that source of religious insight which I believe to be, after all, the
surest, the most accessible, the most universal, and, in its deepest
essence, the most rational. The problem of the modern philosophy of life
is, we have said, the problem of keeping the spirit of religion, without
falling a prey to superstition. At the outset of this lecture I told
briefly why, in the modern world, we aim to avoid superstition. The true
reason for this aim you now see better than at first I could state that
reason. We have learned, and wisely learned, that the great cause of the
study of nature by scientific methods is one of the principal special
causes to which man can be devoted; for nothing serves more than the
pursuit of the sciences serves to bind into unity the actual work of
human civilization. To this cause of scientific study we have all
learned to be, according to our lights, loyal. But the study of science
makes us averse to the belief in magic arts, in supernatural
interferences, in special providences. The scientific spirit turns from
the legends and the superstitions that in the past have sundered men,
have inflamed the religious wars, have filled the realm of imagination
with good and evil spirits. Turns from these--to what? To a belief in a
merely mechanical reality? To a doctrine that the real world is foreign
to our ideals? To an assurance that life is vain?
No; so to view the mission of the study of science is to view that
mission falsely. The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the
lesson of the vast significance of loyalty to the cause of science. And
this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a
rational, a significant unity of human experience, a genuine cause which
men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superstition,
they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as
a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind: an unity
which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human
experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less
unconsciously interpret just as all the other loyal souls interpret
their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in
type to the individual lives which we lead--worthy of devoted service,
significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism.
This unity of human experience reveals to us nature's mechanisms, but is
itself no part of the mechanism which it observes.
If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require: if we
take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, as more or
less enlightened but always practical revelations that there is an unity
of spiritual life which is above our present natural level, which is
worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists
of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws
of outer nature--well, can we not thus see our way towards a religious
insight which is free from superstition, which is indifferent to magic
and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as
they are indeed known, but which nevertheless stoutly insists: "This
world is no mere mechanism; it is full of a spiritual unity that
transcends mere nature?"
I believe that we can do this. I believe that what I have merely hinted
to you is capable of a much richer development than I have here given to
these thoughts. I believe, in brief, that in our loyalties we find our
best sources of a genuinely religious insight.
Men have often said, "The true source of religious insight is
revelation; for these matters are above the powers of human reason."
Now, I am not here to discuss or to criticize anybody's type of
revelation. But this I know, and this the believers in various supposed
revelations have often admitted--that unless the aid of some interior
spiritual insight comes to be added to the merely external revelation,
one can be left in doubt by all possible signs and wonders whereby the
revelation undertakes to give us convincing external evidence. Religious
faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from
that which is within us. And any faith which has indeed a worthy
religious object is either merely a mystic ecstasy, which must then be
judged, if at all, only by its fruits, or else it is a loyalty, which
never exists without seeking to bear fruit in works. Now my thesis is
that loyalty is essentially adoration with service, and that there is no
true adoration without practical loyalty. If I am right, all of the
loyal are grasping in their own ways, and according to their lights,
some form and degree of religious truth. They have won religious
insight; for they view something, at least, of the genuine spiritual
world in its real unity, and they devote themselves to that unity, to
its enlargement and enrichment. And therefore they approach more and
more to the comprehension of that true spiritual life whereof, as I
suppose, the real world essentially consists.
Therefore I find in the growth of the spirit of loyalty which normally
belongs to any loyal life the deepset source of a genuinely significant
religious insight which belongs to just that individual in just his
stage of development.
In brief: Be loyal; grow in loyalty. Therein lies the source of a
religious insight free from superstition. Therein also lies the solution
of the problems of the philosophy of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 77: Commencement address delivered at Simmons College, Boston.
Published in "William James and Other Essays," copyright, 1911. Printed
here by permission of The Macmillan Company.]
POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE[78]
A.C. BRADLEY
The words "Poetry for poetry's sake" recall the famous phrase "Art for
Art." It is far from my purpose to examine the possible meanings of that
phrase, or all the questions it involves. I propose to state briefly
what I understand by "Poetry for poetry's sake," and then, after
guarding against one or two misapprehensions of the formula, to consider
more fully a single problem connected with it. And I must premise,
without attempting to justify them, certain explanations. We are to
consider poetry in its essence, and apart from the flaws which in most
poems accompany their poetry. We are to include in the idea of poetry
the metrical form, and not to regard this as a mere accident or a mere
vehicle. And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as
it actually exists; and, without aiming here at accuracy, we may say
that an actual poem is the succession of experiences--sounds, images,
thoughts, emotions--through which we pass when we are reading as
poetically as we can. Of course this imaginative experience--if I may
use the phrase for brevity--differs with every reader and every time of
reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable
fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now.
What then does the formula "Poetry for poetry's sake" tell us about this
experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this
experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has
an intrinsic value. Next, its _poetic_ value is this intrinsic worth
alone. Poetry may have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or
religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens the passions, or
furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame or money or a
quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons
too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its
poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be
judged entirely from within. And to these two positions the formula
would add, though not of necessity, a third. The consideration of
ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the
reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does
so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of
its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy,
of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a
world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it
fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for the
time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in
the other world of reality.
Of the more serious misapprehensions to which these statements may give
rise I will glance only at one or two. The offensive consequences often
drawn from the formula "Art for Art" will be found to attach not to the
doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is
the whole or supreme end of human life. And as this latter doctrine,
which seems to me absurd, is in any case quite different from the
former, its consequences fall outside my subject. The formula "Poetry is
an end in itself" has nothing to say on the various questions of moral
judgment which arise from the fact that poetry has its place in a
many-sided life. For anything it says, the intrinsic value of poetry
might be so small, and its ulterior effects so mischievous, that it had
better not exist. The formula only tells us that we must not place in
antithesis poetry and human good, for poetry is one kind of human good;
and that we must not determine the intrinsic value of this kind of good
by direct reference to another. If we do, we shall find ourselves
maintaining what we did not expect. If poetic value lies in the
stimulation of religious feelings, _Lead kindly Light_ is no better poem
than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of
patriotism, why is _Scots, wha hae_ superior to _We don't want to
fight?_ if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will
win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's _Art of preserving
Health_ should win much.
Again, our formula may be accused of cutting poetry away from its
connection with life. And this accusation raises so huge a problem that
I must ask leave to be dogmatic as well as brief. There is plenty of
connection between life and poetry, but it is, so to say, a connection
underground. The two may be called different forms of the same thing:
one of them having (in the usual sense) reality, but seldom fully
satisfying imagination; while the other offers something which satisfies
imagination but has not full "reality." They are parallel developments
which nowhere meet, or, if I may use loosely a word which will be
serviceable later, they are analogues. Hence we understand one by help
of the other, and even, in a sense, care for one because of the other;
but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly speaking, a copy
of it. They differ not only because one has more mass and the other a
more perfect shape, but because they have different _kinds_ of
existence. The one touches us as beings occupying a given position in
space and time, and having feelings, desires, and purposes due to that
position: it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much besides. What
meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
space, or, if it has or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
that belonged to it there; and therefore it makes no direct appeal to
those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to contemplative
imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or emotionless,
imagination saturated with the results of "real" experience, but still
contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why poetry has poetic
value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something which we
meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the test of its poetic
value for us lies simply in the question whether it satisfies our
imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience, for example,
judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our imagination. So
also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight, Milton's greatness of
soul, Shelley's "hate of hate" and "love of love", and that desire to
help men or make them happier which may have influenced a poet in hours
of meditation--all these have, as such, no poetical worth: they have
that worth only when, passing through the unity of the poet's being,
they reappear as qualities of imagination, and then are indeed mighty
powers in the world of poetry.
I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
doctrine of form for form's sake. "It is of no consequence what a poet
says, so long as he says the thing well. The _what_ is poetically
indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter, subject, content,
substance, determines nothing; there is no subject with which poetry may
not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything. Nay, more: not only is
the matter indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to 'eradicate the
matter by means of the form,'"--phrases and statements like these meet
us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts.
They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little
more than the fact that somehow or other they are not "bourgeois." But
we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them
might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R.A.M.
Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a
school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as
a rule, from men who either practise one of the arts, or, from study of
it, are interested in its methods. The general reader--a being so
general that I may say what I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels
that he is being robbed of almost all that he cares for in a work of
art. "You are asking me," he says, "to look at the Dresden Madonna as if
it were a Persian rug. You are telling me that the poetic value of
_Hamlet_ lies solely in its style and versification, and that my
interest in the man and his fate is only an intellectual or moral
interest. You allege that, if I want to enjoy the poetry of _Crossing
the Bar_, I must not mind what Tennyson says there, but must consider
solely his way of saying it. But in that case I can care no more for a
poem than I do for a set of nonsense verses; and I do not believe that
the authors of _Hamlet_ and _Crossing the Bar_ regarded their poems
thus."
These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on the one side, form,
treatment, handling on the other, are the field through which I
especially want, in this lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of
battle; and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but the cries of
the combatants are terribly ambiguous. Those phrases of the so-called
formalist may each mean five or six different things. Taken in one sense
they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general reader not
unnaturally takes them, they seem to me false, and mischievous. It would
be absurd to pretend that I can end in a few minutes a controversy which
concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads perhaps to problems not
yet soluble; but we can at least draw some plain distinctions which, in
this controversy, are too often confused.
In the first place, then, let us take "subject" in one particular sense;
let us understand by it that which we have in view when, looking at the
title of an unread poem, we say that the poet has chosen this or that
for his subject. The subject in this sense, so far as I can discover, is
generally something real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of
fairly cultivated people. The subject of _Paradise Lost_ would be the
story of the Fall as that story exists in the general imagination of a
Bible-reading people. The subject of Shelley's stanzas _To a Skylark_
would be the ideas which arise in the mind of an educated person when,
without knowing the poem, he hears the word "skylark." If the title of a
poem conveys little or nothing to us, the "subject" appears to be either
what we should gather by investigating the title in a dictionary or
other book of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might be
offered by a person who had read the poem, and who said, for example,
that the subject of _The Ancient Mariner_ was a sailor who killed an
albatross and suffered for his deed.
Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to use the word in no
other), is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents
of the stanzas _To a Skylark_ are not the ideas suggested by the word
"skylark" to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the
language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter _of_ the poem
at all; and its opposite is not the _form_ of the poem, but the whole
poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another
thing. This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic value cannot
lie in that subject, but lies entirely in its opposite, the poem. How
can the subject determine the value when on one and the same subject
poems may be written of all degrees of merit and demerit; or when a
perfect poem may be composed on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow,
and, if Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem on a subject so
stupendous as the omnipresence of the Deity? The "formalist" is here
perfectly right. Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He is
fighting against our tendency to take the work of art as a mere copy or
reminder of something already in our heads, or at the best as a
suggestion of some idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery, remarking that this
portrait is so like his cousin, or that landscape the very image of his
birthplace, or who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject, and nothing but the
subject, of the next--what is he but an extreme example of this
tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all
its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never
passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may be traced even
in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle
of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no
means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb,
appears almost always to have rendered the conception of the composer.
Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
subjects are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good poem might
not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the
beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, and to judge poems
according as their subjects belong to one of these groups or the other,
is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our pre-conceptions the
meaning of the poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged
by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it; and how can we
venture to say beforehand that he cannot make a true poem out of
something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The
question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether
the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the
incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in
_his_ mind, does not touch this point; it is a further question, one of
ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of "Art for art's sake" will
generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to
sacrifice the better or stronger part of the public to the weaker or
worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to this view. Rossetti
suppressed one of the best of his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for
admiration by Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the moral
effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe, because it was called
fleshly. One may regret Rossetti's judgment and at the same time respect
his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged in his capacity of
citizen, not in his capacity of artist.
So far then the "formalist" appears to be right. But he goes too far, I
think, if he maintains that the subject is indifferent and that all
subjects are the same to poetry. And he does not prove his point by
observing that a good poem might be written on a pin's head, and a bad
one on the Fall of Man. That truth shows that the subject _settles_
nothing, but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of Man is really a
more favourable subject than a pin's head. The Fall of Man, that is to
say, offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more
penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that such a subject, as it exists
in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the poet
touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem or the
débris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated fact,
but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which already
appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some degree
organized and formed. In spite of this a bad poet would make a bad poem
on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of the subject. And we
should not say this if he wrote a bad poem on a pin's head. Conversely,
a good poem on a pin's head would almost certainly transform its subject
far more than a good poem on the Fall of Man. It might revolutionize its
subject so completely that we should say, "The subject may be a pin's
head, but the substance of the poem has very little to do with it."
This brings us to another and a different antithesis. Those figures,
scenes, events, that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man,
are not the substance of Paradise Lost; but in Paradise Lost there are
figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These, with
much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and may
then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which will
be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the whole
poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is also
within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present, but
evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the
distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and
it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in
examining _Paradise Lost_ considers in order the fable, the characters,
and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the
language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the form. In like
manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may be distinguished from
the form.
Now I believe it will be found that a large part of the controversy we
are dealing with arises from a confusion between these two distinctions
of substance and form, and of subject and poem. The extreme formalist
lays his whole weight on the form because he thinks its opposite is the
mere subject. The general reader is angry, but makes the same mistake,
and gives to the subject praises that rightly belong to the substance. I
will read an example of what I mean. I can only explain the following
words of a good critic by supposing that for the moment he has fallen
into this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry--to wit, the
appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men--being
unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will
depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme,
cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become
here of the substance of _Paradise Lost_--the story, scenery,
characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished clean
away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the other not
even the subject, but a supposed invariable material, the appearances of
nature and the thoughts and feelings of men. Is it surprising that the
whole value should then be found in the form?