The Three Provincialities (1922)

With a Postscript (1950)

[‘The Three Provincialities’ was originally published in the second (and last) number of The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting Sculpture and Design – an Egoist Press venture which was edited by Wyndham Lewis. It is reprinted here with Mr Lewis’s consent. – Editor]

It has been perceptible for several years that not one but three English literatures exist: that written by Irishmen, that written by Americans and that composed by the English themselves. Thirty years ago Irish and English literature were in a state of partial amalgamation. That is to say, the literary movement in England was very largely sustained by Irishmen; for some years, otherwise on the whole rather barren years, the depleted English ranks were filled by Irishmen. English literature lacked the vitality to assimilate this foreign matter; and, more recently, in accord with political tendencies, Irish writers (mostly of minor importance) have reassembled in Dublin. There remain, as a permanent part of English literature, some of the poetry of Yeats, and more doubtfully the plays of Synge (probably too local for permanence). As for the future, it may be predicted that the work of Mr Joyce should arrest the separate Irish current, for the reason that it is the first Irish work since that of Swift to possess absolute European significance. Mr Joyce has used what is racial and national and transmuted it into something of international value; so that future Irish writers, measured by the standard he has given, must choose either to pursue the same ideal or to confess that they write solely for an Irish, not for a European public. No more comic peasants, epic heroes, banshees, little people, Deirdres; Mr Joyce has shown them up. Mr James Stephens (I think it was) in a recent number of the Outlook advocated that Irish writers should return to the Irish language. In that case, there will be no further need to discuss Irish literature at all.

[39] American literature, in contrast to Irish, has not yet received this death blow from a native hand. Owing to the fact that America possesses a much greater number (even making full allowance for the difference of population) of able second order writers than England, its ‘national literature’ is extremely flourishing. If it has produced nothing of European importance it nevertheless counts a considerable number of intelligent writers; has several literary critics more alert and open-minded than any of their generation in this country; and some of its poets and novelists at least admire respectable ideals, and tend towards the light. The advance of ‘American literature’ has been accelerated by the complete collapse of literary effort in England. One may even say that the present situation here has now become a scandal impossible to conceal from foreign nations; that literature is chiefly in the hands of persons who may be interested in almost anything else; that literature presents the appearance of a garden unmulched, untrimmed, unweeded, and choked by vegetation sprung only from the chance germination of the seed of last year’s plants.

It is a sign of the poverty and blindness of our criticism that in all three countries a mistaken attitude toward nationality has unconsciously arisen or has been consciously adopted. The point is this: literature is not primarily a matter of nationality, but of language; the traditions of the language, not the traditions of the nation or the race, are what first concern the writer. The Irish radicals are commendable in so far as they mark the necessity for a choice. Ireland must either employ a language of its own or submit to international standards. It is immaterial, from my point of view, whether English literature be written in London, in New York, in Dublin, in Indianapolis, or in Trieste. In fifty years’ time it may all make its appearance in Paris or in New York. But so far as it is literature of the first order, not merely an entertaining slideshow, it will be English literature. Should America in time develop a superior language (as Ireland may try to revert to a more barbarous one) there would be a separate American literature – contingent, probably, upon the disappearance or sufficient degeneration of the English language in England.

Every literature has two sides; it has that which is essential [40] to it as literature, which can be appreciated by everyone with adequate knowledge of the language, and on the other hand it has that which can only be enjoyed by a particular group of people inhabiting a particular portion of the earth. As in the end adequate knowledge of the language means complete knowledge, and as no person can ever have the opportunity to acquire complete knowledge of any language but his own, it is easy to confuse the two appreciations. For those who have the best opportunity for knowing the language are precisely this particular group in a particular portion of the earth. The critic is the person who has the power to distinguish between the two points of view in himself; and to discern what, in any work of literary art, takes its place, through its expression of the genius of its own language, in European literature, and what is of purely local importance. (In the case of such a writer as Dickens, for example, this dissociation remains to be performed.)

English literature at the present time suffers as much, I think, as that written in America, from this pleasant provinciality. (How much contemporary verse, for instance, appeals rather to the Englishman’s love of English rustic scenery than to a universal perception of Nature, such as Wordsworth rarely attained.) And how tardy, and still how deficient, has been the English appreciation of one of the greatest and least local: Edgar Poe. The lesson of language, therefore, is one to be learned on both sides of the Atlantic. (The statement of this fact places the author, as M. Cocteau might say, in the position of Calchas in Troilus and Cressida.) Whatever words a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as much as possible of the history of these words, of the uses to which they have already been applied. Such knowledge facilitates his task of giving to the word a new life and to the language a new idiom. The essential of tradition is in this; in getting as much as possible of the whole weight of the history of the language behind his word. Not every good writer need be conscious of this – I do not know to what extent Mr Wyndham Lewis has studied Elizabethan prose – Mr Joyce at least has not only the tradition but the consciousness of it. The best writers will always produce work which will not be American or Irish or English, [41] but which will take its predestined place in ‘English literature’. It is a pity, however, that the second-best writers, for want of a little critical breadth of view, should insist, out of national vanity or mere unconscious complacency, on what will render them only completely insupportable to posterity. The British writer, who shrinks from working overtime or at weekends, will not find these ideas congenial. Nor, for other reasons, will all American critics..

Postscript 1950. I had completely forgotten ‘The Three Provincialities’, and re-read it, as I re-read any prose piece that I wrote many years ago, with a good deal of misgiving and apprehension. Its republication does not embarrass me, however, so much as I expected. I seem to have made a rash prediction about the influence of Joyce; and when I find that I said that America at that time at which I was writing possessed a much greater number of able second-order writers than England, I now wonder what writers I could have been thinking of. The author of ‘The Three Provincialities’ appears to have been unduly sanguine about the prospects of American literature, and perhaps a little more pessimistic about England than was, at that moment, strictly justified. I am glad to find him asserting that literature is not primarily a matter of nationality but of language; and that true literature has in it something which can be appreciated by intelligent foreigners who have a reading knowledge of the language, and also something which can only be understood by the particular people living in the same place as the author. I am also glad to find the affirmation, that it is a good thing for a writer to take an interest in the history of the words that he uses. I detect a slightly aggressive tone which now gives a mild amusement; and I cannot regard the article as a whole as anything but a very small literary curio.

Poetry and Film

MR T. S. ELIOT’S VIEWS

The following is the text of Mr T. S. Eliot’s address at the opening of the exhibition of dresses and settings for the film Murder in the Cathedral. We produced a very brief summary of his speech last week.

The subject ‘Poetry and Film’ comprehends two questions. The first is:...