Turning Over a New Leaf; or, What Is Literature? By Sheldon Kranz

One of the earliest things I remember Eli Siegel telling his class was: "A person wants to be excited and he wants to be calm. When a person reads a book or looks at a picture or listens to music, he wants the same thing--he wants to be stimulated and he wants to be soothed at the same time."

And if we look at the literature of the world, we find that wherever a poem or prose work gives true pleasure it puts together the opposites of energy and grace, excitement and calm.

However, as in life, writers accent different things. For example, a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins accents energy and roughness, as in these lines:


A poet like Tennyson accents smoothness and repose as in these lines:


Novelists like Tolstoy and Victor Hugo represent energy of a tremendous kind.  Henry James, in his novels, represents something quieter, something more restrained and graceful.  But clearly, if Henry James were just graceful, a novel like Daisy Miller would be limp and spineless.  Henry James has energy, but it is different from the energy of, say, Balzac, and it is not the first thing one feels.

For example, take these two sentences from Henry James's The Tragic Muse:


Here we feel perception as graceful and thoughtful. We have a great church in twilight resting on facts; we have huge stone pillars looming like ghosts in the dimness. These are not the kinds of metaphors Tolstoy would use.  He is too busy having his characters move about briskly. For example, from chapter one of War and Peace there is this:


It takes Henry James a page to say less.  The James tempo is slower, quieter.  For instance, here is James describing Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady:


Henry James people are so engrossed in taking in what is around them, in understanding their feelings and the feelings of the person they are talking to, that they must take their time. It is part of the beauty of Henry James's world: the meditative grace with depth.  Eli Siegel puts it this way in one of the poems from his James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw [Definition Press, NY]. The poem is called "Rapidity Spoils Essence":


But in the graceful depth and perception of Henry James, there is energy.  It is the energy of thought, delicately finding its way.  The James energy is in his perception of nuances of feelings, subtleties of mind.  This, too, is power.

A novelist who is clearly energetic and who belongs with Hugo, Tolstoy, and Balzac among the great creative energies of the world, is Charles Dickens.  He is the person who tells us that nothing is dull, nothing is without its color and speed, nothing is more wonderful than life itself, even when it is shabby or ugly, or ridiculous or mean.  The Dickens energy created hundreds of characters, and a world that is alive. Dickens loved the ludicrous and the uproarious.  He loved the cozy and the domestic. He loved the pathetic.  He loved London streets late at night, and stagecoaches in motion, loaded with passengers and luggage. He loved inns with roaring fires and glowing tables heaped with food; sinister attic rooms and graveyards and dingy law offices. And most of all he loved people-all kinds of people with their pretensions and uncertainties, and also their courage and kindness.

The Dickens energy makes one like this world as much as anything can.  It is, as Eli Siegel has said, good will as power. And it is in his very first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Dickens' style is to put things in motion, even things we ordinarily would not see that way. For example, take this sentence that describes a woman fainting. Dickens frequently has women fainting with hilarious effect.  Fainting is customarily seen as a graceful, curving occurrence, as a woman sinks to the floor in a slow swoon. Dickens turns it into something like gymnastics, with three separate parts.


That is slapstick and some of the most energetic fainting in literature.

Evil also is shown to be tremendously energetic when Dickens describes it.  One of his villains is the hideous little dwarf, Quilp, in The Old Curiosity Shop. This is Quilp eating in the presence of his wife and mother-in-law.


That is all one sentence, and it sounds very different from a Henry James sentence. This has speed and energy.  It does not wind. And the verbs give the sentence great motion: Quilp ate, devoured, chewed, drank, bit, performed. Eating, like fainting, becomes a kind of gymnastic.

And here is a final example of Dickens' energy.  It is a lovely sentence, while it is funny.  It is also made up of separate parts, as a Dickens' sentence often is, to make for a certain speedy effect.  This is very early in David Copperfield. Betsy Trotwood, a great-aunt, has been waiting for Mrs. Copperfield to give birth.  Miss Trotwood is sure it will be a girl, whom, she declares, she will help raise.  Then, mild Dr. Chillip tells her it is a boy.  Dickens writes: