
by anyone.
Thus the
impersonal
Vedic texts can be said to contain the absolute
impersonality
and
in reading
them we have no business to seek for their authors in any way.14
Other
philosophers
of the same school support this view that the scriptural
word
alone is impersonal,
external
and self-sufficient
whereas
human
language
depends
upon the intention
of the author.
The problem of 'intention'
in the
mpallillg of texts is a complicated
one and should be postponed
to another
occasion of discussion;
but apart from that it is reasonable to conclude
that it
is illogical to search for absolute
impersonality
from personal
writings or from
texts written by definite persons. If that would be so, then the very excellence
of
poetrythe novelty and varieties
of poetic vision
would be
meaningless.
Impersonalization
of an emotion,
love for example, being the same everywhere
poetry would be utterly
boring.
In rejecting
the evolutionary
process of the
artistic perfection
Eliot very remarkably
states that art never improves
though
its material
changes.15
Art's materi als being emotions
we may say that this
change in the~e emotions is due to the personal or individual
vision of the poets.
An honest critic need not of course search for the biographical
data of the poet,
but his studies and appreciation
will certainly remain incomplete
if he does not
realize the distinRuished
personal
spirit of the poet that permeates through
the
whole vision of the poetic creation.

Jyotivihar,
Sambalpur,

Burla
Orissaj,(India)

14. Mimiit'nsiinyiiya Prakii'sa, Bombay, 1913, P. 2. 15. 'Tradition

and the Individual Talent
in SW; for a distinction
between the concepts of 'personal am! 'individual'
see Bradley,
Appearance and Reality, O.V.P., London 1930, pp. 127-28 Eliot might have been influenced
by his views.

79

Journal of Comparative Literature

Vol. 2 No. II Winter 1978

and Aesthetics

@Vjshvanatha

Orjssa : India

Kwiraja

Institute:

BOOK REVIEWS
CULTURE,
Orissa CultUral
Cuttack, 1978, 8vo demy, hard
The anthology

Forum;
Rashtrabhasha
Samabaya
bound, PP 156, Rs 15-CO.

not only provides

a general

over-view

Prakashan,

of the present

state

of affairs in the rich Orissan culture, simultaneously

at least in a couple of essays
it tries to derive some conclusions
irrespective of their rightness or otherwise.
The
author of the essay 'Tribal
Art of Orissa'
makes a valuable
point when he says
that the patterns on 'Gadaba'
clothes
are imitations
of similar patterns
on a
leopard's back. But he does not stop there. Rather the sense of communion
with
nature is further
extended
flOm the tribals
to the non-tribals.
By making
'involvement'
the catchword
the writer distinguishes
between
tribal attitude to
art which is based on their 'fancy, fear, sensation and imagination'
and non tribal
view of art who believe these things just to be 'enigmas,
illusions and products of
meaningless labour.'
The distinction is true yet developed as a contrast
as it is,
a bit exaggerated.
But the real truth is arrived
at only with the sentence:
"In
spite of such impression due to non-involvement,
we cannot a\oid admitting
that
there has been extensive infiltration
of tribal art and cultur~ into our social and
individual
habits."
The several examples
that follow
merely
testify to this
account.
triology

G. C. Panda's essay 'Odisi Music'

which champions
the cause of the
of music i. e. 'Nrutya',
'Geeta' and 'Vadya'
while expressing
happiness

over the state of affairs in Odisi 'Nrutya'

which is gradually being considered as a
classical dance expresses concern over the comparative
lack of popular recognition
to Cdisi 'Geeta' and 'Vadya'.
But to my mind, the concern is wholly confounded
since non-visual arts like 'Geeta' and 'Vadya'
can never be so popular
as their
visual counterpart
'Nrutya' is and additionally,
popularity at the cost of distortions
beyond a limit may be perilous to the future of these classical artforms.
D. Pathy's essay on contemporary
Indian Art is a welcome departure
from
the smaller precincts
of Orissan culture to that of Indian. In portraying
Amrita
Sher-Gill to be the first modern Indian painter after the neo-primitivism
of Ja1l1ini
Roy he indeed strikes the right note. Sher-Gill is the obvious choice because she
led the crusade against the theory of faithful
reproduction
of the Bombay School

describing it as impotence in art and se~ondly. the marked

Indianness
of her art
inspite of her vast western background
makes her position
somehow outstanding.
Besides, the writer's blurring of distinctions
between
figurative and abstract art
is undentandable
because as he says-'
Figurative
art is also abstract, since we
admire it not because of its resemblance
to reality or representation
but for those
intrinsic qualities which make it a work of art."
CultUre

Amongst the other essays K. Mohapatra's

Jagannath
PUJi
lht ough the Ages' describes Puri to be a centle of religious,

as a Centre of
philosophical

and literary activities, N. 1-1ishra's 'The Ramayana

in Olissan Art and Literature'
depicts the epic's pervasive
influence on the culture of the state, 'Anti.British
Rebellion of 1817' by M. P. Das pays tributes to the bravery
of the state Willitia,
'The
Evolution
of Sanskrit
Lyrics in Orissa' by B. Panda
enumerates
the
contribution
of Orissa
to the treasury
of Sanskrit
literature
and finally
A. Pattanayak's.
'Typical Oriya Festival Khudurukuni'
highlights the importance
of a folk festival (Jf eastern Orissa. These essays are well.documented
and thus help
achieve the professed aim of bringing to limelight the culture of Orissa but hardly
there is any effort to draw some conclusions to enable
the particular
culture
fit
into the broad sphere of culture as a whole. Thus intellectually
they fall flat upon
the readers
and do not serve any purpose
other
than giving a good deal of
information
on the subject.
The whole book abounds

in grammatical,

lexical

mistakes

and

mistakes

of other types. The absence of an index, a bibliography

and non-use of diacritical
marks are some of the blemishes which
catches the reader's
attention
at the first
glance. Anyhow, as a well-informative
maiden venture
publications
by the Forum in the timps to come.

it anticipates

more

erudite

Dhiren Dart; : Catara Jathara Jatra- The Theatre Published by Smt. Padmini Das,
Bhubaneswar
(Orissa) 1976. 1/8 Double Crown, pp. 56 Hard bound Rs. 15/- .
Mr. Das, who has made performing arts his career and cultural upheaval
of the country his target, has given here a new insight to his readers. In claimiug
the R anigumpha
of Khandagiri
at Bhubaneswar
to be a middle-sized
rectangular
Play House, which perhaps fulfils all the conditions prescribed
by Bharata
Muni,
he has investigated
a lot of materials from the history of ancient
Orissa to the
Sanskrit
dramaturgy
and has sufficiently
shown his probing
mind capable of
penetrating
perception.
He is tempted
to suggest"It could also be that
'Natyasastra'
was written
by Bharata Muni after studying the measurements
of
81

Ranigumpha
Theatre built by Kharavela"
(P. 34) but avoids any critical analysis
or comment being aware of his limitations of historical speculations.
Nevertheless,
it is unfair on the part of a scholar to aS5ert an inference
about something
non-existent:
"For me and from now on for all, it is going to be identified
for all
times to come, what exactly it is, for which it was built by king Kharavela......
It is a Play House or Theatre."
Anyhow

the comparison

similarities

between

the lawyer

sometimes

the

two

is meticulous
with

interprets

and the author

the guste of a seasoned

meaning

author
advocates,
possesses all the
RaIigapitha,
RaIigasir:?a, Supijham,

to his advantage.

has
lawyer

described

the

even through

Ranigumpha,

features prescribed
by NajyaSiistra
Mattavaral).i,
$addaruka,
Nepathya

the

such as
Gruha,

etc. In making this and similar other claims for other caves in KhandagiriUdayagiri
hills the plea of a theatre complex that he has made embraces
almost
all types of performing
Sarnaja of Kharavela's

arts and these include

Nap., Gita, Vadita, Usava
inscriptions
as well as their popular modun variants

and
such

as Jatara,
Dhuduki,
NabardIiga,
Naja, Diisakajhia,
Paja and Dal).ganaja.
Thus
a solution to the origin of the age-old Catara or Jathara
or jatra
has been
found (!) and in doing this if the author has committed
certain stylistic errors
such as use of frequent
question marks
(pp. 10-11) or deliberate
avoidance
of
diacritical
marks (which is inevitable
for the works of this type) or spelling
errors like;,'pronounciation'
and 'it's' (p. 6) this is to be brushed aside by the
author's

thematic

neat printing,

singlemindedness

appropriate

and technical

photographs

and

plus-points

imaginary

of the book

illustrations.

such as

Indeed

in

the pages of Mr. Dash's book the caves of Khandagiri

and Udayagiri
re-live
and
resound with the music of Dundubhi,
Mridanga
and Panava to remind the people
of Orissa of their glorious past.

B. S. Baral
University College of Engineering,
Burla, Sambalpur, Orissa, India.

82

G. C. Nayak, Essays in Analytical Philosophy, 8antmh Publications,

hard bound, 8vo demy pp 210, Rs 35/The

analytical

trend

of philosophy

does not

aim at giving

Cuttack, 1978,

m any

new

'idea' of speculation,
rathpr in a way, it aims at destroyina
the so-called
'ideas'.
Most of the philosophical
problems, it believes,
arise out of misuse of language
and the trou:.]es due to them are over when this misuse is detected by means
of
linguistic analysis. This is thus more a method
than a theory
which has been a
very attractive fashion in the history of post-war European
thought.
Language is a miraculous
discovf'ry
of man to avoid the difficulties in
expressiOn and communication
of his feelings,
emotions
and thoughts
and is
undoubtedly
a great advantage over his primitive
fore-fathers
who used gestures
and postures for this purpose. But to a modern
man the problems
of language.
have been so great and complicated
that, he feels, his discovery
hastumed
into a
labyrinth
for him. When language is incapable of expressing most of our thoughts
and feelings the attempt at judging the validity of our thoughts by the analysis
of languag.e that expresses it is certainly paradoxical.
In stead of being a therapy
in most cases it has been a diseasea futile
intellectual
gymnasticism.
But
though practically
futile or immediately
unproductive,
as all gymnastic
performances are, it is of great belp in at least
sharpening
our intellect,
and the mOst
important
profit of such exercise is that it challenges our accepted ideas,
thoughts
and beliefs, it inspires an impulse for rethinking.
The impact of this analytic
method on the recent
scholars
in Indian
Philosophy is a very healthy sign:
it frees one from dogmatic
conservatism.
If
some have tried to trace the method
itself in the ancient
schools
of Indian
philosophy like Mrmamsa,
grammar
and neo-Nyaya,
others
have applied thp
western

method

in

studying

their

philosophical

thoughts.

Scholars

like

B. K. Matilal, H. K. Ganguli and J. N. Mohanty

have successfully
found that
this linguistic
analysis
of the philosophical
problems was not unknown to our
great thinkers.
Centuries
ago they were vigorously
engaged in debates on the
point though
they did not agree
that language
analysis is the only aim of
philosophy or philosophical
problems can simply be dispensed with by language
analysis as language itself is limited and truth eludes language.
In the present

volume

under

review Professor

G. C. Nayak

has

analysed

some of the very fundamental

problems
of Indian philosophy
in the light of
western analytical method.
The volume contains
ten essays on: the Madhya83

mika school of Mahayana

Buddhism, Upanisadic
philosophy,
SaIikara's
monistic
idealism theory of causality in Nyaya and Sarilkhya
systems, Aurovindo's
idea of
the supramentallanguagf>,
pf'rsonal identity, subtle body and rebirth,
the future
of metaphysics
and reason.
The Author's
erudition
is obviously
vast and his capability
for frf'e
thinking
is manifestly
sufficient and the volume is a valuable
addition
to the
analytical
studies of Indian philosophy.
Professor Nayak interpretes the famous Upanisadic
uttrance
tattvamasi
as something different from ordinary or descriptive
language and something above
the Ayerian
criticism
of the demonstrative
use of language.
Aruni's demostration that multiplicity,
a matter of only empirical
imformation
is unreal since
it
is a difference
in name arising from speech.
The author's
analysis of 'Sclfconsciousness' or the Knowledge of the knower in the philosophy of yajnavalkya
is striking by original.
He aptly observes that Yajnavalkya
has drawn the attention of Maitreyi
from the irrelevant
metaphysical
questions
regarding consciousness after death or liberation
and pleads for philosophical
enlightenment
i.e. self
complete knowledge of the non-dual
reality.
Dr. Nayak's

analysis

of the

problem

of personal

identity

is perhaps

the

most original
portion
in the volume and his correlation
of this concept
with
problems of reincarnation
and subtle body based on Samkhya
exegesis is also very
suggestive.
He rightly states that subtle body (Suksma sarira) is a logical necessity
for making
survival,
rebirth
and reincarnation
meaningful.
The
dispute of the Sarilkhya
and Nyaya theories of causality i. e. whether

age-long
the effect

pre-exists
in the cause or is something newly 'produced'
is discarded
very convincingly by the author as merely a verbal dispute without
any factual significance:
It is immaterial
whether we should use the word 'manifestation'
or 'production'
when both of these refer to the same fact.

is good.

Except for the incomplete

The book is indispensable

transliteration
for the students

of Sanskrit terms the printing

of Indian philosophy.

A. C. Sukla

84