theoryofliteratu00inwell

Evaluation 257
and characters—the "metaphysical quality" (viewed as the world
view which emerges from the work, not the view didactically
stated by the author within or without the work).
Particularly objectionable is the view that the "organ harmonies"
can be disengaged from the poem. In a restricted sense
they can be viewed as having "formal beauty"— phonetic resonance
5 but in literature, including poetry, the formal beauty
almost always exists in the service of expression: we have to ask
about the appropriateness of the "organ harmonies" to plot,
character, theme. Milton's style applied by minor poets to com-
positions on trivial themes became unintentionally ridiculous.
A formalist criticism must suppose that agreement between
our own creed and that of an author or poem need not exist, is
indeed irrelevant, since otherwise we should admire only literary
works whose view of life we accept. Does the Weltanschauung
matter to the aesthetic judgment? The view of life
presented in a poem, says Eliot, must be one which the critic
can "accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of
experience." 19 Eliot's dictum about coherence, maturity, and
truth to experience goes, in its phrasing, beyond any formalism:
coherence, to be sure, is an aesthetic criterion as well as a logical}
but "maturity" is a psychological criterion, and "truth to expe-
rience" an appeal to worlds outside the work of art, a call for
the comparison of art and reality. Let us reply to Eliot that the
maturity of a work of art is its inclusiveness, its awareness of
complexity, its ironies and tensions 5 and the correspondence between
a novel and experience can never be measured by any
simple pairing off of items: what we can legitimately compare
is the total world of Dickens, Kafka, Balzac, or Tolstoy with our
total experience, that is, our own thought and felt "world." And
our judgment of this correspondence registers itself in aesthetic
terms of vividness, intensity, patterned contrast, width, or
depth, static or kinetic. "Life-like" might almost be paraphrased
as "art-like," since the analogies between life and literature become
most palpable when the art is highly stylized: it is writers
like Dickens, Kafka, and Proust who superimpose their signed
world on areas of our own experience. 20
Before the nineteenth century, discussions of evaluation were
likely to center upon the rank and hierarchy of authors—the