to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring
it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far
been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length
of life is destined for the latest attempt, _Sayings and Stories_, a
translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and
some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis
at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly
unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be,
they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,”
and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The
prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent”
of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been
preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all,
it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial
Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English
the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not
colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree
of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted
with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written
to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the
aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have
been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the
English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact,
to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare,
I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is
nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in
that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.
It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in
the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says,
“for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,”
the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I
do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of
the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are
the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s
feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”;
and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally,
is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed.
“Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English,
at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there
is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What
joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect
than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth.
Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s
feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors,
since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social
surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was _this_ the intention of
the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state
of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a
socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in
our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original
must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution,
again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as
Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the
original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without
grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an
“Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase
“Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude,
the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of
outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have
characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely
sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is
published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it
serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We
only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to
touch bottom.
NOTHING FOREIGN.—It is better for a nation to “import” art than to go
without it altogether; and it is the _duty_ of its critics to stimulate
home-production by importing as many as possible of the best foreign
models. That home-production may fail to find itself encouraged to the
point of creation is perfectly possible; inspiration may continue to be
wanting; but of the two states of no home-production and no imports and
no home-production and imports, the latter is to be preferred.
“Foreign” is a word that should be employed with increasing
discrimination, and, most of all, by English writers. There is an English
genius the perfect flower of which we have still to see; for perfect
English has never yet been written. But nothing foreign ought to be
alien to a race as universal in character and mentality as the English;
and in the end, the perfection of the English genius is only possible in
a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. Two tendencies
equal and opposite are at work in this direction, and have always been
in English history. On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency
towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would certainly result in
the complete loss of essential national characteristics. On the other
side, and usually balancing the first, we find an ever-present tendency
towards insularity and æsthetic chauvinism, the excess of which would
undoubtedly result in a caricature of the English genius—the development
of idiosyncrasies in place of style. Somewhere between these two
tendencies the critic of English art must fix his seat, in order that his
judgment may determine, as far as possible, the perfect resultant of the
blend of opposites. It is a matter, too, of time as well as of forms of
culture. Not only are not all times alike, but there is a time for import
and a time for export and a time for “protection”; but, equally, there is
room for discrimination in the kind of art that may wisely be imported or
exported. In general, we should import only what we need and export only
what other nations need, and thus, in the old mediæval sense, traffic
in treasure. Thus guarded, nothing but good can come of the greatest
possible international commerce of the arts.
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—Psycho-analysis is not the last word in psychological
method; and a great deal more of experiment is needed. Freud’s theory of
dreams, for instance, is excellent pioneer work in a field hitherto left
more or less uncultivated, but it is very far from being exhaustively
explanatory of the facts. Suppose it were possible to _control_ dreams—in
other words, to dream of what you will—would not the theory of Freud that
dreams are subconscious wish-fulfilments stand in need of amendment? But
to control dreams is not an utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental
work has been done in this direction to prove that the gate of dreams is
open to the intelligent will. And there is warrant for the attempt in a
good deal of mystical literature. I was reading only recently the poems
of Vaughan the Silurist, and what should I come across but the following
passage:
Being laid and dress’d for sleep, close not thy eyes
Up with the curtains; give thy soul the wing
In some good thoughts; so when the day shall rise
And thou unrak’st thy fire, those sparks will bring
New flames; besides, where these lodge, vain heats mourn
And die; that bush where God is shall not burn.
Vaughan’s lines are not great poetry, but they contain a useful
psychological hint.
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES.—It would be unwise to make a dogma
of any of the present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means of
examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho-analysis is an
instrument of the highest value, but in the interpretation of what it
finds there, and in the conclusions it draws as to their origin—how the
apple got into the dumpling, in fact—psycho-analysis requires to be
checked by all the knowledge we have at our command. Mr. Mead has raised
the question of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question of
interpretation. I am not satisfied that the interpretation placed by Jung
on myths is any more than correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to
think that it does not go far enough. His reduction, for example, of a
whole group of myths to the “incest” motive, appears to me, even in the
light of his definition of incest as the “backward urge into childhood,”
to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is a
sense in which an “urge into childhood” is not backward but forward,
not a regression into an old, but a progression into a new childhood.
“Unless ye become as little children, ye can in no wise enter the Kingdom
of Heaven.” “Incest” is a strictly improper term to apply to such a
transformation; the new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead takes
the same view. The interpretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he
suggests, to the lesser mysteries; but they need to be “elevated” in the
Thomist sense in order to carry us back to the greater. So long as it
confines itself to the “body” psycho-analysis must plainly be confined
to the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with
generation. The greater mysteries are concerned with regeneration, and,
hence, with the “soul”; and even if we assume the “soul” to require a
body, we are outside the region of ordinary generation if that body is
not the physical body. The psycho-analytic interpretation suffers from
this confinement of its text to the physical body, since “the genuine
myth has first and foremost to do with the life of the soul.”
Another caution to remember is that reality cannot be grasped with one
faculty or with several; it requires them all. Only the whole can grasp
the whole. For this reason it is impossible to “think” reality; for
though the object of thought may be reality, all reality is not to
be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to “feel” or to “will” or to
“sense” reality completely. Each of these modes of experiencing reality
reports us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. Before we
can say certainly that a thing is true—before, that is, we can affirm a
reality—it must not only think true, but feel true, sense true, and do
true. The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be true because it
works may be contradicted by the intellectual criterion that reports a
thing to be true because it “thinks” true; and when these both agree in
their report, their common conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the
criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be true when it “feels”
true. It is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and,
consequently, from an appreciation of the many faculties required to
grasp it, that the value set by the world on common sense is derived. For
common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome
it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense
when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion, and the senses; when,
in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality. Otherwise a
statement may be logical, it may be pleasing, it may be practical, it may
be obvious; but only when it is all is it really common sense.
But can we, with only our present faculties, however developed and
harmonised, ever arrive at reality? It may be that in the natural order
of things, humanity implies by definition a certain state of ignorance,
and that this state is only to be transcended by the overpassing of the
“human” condition. Psycho-analysis is still only at the beginning of its
discoveries, but on the very threshold we are met by the problem of the
nascent or germinal faculties of the mind. Are there in the subconscious,
“yearning to mix themselves with life,” faculties for which “humanity”
has not yet developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers have told
us, the next step in evolution is to develop them.
GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—I am doubtful whether we have sufficiently
developed the ideas of psycho-analysis to make a fruitful parallel
possible between them and the ideas contained in Patanjali.
Psycho-analysis, as the name indicates, is more concerned with analysis
than with synthesis, and “Yoga,” whose dominant idea is re-union or
synthesis, appears to be rather a complement than an analogue of
psycho-analysis in the broad sense. Take, for example, the idea of Yoga
as a means to the re-union of the individual with the world-soul: “Thou
art That; Thou shalt become That.” According to Jung, this attempt at
re-union may be nothing more than a megalomaniac regressive introversion,
representing on a grand scale a return to the mother and infantilism.
Since it is separation from the mother (actual and metaphorical), that,
in Jung’s view, creates the basis of consciousness, any attempt to become
re-united with the “mother” is an act of regression. It is obvious from
this dissonance of doctrine that Yoga and psycho-analysis have not as yet
discovered any profound common ground; in fact, in some respects they
appear to be opposed.
I count myself among the increasing number of enthusiastic students of
psycho-analysis. It is the hopeful science of the dawning era. No new era
appears to me to be possible without it, and such a work as Dr. Ernest
Jones’s _Psycho-Analysis_ is one of the books most worth buying at the
present time. But it is elsewhere that I find the best justification
for my enthusiasm, in these words from an old Hermetic text: “The
beginning of perfection is gnosis of man; but gnosis of God is perfected
perfection.” Psycho-analysis thus appears to be the beginning of the
gnosis of man, and, in this sense, the beginning of perfection. But
it is only the beginning. Mere morality, however psychological, is no
substitute for religion; and the most profoundly and sincerely moral of
men—Ibsen, for example—end in a state of despair unless at the point at
which their morality gives out, religion of some kind comes to their aid.
Psycho-analysis, I think it will be found, is doomed, while it remains
analysis, to end in the same state of despair. It will teach us all
there is to be known about the nature of man; but the gnosis of man is
not satisfying. For it is only thereafter and when man is transcended as
an object of gnosis that perfected perfection is possible. I would not,
however, hasten by a single impatient step this second and completing
phase of the process of our learning. The gnosis of man is necessary to
the gnosis of God, and God can well look after Himself and bide our time.
Furthermore, a premature attempt to know God before we are initiated into
the mysteries of the gnosis of man must be heavily paid for. Religion
without humanity is more dangerous than humanity without religion. Let us
then settle down with concentrated attention to the problem before us,
the material and method of which are to be found in psycho-analysis. We
shall be able to afford to whistle when we are through that wood.
A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON.”—The new Cambridge magazine, _The Cocoon_, cannot
be regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest, since its point of
view is unique. It is not written by “theological” minds that “estimate
affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” but by
minds that hold that things “are capable of more than one truthful
interpretation.” The second of these contentions is true enough, but,
unfortunately, the new interpretations of _The Cocoon_, however truthful,
are trivial. Age, we are told, sees the Moon as just a “heavenly body”;
whereas the youth who spin _The Cocoon_ see the Moon as “a wonderful
cheese” or a prehistoric coin. Age, again, looks at the Great Pyramid
and interprets it as a pyramidal structure; but our spinning youth
interpret it as a “colossal and awe-inspiring cube,” with emphasis on
the awe. The difference between the interpretations is, to my mind,
all in favour of age. It may be true that the Moon is translatable in
terms of cheese, and the Great Pyramid may really be a cube, but the
interpretations are without interest or value. If _The Cocoon_ had said
that the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, or the Great Pyramids the
psychic meeting-place of the Rosicrucians, the new “interpretation”
might have had some interest. As it is, we are back in the nursery,
and not by any means in the nursery of the race. The earlier editorial
affirmation is not even sense, but a contradiction of sense. “To estimate
affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” is not
theological only, it is only means of estimating at all. Things _are_
so and so, and the unchangeability of dogma and fixity of belief are
determined, or should be, by the corresponding unchangeability and
fixity of things as they are. When we find that the nature of things
changes arbitrarily from day to day, we may consider the advisability
of changing our belief that it is fixed as rapidly as nature itself is
transformed. Otherwise, if anything we say is to be “true,” it must be
because there is a fixed and unchangeable nature to which our dogmas and
beliefs refer. The alternative is not youth and imagination and “other
truthful interpretations of things,” it is nursery chatter about cheese
and pyramidal cubes.
Pass the articles on Balzac and D’Annunzio, both of which might have
been written by Old Age or even by Middle Age, and let us see how
the state of mind calling itself Youth deals with history. Remember
that Cambridge, where the Cocoons come from, regards itself as “the
nursery of the nation”; and then listen to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt
one of our future representatives on the World-League, preparing his
programme. “It is stupid,” he says, “to write history or to study
history, on the assumption that we Western Europeans are the salt of
the earth.” And Mr. H. Y. Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that
“we must keep the sociological aim of history in sight”; ... “the
be-all and end-all of history is sociology.” No wonder the _Manchester
Guardian_—the guardian, that is to say, of Manchester—found _The
Cocoon_ so promising, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney and Mr.
Oulsham are embryos of _Manchester Guardian_ “leaders,” they are _so_
cosmopolitan and _so_ humanitarian. Apart, however, from their extreme
Age, bordering on decrepitude, I find in them not even an unimportant
“truthful interpretation.” It is not true that sociology is the be-all
and end-all of history as it ought to be written; and to deny, in the
name of history, that Western Europe _is_ the salt of the earth (however
it may have lost its savour) is just to deny and repudiate European
world-responsibility. Things, again, _are_ so and so, and not otherwise,
let Youth interpret them as it will. Europe _is_ the responsible mind of
the world, and the be-all and end-all of history is the fulfilment of a
world-purpose whose objective is more than merely human sociology. If the
“nursery of the nation” has a different interpretation, the nursery of
the nation is wrong.
_The Cocoon_ is under the impression that there is something valuable
in Youth in years; that Youth in years is the only kind of Youth; that
Youth in years is Youth indeed. Our first birth, however, is only a sleep
and a forgetting, and real Youth comes only after the second-birth.
The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth
to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations
defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up.
_The Cocoon_ fairly describes Youth as “a condition of energy and
receptiveness”; but is Youth in years necessarily of that kind? As for
receptiveness, we have already seen that the “historians” of the “nursery
of the nation” either hark back or hark forward to ideas long since dead.
And as for “energy,” barring its animal manifestation in sport, the
highest culture demands the highest concentration of energy, and where
shall we find it but in the twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon
himself and his habits of thought is young, whatever his years. On the
other hand, whoever cannot be “bothered” to think afresh, but contents
himself with what he used to think is old and lacking in energy, whatever
his years or his blues.
It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic as they grow
old, as it is privilege of the twice-born to increase in hope as they
wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely
old in the former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that “the
beauty of English prose is already mainly a thing of the past.” It is
not a sentiment for “the nursery of the nation,” and it is altogether
untrue. Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but the best
is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we have certainly
had revealed to us in abundance, and some of our greatest writers have
succeeded in making an anthology in their style of two or three or
even four of them; but an English prose with all its known qualities
harmonised and synthesised in a single style is a thing of the future
and not of the past. There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A
great deal of “energy,” however, will be necessary to such a synthesis.
Its creator must be not only twice-born, but, as the _Mahabharata_
says of Indian sages, “blazing with spiritual energy,” for the fire of
imagination to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a style is
too intense for ordinary mortals.
AN OXFORD MISCELLANY.—_A Queen’s College Miscellany_ is filially
dedicated to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it seems, were
Queen’s men in their day. Still another association with these writers
is sought in the comparison of the college coterie from which each arose
with the group responsible for the present miscellany. Something of the
nature of a cult is indicated; and I take it that the various items of
the miscellany are “corporate” as well as individual. The foreword says
as much. In a vocabulary that seems most ominous for literature, we are
referred to a “literary team” whose “output” is here presented, and to
an attempt to “prove that team-work is possible in prose and poetry.”
And the miscellany is the first “harvest” of “the refined product.” My
opinion of “team-work” is certainly that it is possible both in prose and
poetry. No individual has ever by himself written either great prose or
great poetry, and the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting
Shakespeare, are of anonymous—that is to say, of collective—authorship.
The elevation of the group-consciousness, however, is everything, and I
need not remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate Pater and
Dowson, and whose considered “foreword” contains such terminological
ineptitudes as “team-work,” “output,” and the “harvest” of a “refined
product,” is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse.