THE MEANING OF MAGIC
The effect of the French revolution upon poets is a subject of especial
interest to us, because the period is so nearly identical with our own.
There were several English poets whose reactions to the great event it
will pay us to consider.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a clergyman’s son, born in 1772, so that he
was twenty-one years old when King Louis’ head fell into the basket of
the guillotine. At that time Coleridge was traveling about giving
Unitarian lectures, a most revolutionary occupation. He met another
young enthusiast, Robert Southey, and they had a Utopian dream of a free
community on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It was to be called the
Pantisocracy, and to get funds Coleridge set out to canvass for his
Unitarian paper. The dream ended when the two poets married sisters.
At the age of twenty-eight we find Coleridge in the full tide of the
reaction against France. One of the organs of the Tory party, the London
“Morning Post,” is paying him a salary to write articles clamoring for
renewal of the war on the French republic; it was said in Parliament
that the rupture of the peace was brought about by these articles. For
the balance of his days the one-time Unitarian was a pillar of the
Anglican church, and of every form of reaction. He had become a devotee
of German metaphysics, also of opium; a wanderer and a wreck, living on
charity, and planning colossal literary labors which came to nothing. He
was sent to a nursing-home under the charge of a physician, where he
died at the age of sixty-two.
So much for the life; and now for the poetry. There are only a few
hundred lines of it, all written before the poet entered the Tory
service. A study of it makes clear the spiritual tragedy; it is poetry
of emotion and music, with a total absence of judgment and will. From
only one of the poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” can you extract a human
meaning; that if one man commits an act of cruelty against a bird, the
moral forces of the universe will punish a shipload of innocent men,
sparing only the one who is guilty!
It is the poetry of opium. Indeed, the most famous of all the verses,
“Kubla Khan,” was actually an opium dream, transferred to paper after
return to consciousness--
“Now, hold on a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Here is a letter from a Poet.
You are going to have a lot of them reading this book, and wanting to
pull your hair out; so you might as well have it out with them now. This
Poet names ‘Kubla Khan’ as the perfect type of the ‘pure’ poem.”
“I know. Swinburne calls it, ‘for absolute melody and splendor the first
poem in the language.’ It happens that the first five lines sum up the
whole; so it will pay us to stop and analyze them, take them apart,
syllable by syllable, and see how the trick is done. I quote the lines;
and in order to play fair with the poet, shut your eyes and give
yourself up to his spell. If you have any feeling for beauty of words,
you will feel a chill running up and down your spine.”
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
First of all, note the meter; every long syllable is naturally long, and
every short syllable is naturally short; so the lines flow softly, like
running waves. Not merely are the rhymes perfect, there are hidden
rhymes scattered through the lines; the Xanadu and Khan, also the two
u’s in the first line, and the two a’s in the fourth line. Note the
repetition of the consonant sounds. The X in the first line is
pronounced as K; and we have seen shrewd business men in the United
States collect many millions of dollars from the American people by the
magic of the letter K three times repeated. There are two d’s in the
second line, four r’s in the third, two m’s in the fourth, two s’s in
the fifth. There is not a single harsh sound in the entire five lines;
they have every musical charm that is possible to words.
So much for the sounds; and now for the sense. Let us take it word by
word, and see what it tells us. Xanadu: a place you never heard of,
therefore mysterious, stimulating to the imagination; taken in
connection with Kubla Khan, it suggests Tartar despotism, cruelty,
terror. “A stately pleasure-dome”: magnificence in the fashion of the
Arabian Nights, extravagance, a free rein to desire. The word “decree”
reinforces this; suggesting an Oriental despot, who follows his whims
without restraint. “Alph”: an unknown stream, therefore mysterious. “The
sacred river”: this reinforces the idea of despotism, adding to our fear
of earthly kings that of an all-powerful one in heaven. “Caverns
measureless to man”: again mystery, and the fear which the unknown
inspires. “Sunless sea”: this clenches the impression; for without the
sun there can be no life, and the picture is the last word in
desolation.
The rest of the poem is in the same key. We hear about “ancestral voices
prophesying war,” and a stream haunted “by woman wailing for her demon
lover.” We are told about “an Abyssinian maid,” “a damsel with a
dulcimer,” etc.
Note that everyone of these images appeals to reactionary emotions, fear
or sensuality; By sensuality the reason is dragged from its throne;
while fear destroys all activity of the mind, causing abasement and
submission. Moreover--and here is the point essential to our
argument--almost every image in this poem turns out on examination to be
a lie. There is no such place as Xanadu; and Kubla Khan has nothing to
teach us but avoidance. His pleasures were bloody and infamous, and
there was nothing “stately” about his “pleasure-dome.” There never was a
river Alph, and the sacredness of any river is a fiction of a priestly
caste, preying on the people. There are no “caverns measureless to man”;
while as for a “sunless sea,” a few arc-lights would solve the problem.
The “woman wailing for her demon lover” is a savage’s nightmare; while
as for the “Abyssinian maid,” she would have her teeth blackened and
would stink of rancid palm oil.
From the beginning to the end, the poem deals with things which are
sensual, cruel, and fatal to hope. These old fears and cravings are
buried deep in our subconsciousness; the poet touches them, and they
quiver inside us, and we don’t know what it means, so we call it
“magic.” That is the favorite term of the art for art’s sakers; they
don’t know what this “magic” is, and they don’t want to know, but the
psychoanalyst tells them.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Our Poet will be pained. He lives by magic, and you seek
to destroy it!”
Says Ogi: “There are emotions equally thrilling, equally wonderful,
which are stirred by the discovery of new truth and the contemplation of
progress. What I am trying to do is to persuade the poets to use their
brains and common sense, and apply melody and beauty of sound to the
good things of the future, instead of to the evil things of the past.”
“Give them a few illustrations,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“I will name eight things which have been in my daily newspapers during
the past week, any one of which is every bit as exciting, every bit as
provocative of ecstasy as ‘Kubla Khan.’
“Number One: The air is full of music, traveling half way round the
earth. Number Two: Aeroplanes are circling the earth for the first time
in history. Number Three: A scientist has given his life in the effort
to find a cure for cancer. Number Four: Mars is coming nearer, and we
have a chance to learn how the canals are made, and perhaps to get
messages from a new race. Number Five: In a physics laboratory, only two
or three miles from our home, men are taking the atom to pieces and
preparing to extract its energy. Number Six: We are discovering how to
take control of our subconscious minds and master our hidden life.
Number Seven: A group of scientists in New York are exploring, by means
of laboratory tests, the energies we call ‘psychic.’ Number Eight: In
every civilized country today the workers are organizing themselves to
put an end to parasitism based upon class privilege.
“Here are eight themes for poets, every one of which has the advantage
of being real, and not fading away upon analysis. Here are
pleasure-domes that are truly “stately,” rivers that are truly “sacred,”
caverns that are truly “measureless to man.” These modern themes have
only one drawback, from the point of view of the poet; they require him
to think as well as to feel!”