Chapter XVI). The eye, as is well known, is peculiar among our

“Extraordinarily interesting. . . . He is erudite and he is intelligent;

he makes the courageous attempt to be at the same time scientific

and psychological; and he has the great advantage of having at

his disposal a knowledge of semantics. His terms are clear, useful,

and conveniently few.”—_The Nation_.

“What he has done is to make thinking about art clearer, and

about life, too. This is precisely the merit of Richards’ remarkable

volume.”—_Christian Science Monitor_.

“The book is compact with stimulating criticism of the great

critics of the ages, and with numberless original suggestions

on all phases of the creation and appreciation of art.”—_Springfield

Republican_.

“An important contribution to the rehabilitation of English

criticism—perhaps, because of its sustained scientific nature, the

most important yet made. . . . The principles enunciated are pursued

in more particular aspects of literary criticism, always with a clear

rest and consequent elucidation. Parallel applications to the arts of

painting, sculpture, and music form the subjects of three chapters.

Another important chapter deals with the availability of the poet’s

experience.”—_The Criterion, London_.

“Mr. Richards is an entertaining writer, whose work avoids easily

the tedium of a technical treatise.”—_The British Journal of

Psychology_.

Transcriber’s Note:

This eBook was created from a 1928 edition, scans of which are

available from the Internet Archive. Tildes (~) indicate words

that were set in Fraktur script in the original text.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to

the public domain.

International Library of Psychology

Philosophy and Scientific Method

PRINCIPLES OF

LITERARY

CRITICISM

BY

I. A. RICHARDS

FELLOW OF

MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

LUND HUMPHRIES

LONDON · BRADFORD

CONTENTS

I. THE CHAOS OF CRITICAL THEORIES

II. THE PHANTOM ÆSTHETIC STATE

III. THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM

IV. COMMUNICATION AND THE ARTIST

V. THE CRITICS’ CONCERN WITH VALUE

VI. VALUE AS AN ULTIMATE IDEA

VII. A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF VALUE

VIII. ART AND MORALS

IX. ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE MISAPPREHENSIONS

X. POETRY FOR POETRY’S SAKE

XI. A SKETCH FOR A PSYCHOLOGY

XII. PLEASURE

XIII. EMOTION AND THE CŒNESTHESIA

XIV. MEMORY

XV. ATTITUDES

XVI. THE ANALYSIS OF A POEM

XVII. RHYTHM AND METRE

XVIII. ON LOOKING AT A PICTURE

XIX. SCULPTURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF FORM

XX. THE _IMPASSE_ OF MUSICAL THEORY

XXI. A THEORY OF COMMUNICATION

XXII. THE AVAILABILITY OF THE POET’S EXPERIENCE

XXIII. TOLSTOY’S INFECTION THEORY

XXIV. THE NORMALITY OF THE ARTIST

XXV. BADNESS IN POETRY

XXVI. JUDGMENT AND DIVERGENT READINGS

XXVII. LEVELS OF RESPONSE AND THE WIDTH OF APPEAL

XXVIII. THE ALLUSIVENESS OF MODERN POETRY

XXIX. PERMANENCE AS A CRITERION

XXX. THE DEFINITION OF A POEM

XXXI. ART, PLAY, AND CIVILISATION

XXXII. THE IMAGINATION

XXXIII. TRUTH AND REVELATION THEORIES

XXXIV. THE TWO USES OF LANGUAGE

XXXV. POETRY AND BELIEFS

APPENDIX A ON VALUE

APPENDIX B ON MR. ELIOT’S POETRY

PREFACE

A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore,

usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.

This book might better be compared to a loom on which it is proposed

to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation. What is

most important about it, the interconnection of its several points

of view, might have been exhibited, though not with equal clarity,

in a pamphlet or in a two-volume work. Few of the separate items

are original. One does not expect novel cards when playing so

traditional a game; it is the hand which matters. I have chosen

to present it here on the smallest scale which would allow me

to fit together the various positions adopted into a whole of

some firmness. The elaborations and expansions which suggest

themselves have been constantly cut short at the point at which

I thought that the reader would be able to see for himself how

they would continue. The danger of this procedure, which otherwise

has great advantages both for him and for me, is that the different

parts of a connected account such as this mutually illumine one

another. The writer, who has, or should have, the whole position

in his mind throughout, may overlook sources of obscurity for

the reader, due to the serial form of the exposition. This I

have endeavoured to prevent by means of numerous cross-references,

forwards and backwards.

But some further explanation of the structure of the book is

due to the reader. At sundry points—notably in Chapters VI,

VII, and XI-XV—its progress appears to be interrupted by lengthy

excursions into theory of value, or into general psychology.

These I would have omitted if it had seemed in any way possible

to develop the argument of the rest strongly and clearly in their

absence. Criticism, as I understand it, is the endeavour to discriminate

between experiences and to evaluate them. We cannot do this without

some understanding of the nature of experience, or without theories

of valuation and communication. Such principles as apply in criticism

must be taken from these more fundamental studies. All other

critical principles are arbitrary, and the history of the subject

is a record of their obstructive influence. The view of value

implied throughout is one which must be held in some form by

very many persons. Yet I have been unable to discover anywhere

any statement of it to which I might satisfactorily refer the

reader. I had to make a fairly full statement with applications

and illustrations myself. And I had to put in the forefront of

the book where, to the more exclusively literary reader, it will

appear a dry and uninviting tract to be crossed for problematical

advantages. The same remarks apply to the second theoretical

expansion, the psychological chapters; they are to the value

chapters, I fear, as a Sahara to a Gobi. No other choice seemed

open if I did not wish my later, critical, sections to be misunderstood,

than to include as a preliminary what amounts to a concise treatise

on psychology. For nearly all the topics of psychology are raised

at one point or another by criticism, but raised from an angle

which ordinary text-books do not contemplate. These two deserts

passed, the rest of the book accords, I believe, much more closely

with what may be expected of an essay in criticism, although

the language in which some of the more obvious remarks are couched

may seem unnecessarily repellant. The explanation of much of

the turgid uncouthness of its terminology is the desire to link

even the commonplaces of criticism to a systematic exposition

of psychology. The reader who appreciates the advantages so gained

will be forgiving.

I have carefully remembered throughout that I am not writing

for specialists alone. The omissions, particularly as to qualifications

and reservations, which this fact entails, should in fairness

to myself be mentioned.

My book, I fear, will seem to many sadly lacking in the condiments

which have come to be expected in writings upon literature. Critics

and even theorists in criticism currently assume that their first

duty is to be moving, to excite in the mind emotions appropriate

to their august subject-matter. This endeavour I have declined.

I have used, I believe, few words which I could not define in

the actual use which I have made of them, and necessarily such

words have little or no emotive power. I have comforted myself

with the reflection that there is perhaps something debilitated

about a taste for speculation which requires a flavouring of

the eternal and the ultimate or even of the literary spices,

mystery and profundity. Mixed modes of writing which enlist the

reader’s feeling as well as his thinking are becoming dangerous

to the modern consciousness with its increasing awareness of

the distinction. Thought and feeling are able to mislead one

another at present in ways which were hardly possible six centuries

ago. We need a spell of purer science and purer poetry before

the two can again be mixed, if indeed this will ever become once

more desirable. In the Second Edition I added a note on Mr. Eliot’s

poetry which will elucidate what I mean here by purity, and some

supplementary remarks upon Value; in the Third, a few minor improvements

have been made.

It should be borne in mind that the knowledge which the men of

A.D. 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our æsthetics,

all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful.

Poor indeed would be the prospect if this were not so. The thought,

“What shall we do with the powers, which we are so rapidly developing,

and what will happen to us if we cannot learn to guide them in

time?” already marks for many people the chief interest of existence.

The controversies which the world has known in the past are as

nothing to those which are ahead. I would wish this book to be

regarded as a contribution towards these choices of the future.

Between the possession of ideas and their application there is

a gulf. Every teacher winces when he remembers this. As an attempt

to attack this difficulty, I am preparing a companion volume,

_Practical Criticism_. Extremely good and extremely bad

poems were put _unsigned_ before a large and able audience.

The comments they wrote at leisure give, as it were, a stereoscopic

view of the poem and of possible opinion on it. This material

when systematically analysed, provides, not only an interesting

commentary upon the state of contemporary culture, but a new

and powerful educational instrument.

I. A. R.

_Cambridge, May_, 1928.

CHAPTER I

The Chaos of Critical Theories

O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable

deal of sack!—_The First Part of King Henry the Fourth._

The literature of Criticism is not small or negligible, and its

chief figures, from Aristotle onwards, have often been among

the first intellects of their age. Yet the modern student, surveying

the field and noting the simplicity of the task attempted and

the fragments of work achieved, may reasonably wonder what has

been and is amiss. For the experiences with which criticism is

concerned are exceptionally accessible, we have only to open

the book, stand before the picture, have the music played, spread

out the rug, pour out the wine, and the material upon which the

critic works is presently before us. Even too abundantly, in

too great fullness perhaps: “More warmth than Adam needs” the

critic may complain, echoing Milton’s complaint against the climate

of the Garden of Eden; but he is fortunate not to be starved

of matter like the investigator of psychoplasm. And the questions

which the critic seeks to answer, intricate though they are,

do not seem to be extraordinarily difficult. What gives the experience

of reading a certain poem its value? How is this experience better

than another? Why prefer this picture to that? In which ways

should we listen to music so as to receive the most valuable

moments? Why is one opinion about works of art not as good as

another? These are the fundamental questions which criticism

is required to answer, together with such preliminary questions—What

_is_ a picture, a poem, a piece of music? How can experiences

be compared? What is value?—as may be required in order to approach

these questions.

But if we now turn to consider what are the results yielded by

the best minds pondering these questions in the light of the

eminently accessible experiences provided by the Arts, we discover

an almost empty garner. A few conjectures, a supply of admonitions,

many acute isolated observations, some brilliant guesses, much

oratory and applied poetry, inexhaustible confusion, a sufficiency

of dogma, no small stock of prejudices, whimsies and crotchets,

a profusion of mysticism, a little genuine speculation, sundry

stray inspirations, pregnant hints and random _aperçus_;

of such as these, it may be said without exaggeration, is extant

critical theory composed.

A few specimens of the most famous utterances of Aristotle, Longinus,

Horace, Boileau, Dryden, Addison, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle,

Matthew Arnold, and some more modern authors, will justify this

assertion. “All men naturally receive pleasure from imitation.”

“Poetry is chiefly conversant about general truth.” “It demands

an enthusiasm allied to madness; transported out of ourselves

we become what we imagine.” “Beautiful words are the very and

peculiar light of the mind.” “Let the work be what you like,

provided it has simplicity and unity.” “De Gustibus. . .” “Of

writing well right thinking is the beginning and the fount.”

“We must never separate ourselves from Nature.” “Delight is the

chief, if not the only end; instruction can be admitted but in

the second place.” “The pleasures of Fancy are more conducive

to health than those of the understanding.” “The spontaneous

overflow of powerful feeling.” “The best words in the best order.”

“The whole soul of man in activity.” “Unity in variety.” “The

synthetic and magical power of the imagination.” “The eye on

the object.” “The disimprisonment of the soul of fact.” “The

identification of content and form.” “A criticism of Life.” “Empathy

favourable to our existence.” “Significant form.” “The expression

of impressions,” etc. etc.

Such are the pinnacles, the _apices_ of critical theory,

the heights gained in the past by the best thinkers in their

attempt to reach explanations of the value of the arts. Some

of them, many of them indeed, are profitable starting-points

for reflection, but neither together, nor singly, nor in any

combination do they give what is required. Above them and below

them, around and about them can be found other things of value,

of service for the appreciation of particular poems and works

of art; comment, elucidation, appraisal, much that is fit occupation

for the contemplative mind. But apart from hints such as have

been cited, no explanations. The central question, What is the

value of the arts, why are they worth the devotion of the keenest

hours of the best minds, and what is their place in the system

of human endeavours? is left almost untouched, although without

some clear view it would seem that even the most judicious critic

must often lose his sense of position.

But perhaps the literature of Criticism is the wrong place in

which to expect such an inquiry. Philosophers, Moralists and

Æstheticians are perhaps the competent authorities? There is

certainly no lack of treatises upon the Good and the Beautiful,

upon Value and upon the Æsthetic State, and the treasures of

earnest endeavour lavished upon these topics have not been in

vain. Those investigators who have relied upon Reason, upon the

Select Intuition and the Ineluctable Argument, who have sat down

without the necessary facts to think the matter out, have at

least thoroughly discredited a method which apart from their

labours would hardly have been suspected of the barrenness it

has shown. And those who, following Fechner, have turned instead

to the collection and analysis of concrete, particular facts

and to empirical research into æsthetics have supplied a host

of details to psychology. In recent years especially, much useful

information upon the processes which make up the appreciation

of works of art has been skilfully elicited. But it is showing

no ingratitude to these investigators if we point out certain

defects of almost all experimental work on æsthetics, which make

their results at best of only indirect service to our wider problems.

The most obvious of these concerns their inevitable choice of

experiments. Only the simplest human activities are at present

amenable to laboratory methods. Æstheticians have therefore been

compelled to begin with as simple forms of ‘æsthetic choice’

as can be devised. In practice, line-lengths and elementary forms,

single notes and phrases, single colours and simple collocations,

nonsense syllables, metronomic beats, skeleton rhythms and metres

and similar simplifications have alone been open to investigation.

Such more complex objects as have been examined have yielded

very uncertain results, for reasons which anyone who has ever

_both_ looked at a picture or read a poem _and_ been inside a

psychological laboratory or conversed with a representative

psychologist will understand.

The generalisations to be drawn from these simple experiments

are, if we do not expect too much, encouraging. Some light upon

obscure processes, such as empathy, and upon the intervention

of muscular imagery and tendencies to action into the apprehension

of shapes and of sequences of sounds which had been supposed

to be apprehended by visual or auditory apparatus alone, some

interesting facts about the plasticity of rhythm, some approach

towards a classification of the different ways in which colours

may be regarded, increased recognition of the complexity of even

the simplest activities, these and similar results have been

well worth the trouble expended. But more important has been

the revelation of the great variety in the responses which even

the simplest stimuli elicit. Even so unambiguous an object as

a plain colour, it has been found, can arouse in different persons

and in the same person at different times extremely different

states of mind. From this result it may seem no illegitimate

step to conclude that highly complex objects, such as pictures,

will arouse a still greater variety of responses, a conclusion

very awkward for any theory of criticism, since it would appear

to decide adversely the preliminary question: “How may experiences

be compared?” which any such theory must settle if the more fundamental

questions of value are to be satisfactorily approached.

But just here a crucial point arises. There seems to be good

reason to suppose that the more simple the object contemplated

the more varied the responses will be which can be expected from

it. For it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to contemplate a

comparatively simple object by itself. Inevitably it is taken

by the contemplator into some context, and made part of some

larger whole, and under such experimental conditions as have

yet been devised it seems not possible to guarantee the kind

of context into which it is taken. A comparison with the case

of words is instructive. A single word by itself, let us say

‘night,’ will raise almost as many different thoughts and feelings

as there are persons who hear it. The range of variety with a

single word is very little restricted. But put it into a sentence

and the variation is narrowed; put it into the context of a whole

passage, and it is still further fixed; and let it occur in such

an intricate whole as a poem and the responses of competent readers

may have a similarity which only its occurrence in such a whole

can secure. The point will arise for discussion when the problem

of corroboration for critical judgments is dealt with later (cf.

pp. 166, 178, 192). It had to be mentioned here in order to explain

why the theory of criticism shows no great dependence upon experimental

æsthetics, useful in many respects as these investigations are.

CHAPTER II

The Phantom Æsthetic State

None of his follies will he repent, none will he wish to repeat; no

happier lot can be assigned to man.—_Wilhelm Mester_.

A more serious defect in æsthetics is the avoidance of considerations

as to value. It is true that an ill-judged introduction of value

considerations usually leads to disaster, as in Tolstoy’s case.

But the fact that some of the experiences to which the arts give

rise are valuable and take the form they do because of their

value is not irrelevant. Whether this fact is of service in analysis

will naturally depend upon the theory of value adopted. But to

leave it out of account altogether is to run the risk of missing

the clue to the whole matter. And the clue has in fact been missed.

All modern æsthetics rests upon an assumption which has been

strangely little discussed, the assumption that there is a distinct

_kind_ of mental activity present in what are called æsthetic

experiences. Ever since “the first rational word concerning beauty”[1]

was spoken by Kant, the attempt to define the ‘judgment of taste’

as concerning pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual,

and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or of ordinary

emotions, in short to make it a thing _sui generis_, has

continued. Thus arises the phantom problem of the æsthetic mode

or æsthetic state, a legacy from the days of abstract investigation

into the Good, the Beautiful and the True.

The temptation to align this tripartite division with a similar

division into Will, Feeling and Thought was irresistible. “All

the faculties of the Soul, or capacities, are reducible to three,

which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground:

the _faculty of knowledge_, the _feeling of pleasure or

displeasure_, and the _faculty of desire_”[2] said Kant.

Legislative for each of these faculties stood Understanding,

Judgment and Reason respectively. “Between the faculties of knowledge

and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is

intermediate between understanding and reason.” And he went on

to discuss æsthetics as appertaining to the province of judgment,

the middle one of these three, the first and last having already

occupied him in his two other Critiques of Pure and Practical

Reason respectively. The effect was virtually to annex æsthetics

to Idealism, in which fabric it has ever since continued to serve

important purposes.

This accident of formal correspondence has had an influence upon

speculation which would be ridiculous if it had not been so disastrous.

It is difficult even now to get out of ruts which have been seen

to lead nowhere. With the identification of the provinces of

Truth and Thought no quarrel arises, and the Will and the Good

are, as we shall see, intimately connected, but the attempts

to fit Beauty into a neat pigeon-hole with Feeling have led to

calamitous distortions. It is now generally abandoned,[3] although

echoes of it can be heard everywhere in critical writings. The

peculiar use of ‘emotion’ by reviewers, and the prevalence of

the phrase ‘æsthetic emotion’ is one of them. In view, then,

of the objections to Feeling, something else, some special mode

of mental activity, had to be found, to which Beauty could belong.

Hence arose the æsthetic mode. Truth was the object of the inquiring

activity, of the Intellectual or Theoretical part of the mind,

and the Good that of the willing, desiring, practical part; what

part could be found for the Beautiful? Some activity that was

neither inquisitive nor practical, that did not question and

did not seek to use. The result was the æsthetic, the contemplative,

activity which is still defined, in most treatments[4], by these

negative conditions alone, as that mode of commerce with things

which is neither intellectual inquiry into their nature, nor

an attempt to make them satisfy our desire. The experiences which

arise in contemplating objects of art were then discovered to

be describable in some such terms, and system secured a temporary

triumph.

It is true that many of these experiences do present peculiarities,

both in the intellectual interest which is present and in the

way in which the development of desires within them takes place,

and these peculiarities—detachment, impersonality, serenity and

so forth—are of great interest. They will have to be carefully

examined in the sequel.

We shall find that two entirely different sets of characters

are involved. They arise from quite different causes but are

hard to distinguish introspectively. Taken as marking off a special

province for inquiry they are most unsatisfactory. They would

yield for our purposes, even if they were not so ambiguous, a

diagonal or slant classification. Some of the experiences which

most require to be considered would be left out and many which

are without importance brought in. To choose the Æsthetic State

as the starting-point for an inquiry into the values of the arts

is in fact somewhat like choosing ‘rectangular, and red in parts’

as a definition of a picture. We should find ourselves ultimately

discussing a different collection of things from those we intended

to discuss.

But the problem remains—Is there any such thing as the æsthetic

state, or any æsthetic character of experiences which is _sui

generis_? Not many explicit arguments have ever been given

for one. Vernon Lee, it is true, in _Beauty and Ugliness_,

p. 10, argues that “a relation entirely _sui generis_ between

visible and audible forms and ourselves” can be deduced from

the fact “that given proportions, shapes, patterns, compositions

have a tendency to recur in art.” How this can be done it is

hard to divine. Arsenic tends to recur in murder cases, and tennis

in the summer, but no characters or relations _sui generis_

anywhere are thereby proved. Obviously you can only tell whether

anything is like or unlike other things by examining it and them,

and to notice that one case of it is like another case of it,

is not helpful. It may be suspected that where the argument is

so confused, the original question was not very clear.

The question is whether a certain kind of experience is or is

not _like_ other kinds of experience. Plainly it is a question

as to degree of likeness. Be it granted at once, to clear the

air, that there are all sorts of experiences involved in the

values of the arts, and that attributions of Beauty spring from

all sorts of causes. Is there among these one kind of experience

as different from experiences which don’t so occur as, say envy

is from remembering, or as mathematical calculation is from eating

cherries? And what degree of difference would make it specific?

Put this way it is plainly not an easy question to answer. These

differences, none of them measurable, are of varying degree,

and all are hard to estimate. Yet the vast majority of post-Kantian

writers, and many before him, have unhesitatingly replied, “Yes!

the æsthetic experience is peculiar and specific.” And their

grounds, when not merely verbal, have usually been those of direct

inspection.

It requires some audacity to run counter to such a tradition,

and I do not do so without reflection. Yet, after all, the matter

is one of classification, and when so many other divisions in

psychology are being questioned and re-organised, this also may

be re-examined.

The case for a distinct æsthetic species of experience can take

two forms. It may be held that there is some unique kind of mental

element which enters into æsthetic experiences and into no others.

Thus Mr Clive Bell used to maintain the existence of an unique

emotion ‘æsthetic emotion’ as the _differentia_. But psychology

has no place for such an entity. What other will be suggested?

Empathy, for example, as Vernon Lee herself insists, enters into

innumerable other experiences as well as into æsthetic experiences.

I do not think any will be proposed.

Alternatively, the æsthetic experience may contain no unique

constituent, and be of the usual stuff but with a special form.

This is what it is commonly supposed to be. Now the special form

as it is usually described—in terms of disinterestedness, detachment,

distance, impersonality, subjective universality, and so forth—this

form, I shall try to show later, is sometimes no more than a

consequence of the incidence of the experience, a condition or

an effect of communication. But sometimes a structure which can

be described in the same terms is an essential feature of the

experience, the feature in fact upon which its value depends.

In other words, at least two different sets of characters, due

to different causes, are, in current usage, ambiguously covered

by the term ‘æsthetic.’ It is very necessary to distinguish the

sense in which merely putting something in a frame or writing

it in verse gives it an ‘æsthetic character,’ from a sense in

which value is implied. This confusion, together with other confusions,[5]

has made the term nearly useless.

The æsthetic mode is generally supposed to be a peculiar way

of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting

experiences are valuable, disvaluable or indifferent. It is intended

to cover the experience of ugliness as well as that of beauty,

and also intermediate experiences. What I wish to maintain is

that there is no such mode, that the experience of ugliness has

nothing in common with that of beauty, which both do not share

with innumerable other experiences no one (except Croce; but

this qualification is often required) would dream of calling

æsthetic. But a narrower sense of æsthetic is also found in which

it _is_ confined to experiences of beauty and does imply

value. And with regard to this, while admitting that such experiences

can be distinguished, I shall be at pains to show that they are

closely similar to many other experiences, that they differ chiefly

in the connections between their constituents, and that they

are only a further development, a finer organisation of ordinary

experiences, and not in the least a new and different kind of

thing. When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to

music, we are not doing something quite unlike what we were doing

on our way to the Gallery or when we dressed in the morning.

The fashion in which the experience is caused in us is different,

and as a rule the experience is more complex and, if we are successful,

more unified. But our activity is not of a fundamentally different

kind. To assume that it is, puts difficulties in the way of describing

and explaining it, which are unnecessary and which no one has

yet succeeded in overcoming.

The point here raised, and particularly the distinction between

the two quite different sets of characters, on the ground of

which an experience may be described as æsthetic or impersonal

and disinterested, will become clearer at a later stage.[6]

A further objection to the assumption of a peculiar æsthetic

attitude is that it makes smooth the way for the idea of a peculiar

æsthetic value, a pure art value. Postulate a peculiar kind:

of experience, æsthetic experience, and it is an easy step to

the postulation of a peculiar unique value, different in kind

and cut off from the other values of ordinary experiences. “To

appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life,

no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its

emotions.”[7] So runs a recent extreme statement of the Æsthetic

Hypothesis, which has had much success. To quote another example

less drastic but also carrying with it the implication that æsthetic

experiences are _sui generis_, and their value not of the

same kind as other values. “Its nature is to be not a part, nor

yet a copy, of the real world (as we commonly understand that

phrase), but a world in itself independent, complete, autonomous.”[8]

This view of the arts as providing a private heaven for æsthetes

is, as will appear later, a great impediment to the investigation

of their value. The effects upon the general attitudes of those

who accept it uncritically are also often regrettable; while

the effects upon literature and the arts have been noticeable,

in a narrowing and restriction of the interests active, in preciousness,

artificiality and spurious aloofness. ~Art~ envisaged as a mystic,

ineffable virtue is a close relative of the ‘æsthetic mood’,

and may easily be pernicious in its effects, through the habits

of mind which, as an idea, it fosters, and to which, as a mystery,

it appeals.

[1] Hegel’s _dictum, History of Philosophy_, iii, 543.

[2] _Critique of Judgment_, transl. by Meredith, p. 15.

[3] Dr Bosanquet was one of the last adherents. See his _Three

Lectures on Æsthetics_.

[4] E.g. Vernon Lee, _The Beautiful_.

[5] E.g. Any choice for which the chooser cannot give his reasons

tends in the laboratory to be called an ‘æsthetic choice.’

[6] Cf. Chapters X and XXXII, and Impersonality, _Index_.

[7] Clive Bell, _Art_, p. 25.

[8] A.C. Bradley, _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, p. 5.

CHAPTER III

The Language of Criticism

. . . . I too have seen

My vision of the rainbow Aureoled face

Of her whom men name Beauty: proud, austere:

Divinely fugitive, that haunts the world. . . .

_The Dominion of Dreams_.

Whatever the disadvantages of modern æsthetics as a basis for

a theory of Criticism, the great advance made upon prescientific

speculation into the nature of Beauty must also be recognised.

That paralysing apparition Beauty, the ineffable, ultimate, unanalysable,

simple Idea, has at least been dismissed and with her have departed

or will soon depart a flock of equally bogus entities. Poetry

and inspiration together, it is true, still dignify respectable

quarters with their presence.

“Poetry, like life, is one thing. . . . Essentially a continuous

substance or energy, poetry is historically a connected movement,

a series of successive integrated manifestations. Each poet,

from Homer or the predecessors of Homer to our own day, has been,

to some degree and at some point, the voice of the movement and

energy of poetry; in him, poetry has for the moment become visible,

audible, incarnate; and his extant poems are the record left

of that partial and transitory incarnation. . . . The progress

of poetry, with its vast power and exalted function, is immortal.”[9]

A diligent search will still find many other Mystic Beings, for

the most part of a less august nature, sheltering in verbal thickets.

Construction, Design, Form, Rhythm, Expression . . . are more

often than not mere _vacua_ in discourse, for which a theory

of criticism should provide explainable substitutes.

While current attitudes to language persist, this difficulty

of the linguistic phantom must still continue. It has to be recognised

that all our natural turns of speech are misleading, especially

those we use in discussing works of art. We become so accustomed

to them that even when we are aware that they are ellipses, it

is easy to forget the fact. And it has been extremely difficult

in many cases to discover that any ellipsis is present. We are

accustomed to say that a picture is beautiful, instead of saying

that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain

ways.[10] The discovery that the remark, “This is beautiful”,

must be turned round and expanded in this way before it is anything

but a mere noise signalling the fact that we approve of the picture,

was a great and difficult achievement. Even to-day, such is the

insidious power of grammatical forms, the belief that there is

such a quality or attribute, namely Beauty, which attaches to

the things which we rightly call beautiful, is probably inevitable

for all reflective persons at a certain stage of their mental

development.

Even among those who have escaped from this delusion and are

well aware that we continually talk as though things possess

qualities, when what we ought to say is that they cause effects

in us of one kind or another, the fallacy of ‘projecting’ the

effect and making it a quality of its cause tends to recur. When

it does so it gives a peculiar obliquity to thought and although

few competent persons are nowadays so deluded as actually to

hold the mystical view that there is a quality Beauty which inheres

or attaches to external objects, yet throughout all the discussion

of works of art the drag exercised by language towards this view

can be felt. It perceptibly increases the difficulty of innumerable

problems and we shall have constantly to allow for it. Such terms

as ‘construction’, ‘form’, ‘balance’, ‘composition’, ‘design’,

‘unity’, ‘expression’, for all the arts; as ‘depth’, ‘movement’,

‘texture’, ‘solidity’, in the criticism of painting; as ‘rhythm’,

‘stress’, ‘plot’, ‘character’, in literary criticism; as ‘harmony’,

‘atmosphere’, ‘development’, in music, are instances. All these

terms are currently used as though they stood for qualities inherent

in things outside the mind, as a painting, in the sense of an

assemblage of pigments, is undoubtedly outside the mind. Even

the difficulty of discovering, in the case of poetry, what thing

other than print and paper is there for these alleged qualities

to belong to, has not checked the tendency.

But indeed language has succeeded until recently in hiding from

us almost all the things we talk about. Whether we are discussing

music, poetry, painting, sculpture or architecture, we are forced

to speak as though certain physical objects—vibrations of strings

and of columns of air, marks printed on paper, canvasses and

pigments, masses of marble, fabrics of freestone, are what we

are talking about. And yet the remarks we make as critics do

not apply to such objects but to states of mind, to experiences.

A certain strangeness about this view is often felt but diminishes

with reflection. If anyone says that ‘The May Queen’ is sentimental,

it is not difficult to agree that he is referring to a state

of mind. But if he declares that the masses in a Giotto exactly

balance one another, this is less apparent, and, if he goes on

to discuss time in music, form in visual art, plot in drama,

the fact that he is all the while talking about mental happenings

becomes concealed. The verbal apparatus comes between us and

the things with which we are really dealing. Words which are

useful, indeed invaluable, as handy stop-gaps and makeshifts

in conversation, but which need elaborate expansions before they

can be used with precision, are treated as simply as people’s

proper names. So it becomes natural to seek for the things these

words appear to stand for, and thus arise innumerable subtle

investigations, doomed _ab initio_ as regards their main

intent to failure.

We must be prepared then to translate, into phrases pedantic

and uncouth, all the too simple utterances which the conversational

decencies exact. We shall find later, in their peculiar emotive

power the main reason why, in spite of all manner of confusions

and inconveniences, these current ways of speaking are retained.

For emotive purposes they are indispensable, but for clarity,

for the examination of what is actually happening, translations

are equally a necessity.

Most critical remarks state in an abbreviated form that an object

causes certain experiences, and as a rule the form of the statement

is such as to suggest that the object has been said to possess

certain qualities. But often the critic goes further and affirms

that the effect in his mind is due to special particular features

of the object. In this case he is pointing out something about

the object in addition to its effect upon him, and this fuller

kind of criticism is what we desire. Before his insight can greatly

benefit, however, a very clear demarcation between the object,

with its features, and his experience, which is the effect of

contemplating it, is necessary. The bulk of critical literature

is unfortunately made up of examples of their confusion.

It will be convenient at this point to introduce two definitions.

In a full critical statement which states not only that an experience

is valuable in certain ways, but also that it is caused by certain

features in a contemplated object, the part which describes the

value of the experience we shall call the _critical_ part.

That which describes the object we shall call the _technical_

part. Thus to say that we feel differently towards wooden crosses

and stone crosses is a technical remark. And to say that metre

is more suited to the tender passion than is prose would be,

as it stands, a technical remark, but here it is evident that

a critical part might easily be also present. All remarks as

to the ways and means by which experiences arise or are brought

about are technical, but critical remarks are about the values

of experiences and the reasons for regarding them as valuable,

or not valuable. We shall endeavor in what follows to show that

critical remarks are merely a branch of psychological remarks,

and that no special ethical or metaphysical ideas need be introduced

to explain value.

The distinction between technical and critical remarks is of

real importance. Confusion here is responsible for some most

curious passages in the histories of the arts. A certain technique

in certain cases produces admirable results; the obvious features

of this technique come to be regarded at first as sure signs

of excellence, and later as the excellence itself. For a while

nothing, however admirable, which does not show these superficial

marks, gets fair consideration. Thomas Rymer’s denigration of

Shakespeare, Dr Johnson’s view of Milton’s pauses, the aftermath

of the triumph of Pope, archaistic sculpture, the Greek poses

in the compositions of David, the imitations of Cézanne, are

famous instances; they could be multiplied indefinitely. The

converse case is equally common. An obvious technical blemish

in a special case is recognised. It may be too many S’s in a

particular line, or the irregularity and rimelessness of a ‘Pindaric’

Ode; henceforth any line superficially similar,

The lustre of the long convolvulusses,

any unrhymed lyric, is regarded as defective. This trick of judging

the whole by the detail, instead of the other way about, of mistaking

the means for the end, the technique for the value, is in fact

much the most successful of the snares which waylay the critic.

Only the teacher knows (and sometimes he is guilty himself) how

great is the number of readers who think, for example, that a

defective rime—bough’s house, bush thrush, blood good—is sufficient

ground for condemning a poem in the neglect of all other considerations.

Such sticklers, like those with a scansion obsession (due as

a rule to Exercises in Latin Verse), have little understanding

of poetry. We pay attention to externals when we do not know

what else to do with a poem.

[9] G. W. Mackail, _Lectures on Poetry_. Introduction.

[10] We can diagrammatically represent the delusion as follows.

What actually occurs is that A, a work of art, causes E an effect

_in us_, which has the character b; A _causes_ E[b]. We _speak_

as though we perceived that A has the quality B (Beauty); we are

perceiving A[B]; and if we are not careful we think so too. No one

of our recent revolutions in thought is more important than this

progressive rediscovery of what we are talking about. It is being

inevitably followed by wide changes in our attitudes to the world and

to fellow-creatures. One current in this change is towards tolerance,

another towards scepticism, a third towards far more secure founding

of our motives of action. The startling philosophical changes in the

general outlook sometimes’ predicted for Relativity (or for popular

ideas about it when once they become widespread) appear likely, if

they occur at all, to be engulfed by these more unobtrusive but more

domestic changes.

CHAPTER IV

Communication and the Artist

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest

and best minds.—_The Defence of Poetry_.

The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are

an account of value and an account of communication. We do not

sufficiently realise how great a part of our experience takes

the form it does, because we are social beings and accustomed

to communication from infancy. That we acquire many of our ways

of thinking and feeling from parents and others is, of course,

a commonplace.

But the effects of communication go much deeper than this. The

very structure of our minds largely determined by the fact that

man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of

thousands of years, throughout the course of his human development

and beyond even that. A large part of the distinctive features

of the mind are due to its being an instrument for communication.

An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated,

but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to

be communicated. The emphasis which natural selection has put

upon communicative ability is overwhelming.

There are very many problems of psychology, from those with which

some of the exponents of _Gestalt theorie_ are grappling to those by

which psycho-analysts are bewildered, for which this neglected, this

almost overlooked aspect of the mind may provide a key, but it is

pre-eminently in regard to the arts that it is of service. For the

arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity. As we shall

see, most of the difficult and obscure points about the structures of

the arts, for example the priority of formal elements to content,[11]

or the impersonality and detachment so much stressed by æstheticians,

become easily intelligible as soon as we consider them from this angle.

But a possible misunderstanding must be guarded against. Although it is

as a communicator that it is most profitable to consider the artist,

it is by no means true that he commonly looks upon himself in this

light. In the course of his work he is not as a rule deliberately and

consciously engaged in a communicative endeavour. When asked, he is

more likely than not to reply that communication is an irrelevant or

at best a minor issue, and that what he is making is something which

is beautiful in itself, or satisfying to him personally, or something

expressive, in a more or less vague sense, of his emotions, or of

himself, something personal and individual. That other people are

going to study it, and to receive experiences from it may seem to him

a merely accidental, inessential circumstance. More modestly still, he

may say that when he works he is merely amusing himself.

That the artist is not as a mule consciously concerned with communication,

but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting

or whatever it is, ‘right’, apparently regardless of its communicative

efficacy, is easily explained. To make the work ‘embody’, accord

with, and represent the precise experience upon which its value

depends is his major preoccupation, in difficult cases an overmastering

preoccupation, and the dissipation of attention which would be

involved if he considered the communicative side as a separate

issue would be fatal in most serious work. He cannot stop to

consider how the public or even how especially well qualified

sections of the public may like it or respond to it. He is wise,

therefore, to keep all such considerations out of mind altogether.

Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate

attention to the communicative aspect tend (there are exceptions

to this, of which Shakespeare might be one) to fall into a subordinate

rank.

But this conscious neglect of communication does not in the least

diminish the importance of the communicative aspect. It would

only do so if we were prepared to admit that only our conscious

activities matter. The very process of getting the work ‘right’

has itself, so far as the artist is normal,[12] immense communicative

consequences. Apart from certain special cases, to be discussed

later, it will, when ‘right’, have much greater communicative

power than it would have had if ‘wrong’. The degree to which

it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure

of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in

others.

But more narrowly the reluctance of the artist to consider communication

as one of his main aims, and his denial that he is at all influenced

in his’ work by a desire to affect other people, is no evidence

that communication is not actually his principal object. On a

simple view of psychology, which overlooked unconscious motives,

it would be, but not on any view of human behaviour which is

in the least adequate. When we find the artist constantly struggling

towards impersonality, towards a structure for his work which

excludes his private, eccentric, momentary idiosyncrasies, and

using always as its basis those elements which are most uniform

in their effects upon impulses; when we find private works of

art, works which satisfy the artist,[13] but are incomprehensible

to everybody else, so rare, and the publicity of the work so

constantly and so intimately bound up with its appeal to the

artist himself, it is difficult to believe that efficacy for

communication is not a main part of the ‘rightness’[14] which

the artist may suppose to be something quite different.

How far desire actually to communicate, as distinguished from

desire to produce something with communicative efficacy (however

disguised), is an ‘unconscious motive’ in the artist is a question

to which we need not hazard an answer. Doubtless individual artists

vary enormously. To some the lure of ‘immortality’ of enduring

fame, of a permanent place in the influences which govern the

human mind, appears to be very strong. To others it is often

negligible. The degree to which such notions are avowed certainly

varies with current social and intellectual fashions. At present

the appeal to posterity, the ‘nurslings of immortality’ attitude

to works of art appears to be much out of favour. “How do we

know what posterity will be like? They may be awful people!”

a contemporary is likely to remark, thus confusing the issue.

For the appeal is not to posterity merely as living at a certain

date, but as especially qualified to judge, a qualification most

posterities have lacked.

What concerns criticism is not the avowed or unavowed motives

of the artist, however interesting these may be to psychology,

but the fact that his procedure does, in the majority of instances,

make the communicative efficacy of his work correspond with his

own satisfaction and sense of its rightness. This may be due

merely to his normality, or it may be due to unavowed motives.

The first suggestion is the more plausible. In any case it is

certain that no mere careful study of communicative possibilities,

together with any desire to communicate, however intense, is

ever sufficient without close natural correspondence between

the poet’s impulses and possible impulses in his reader. All

supremely successful communication involves this correspondence,

and no planning can take its place. Nor is the deliberate conscious

attempt directed to communication so successful as the unconscious

indirect method.

Thus the artist is entirely justified in his apparent neglect

of the main purpose of his work. And when in what follows he

is alluded to without qualification as being primarily concerned

with communication, the reservations here made should be recalled.

Since the poet’s unconscious motives have been alluded to, it

may be well at this point to make a few additional remarks. Whatever

psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are

not a very profitable field for investigation. They offer far

too happy a hunting-ground for uncontrollable conjecture. Much

that goes to produce a poem is, of course, unconscious. Very

likely the unconscious processes are more important than the

conscious, but even if we knew far more than we do about how

the mind works, the attempt to display the inner working of the

artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject

to the gravest dangers. And to judge by the published work of

Freud upon Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe (e.g. _The

Psychology of the Unconscious_, p. 305), psycho-analysts tend

to be peculiarly inept as critics.

The difficulty is that nearly all speculations as to what went

on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable

than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind. The most

plausible explanations are apt to depend upon features whose

actual causation is otherwise. I do not know whether anyone but

Mr Graves has attempted to analyse _Kubla Khan_, a poem

which by its mode of composition and by its subject suggests

itself as well fitted for analysis. The reader acquainted with

current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing

Freudian onslaught.

If he will then open _Paradise Lost_, Book IV at line 223,

and read onwards: for sixty lines, he will encounter the actual

sources of not a few of the images and phrases of the poem. In

spite of—

Southward through _Eden_ went a River large,

Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hill

Pass’d underneath ingulft . . .

in spite of—

Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill

Waterd the Garden; thence united fell

Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood . . .

in spite of—

Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold

With mazie error under pendant shades

Ran Nectar . . .

in spite of—

Meanwhile murmuring waters fall

Down the slope hills, disperst . . .

his doubts may still linger until he reaches

Nor where _Abassin_ Kings thir issue Guard,

Mount Amara.

and one of the most cryptic points in Coleridge’s poem, the Abyssinian

maid, singing of Mount Abora, finds its simple explanation. The

closing line of the poem perhaps hardly needs this kind of derivation.

From one source or another almost all the matter of _Kubla

Khan_ came to Coleridge in a similar fashion. I do not know

whether this particular indebtedness has been remarked before,

but _Purchas his Pilgrimage_, Bartram’s _Travels in North

and South Carolina_, and Maurice’s _History of Hindostan_

are well-known sources, some of them indicated by Coleridge himself.

This very representative instance of the unconscious working

of a poet’s mind may serve as a not inapposite warning against

one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism.

The extent to which the arts and their place in the whole scheme

of human affairs have been misunderstood, by Critics, Moralists,

Educators, Æstheticians . . . is somewhat difficult to explain.

Often those who most misunderstood have been perfect in their

taste and ability to respond, Ruskin for example. Those who both

knew what to do with a work of art and also understood what they

were doing, have been for the most part artists and little inclined

for, or capable of, the rather special task of explaining. It

may have seemed to them too obvious to need explanation. Those

who have tried have as a rule been foiled by language. For the

difficulty which has always prevented the arts from being explained

as well as ‘enjoyed’ (to use an inadequate word in default of

an adequate) is language.

“Happy who can

Appease this virtuous enemy of man!”

It was perhaps never so necessary as now that we should know

why the arts are important and avoid inadequate answers. It will

probably become increasingly more important in the future. Remarks

such as these, it is true, are often uttered by enthusiastic

persons, and are apt to be greeted with the same smile as the

assertion that the future of England is bound up with Hunting.

Yet their full substantiation will be found to involve issues

which are nowhere lightly regarded.

The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from

and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when

their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours

when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly

seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely

reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness of interests or confused

bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure.

Both in the genesis of a work of art, in the creative moment,

and in its aspect as a vehicle of communication, reasons can

be found for giving to the arts a very important place in the

theory of Value. They record the most important judgments we

possess as to the values of experience. They form a body of

evidence which, for lack of a serviceable psychology by which

to interpret it, and through the desiccating influence of abstract

Ethics, has been left almost untouched by professed students

of value. An odd omission, for without the assistance of the

arts we could compare very few of our experiences, and without

such comparison we could hardly hope to agree as to which are

to be preferred. Very simple experiences—a cold bath in an enamelled

tin, or running for a train—may to some extent be compared without

elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted

with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary

conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most

men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions

or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us

pretend the contrary. In the arts we find the record in the only

form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences

which have seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating

persons. Through the obscure perception of this fact the poet

has been regarded as a seer and the artist as a priest, suffering

from usurpations. The arts, if rightly approached, supply the

best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable

than others. The qualifying clause is all-important however.

Happily there is no lack of glaring examples to remind us of

the difficulty of approaching them rightly.

[11] See Chapter XXIV.

[12] This point will be discussed in Chapter XXIV.

[13] Again the normality of the artist has to be considered.

[14] As will be seen, I am not going to identify ‘beauty’ with

‘communicative efficacy’. This is a trap which it is easy to

fall into. A number of the exoteric followers of Croce may be

found in it, though not Croce himself.

CHAPTER V

The Critics’ Concern with Value

What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault

In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar?

And cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?

_Gerard Hopkins_.

Between the general inquiry into the nature of the good and the

appreciation of particular works of art, there may seem to be

a wide gap, and the discussion upon which we are about to embark

may appear a roundabout way of approaching our subject. Morals

have often been treated, especially in recent times, as a side-issue

for criticism, from which the special concern of the critic must

be carefully separated. His business, so it has been said, is

with the work of art in itself, not with any consequences which

lie outside it. These may be left, it has been supposed, to others

for attention, to the clergy perhaps or to the police.

That these authorities are sadly incompetent is a minor disadvantage.

Their blunderings are as a rule so ridiculous that the effects

are brief. They often serve a useful purpose in calling attention

to work which might be overlooked. What is more serious is that

these indiscretions, vulgarities and absurdities encourage the

view that morals have little or nothing to do with the arts,

and the even more unfortunate opinion that the arts have no connection

with morality. The ineptitudes of censors, their choice of censorable

objects, ignoble blasphemy, such as that which declared _Esther

Waters_ an impure book, displays of such intelligence as considered

_Madame Bovary_ an apology for adulterous wrong, innumerable

comic, stupefying, enraging interferences fully explain this

attitude, but they do not justify it.

The common avoidance of all discussion of the wider social and

moral aspects of the arts by people of steady judgment and strong

heads is a misfortune, for it leaves the field free for folly,

and cramps the scope of good critics unduly. So loath have they

been to be thought at large with the wild asses that they have

virtually shut themselves up in a paddock. If the competent are

to refrain because of the antics of the unqualified, an evil

and a loss which are neither temporary nor trivial increase continually.

It is as though medical men were all to retire because of the

impudence of quacks. For the critic is as closely occupied with

the health of the mind as the doctor with the health of the body.

In a different way, it is true, and with a wider and subtler

definition of health, by which the healthiest mind is that capable

of securing the greatest amount of value.

The critic cannot possibly avoid using some ideas about value.

His whole occupation is an application and exercise of his ideas

on the subject, and an avoidance of moral preoccupations on his

part can only be either an abdication or a rejection under the

title of ‘morality’ of what he considers to be mistaken or dishonest

ideas and methods. The term has a dubious odour, it has been

handled by many objectionable as well as admirable people, and

we may agree to avoid it. But the errors exemplified by censorship

exploits are too common, and misconceptions as to the nature

of value too easy to fall into and too widespread, for useful

criticism to remain without a general theory and an explicit

set of principles.

What is needed is a defensible position for those who believe

that the arts are of value. Only a general theory of value which

will show the place and function of the arts in the whole system

of values will provide such a stronghold. At the same time we

need weapons with which to repel and overthrow misconceptions.

With the increase of population the problem presented by the

gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted

as excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely

more serious and appears likely to become threatening in the

near future. For many reasons standards are much more in need

of defence than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to envisage

a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular taste

replaces trained discrimination. Yet commercialism has done stranger

things: we have not yet fathomed the more sinister potentialities

of the cinema and the loud-speaker, and there is some evidence,

uncertain and slight no doubt, that such things as ‘best-sellers’

(compare _Tarzan_ with _She_), magazine verses, mantelpiece

pottery, Academy pictures, Music Hall songs, County Council buildings,

War Memorials . . . are decreasing in merit. Notable exceptions,

in which the multitude are better advised than the experts, of

course occur sometimes, but not often.

To bridge the gulf, to bring the level of popular appreciation

nearer to the consensus of best qualified opinion, and to defend

this opinion against damaging attacks (Tolstoy’s is a typical

example), a much clearer account than has yet been produced,

of why this opinion is right, is essential. These attacks are

dangerous, because they appeal to a natural instinct, hatred

of ‘superior persons’. The expert in-matters of taste is in an

awkward position when he differs from the majority. He is forced

to say in effect, “I am better than you. My taste is more refined,

my nature more cultured, you will do well to become more like

me than you are.” It is not his fault that he has to be so arrogant.

He may, and usually does, disguise the fact as far as possible,

but his claim to be heard as an expert depends upon the truth

of these assumptions. He ought then to be ready with reasons

of a clear and convincing kind as to why his preferences are

worth attention, and until these reasons are forthcoming, the

accusations that he is a charlatan and a prig are embarrassing.

He may indeed point to years of preoccupation with his subject,

he may remark like the wiseacre Longinus, sixteen hundred years

ago, “The judgment of literature is the final outcome of much

endeavour,” but with him are many Professors to prove that years

of endeavour may lead to nothing very remarkable in the end.

To habilitate the critic, to defend accepted standards against

Tolstoyan attacks, to narrow the interval between these standards

and popular taste, to protect the arts against the crude moralities

of Puritans and perverts, a general theory of value, which will

not leave the statement “This is good, that bad,” either vague

or arbitrary, must be provided. There is no alternative open.

Nor is it such an excursus from the inquiry into the nature of

the arts as may be supposed. For if a well-grounded theory of

value is a necessity for criticism, it is no less true that an

understanding of what happens in the arts is needed for the theory.

The two problems “What is good?” and “What are the arts?” reflect

light upon one another. Neither in fact can be fully answered

without the other.

To the unravelling of the first we may now proceed.

CHAPTER VI

Value as an Ultimate Idea

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.—_Aire and Angels_.

It has always been found far more easy to divide experiences[15]

into good and bad, valuable and the reverse, than to discover

what we are doing when we make the division. The history of opinions

as to what constitutes value, as to why and when anything is

rightly called good, shows a bewildering variety. But in modern

times the controversy narrows itself down to two questions. The

first of these is whether the difference between experiences

which are valuable and those which are not can be fully described

in psychological terms; whether some additional distinctive ‘ethical’

or ‘moral’ idea of a non-psychological nature is or is not required.

The second question concerns the exact psychological analysis

needed in order to explain value if no further ‘ethical’ idea

is shown to be necessary.

The first question will not detain us long. It has been ably

maintained[16] and widely accepted that when we say that an experience

is good we are simply saying that it is endowed with a certain

ethical property or attribute not to be reduced to any psychological

properties or attributes such as being desired or approved, and

that no further elucidation of this special ethical property

by way of analysis is possible. ‘Good’ on this view is in no

way a shorthand term for some more explicit account. The things

which are good, it is held, are just good, possess a property

which can be recognised by immediate intuition, and here, since

good is unanalysable, the matter must rest. All that the study

of value can do is to point out the things which possess this

property, classify them, and remove certain confusions between

ends which are good in themselves and means which are only called

good, because they are instrumental in the attainment of intrinsically

good ends. Usually those who maintain this view also hold that

the only things which are good for their own sakes and not merely

as a means are certain conscious experiences, for example, knowledge,

admiring contemplation of beauty, and feelings of affection and

veneration under some circumstances. Other things, such as mountains,

books, railways, courageous actions, are good instrumentally

because, and in so far as, they cause or make possible states

of mind which are valuable intrinsically. Thus the occurrence

of states of mind which are recognised as good is regarded as

an isolated fact of experience, not capable of being accounted

for, or linked up with the rest of human peculiarities as a product

of development in the way made familiar by the biological sciences.

The plausibility of this view derives principally from the metaphysical

assumption that there are properties, in the sense of subsistent

entities, which attach to existent particulars, but which might

without absurdity be supposed to attach to nothing.

These metaphysical entities, variously named Ideas, Notions,

Concepts or Universals, may be divided into two kinds, sensuous

and supersensuous.[17] The sensuous are those which may be apprehended

by the senses, such as ‘red’, ‘cold’, ‘round’, ‘swift’, ‘painful’,

and the supersensuous, those apprehended not in sensuous perception

but otherwise. Logical relations, ‘necessity’ or ‘impossibility,’

and such ideas as ‘willing’, ‘end’, ‘cause’, and ‘being three

in number’, have in this way been supposed to be directly apprehensible

by the mind. Amongst these supersensuous Ideas good is to be

found.

Nothing could be simpler than such a view, and to many people

the subsistence of such a property of goodness appears not surprising.

But to others the suggestion seems merely a curious survival

of abstractionism, if such a term may be defended by its close

parallel with obstructionism. A blind man in a dark room chasing

a black cat which is not there would seem to them well employed

in comparison with a philosopher apprehending such ‘Concepts’.

While ready for convenience of discourse to talk and even to

think as though Concepts and Particulars were separable and distinct

kinds of entities, they refuse to believe that the structure

of the world actually contains such a cleavage. The point is

perhaps undiscussable, and is probably unimportant, except in

so far as the habit of regarding the world as actually so cloven

is a fruitful source of bogus entities, usually hypostatised

words. The temptation to introduce premature ultimates—Beauty

in Æsthetics, the Mind and its faculties in psychology, Life

in physiology, are representative examples—is especially great

for believers in Abstract Entities. The objection to such Ultimates

is that they bring an investigation to a dead end too suddenly.

An ultimate Good is, in this instance, just such an arbitrary

full stop.

It will be agreed that a less cryptic account of good, if one

can be given, which is in accordance with verifiable facts, would

be preferable, even though no means were available for refuting

the simpler theory. Upholders of this theory, however, have produced

certain arguments to show that no other view of good is possible,

and these must first be briefly examined. They provide, in addition,

an excellent example of the misuse of psychological assumptions

in research, for although a psychological approach is often of

the utmost service, it can also be a source of obscurantism and

over-confidence. The arguments against any naturalistic account

depend upon the alleged results of directly inspecting what is

before our minds when we judge that anything is good. If we substitute,

it is maintained, any account of good whatever for ‘good’ in

the assertion, ‘This is good’—for example, ‘This is desired’

or ‘This is approved’—we can detect that what is substituted

is different from ‘good’, and that we are not then making the

same judgment. This result, it is claimed, is confirmed by the

fact that we can always ask, “Is what is desired, or what is

approved, good?” however we may elaborate the account provided,

and that this is always a genuine question which would be impossible

were the substituted account actually the analysis of good.

The persuasiveness of this refutation is found to vary enormously

from individual to individual, for the results of the experiments

upon which it relies differ. Those who have accustomed themselves to

the belief that good is a supersensuous simple Idea readily discover

the fraudulent character of any offered substitute, while those who

hold some psychological theory of value, with equal ease identify

their account with ‘good’. The further question, “When and under what

conditions can judgments be distinguished?” arises, a question so

difficult to answer that any argument becomes suspect which depends

upon assuming that they can be infallibly recognised as different. If

for any reason we wish to distinguish two judgments, we can persuade

ourselves, in any case in which they are differently formulated, that

they are different. Thus it has been thought that ‘_a_ exceeds _b_’ and

‘_a_ is greater than _b_’ are distinguishable, the first being supposed

to state simply that _a_ has the relation ‘exceeds’ to _b_, while the

second is supposed to state that _a_ has the relation ‘is’ to _greater_

which again has the relation ‘than’ to _b_.[18] The conclusion to

be drawn from the application of such methods to the problem of the

meaning of Good would seem to be that they are not competent to decide

anything about it—by no means a valueless result.

Since nothing can be concluded from a comparison of ‘This is

good’ with, let us say, ‘This is sought by an impulse belonging

to a dominant group’, let us see whether light can be gained

by considering analogous instances in which special distinct

ideas have for a time been thought indispensable only to yield

later to analysis and substitution. The case of Beauty is perhaps

too closely related to that of Good for our purpose. Those who

can persuade themselves that Good is an unique irreducible entity

might believe the same of Beauty. An episode in the theory of

the tides is more instructive. It was once thought that the moon

must have a peculiar Affinity with water: When the moon is full

the tides are higher. Clearly the seas swell in sympathy with

the increase of the moon. The history of science is full of mysterious

unique entities which have gradually evaporated as explanation

advanced.

The struggles of economists with ‘utility’, of mathematical philosophers

with ‘points’ and ‘instants’, of biologists with ‘entelechies’,

and the adventures of psycho-analysts with ‘the libido’ and ‘the

collective unconscious’ are instances in point. At present theoretical

psychology in particular is largely made up of the manipulation

of similar suspects. The Act of Judgment, the relation of Presentation,

Immediate Awareness, Direct Inspection, the Will, Feeling, Assumption,

Acceptance, are only a few of the provisional ultimates introduced

for convenience of discussion. Some of them may in the end prove

to be indispensable, but meanwhile they are not, to prudent people,

more than symbolic conveniences; theories dependent upon them

must not be allowed to shut off from investigation fields which

may be fruitful.

[15] Throughout this discussion ‘experience’ will be used in a

wide sense to stand for any occurrence in the mind. It is equivalent

to ‘mental state, or process.’ The term has often unfortunate

suggestions of passiveness and of consciousness, but many of

the ‘experiences’ here referred to would ordinarily be called

‘actions’ and have parts which are not conscious and not accessible

to introspection as important as those which are.

[16] A chief advocate of this view is Dr G. E. Moore, whose _Principia

Ethica_ and _Ethics_ contain brilliant statements of the position.

[17] Cf. F. Brentano, _The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong_,

pp. 12, 46.

[18] Cf. Russell, _The Principles of Mathematics_, p. 100. “On this

principle, from which I can see no escape, that every genuine word

must have some meaning, the _is_ and _than_ must form part of ‘_a_

is greater than _b_’, which thus contains more than two terms and

a relation. The _is_ seems to state that _a_ has to _greater_ the

relation of referent, while the _than_ states similarly that _b_ has to

_greater_ the relation of relatum. But ‘_a_ exceeds _b_’ may be held to

express solely the relation of _a_ to _b_, without including any of the

implications of further relations.” On the introspective comparison of

judgments _The Meaning of Meaning_, by C. K. Ogden and the writer, may

be consulted.

CHAPTER VII

A Psychological Theory of Value

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but because they are

useful.—_Marianne Moore_.

The method then by which any attempt to analyse ‘good’ has been

condemned is itself objectionable, and yields no sound reason

why a purely psychological account of the differences between

good, bad, and indifferent experiences should not be given. The

data for the inquiry are in part supplied by anthropology. It

has become clear that the disparity among the states of mind

recognised as good by persons of different races, habits and

civilisations is overwhelming. Any observant child, it is true,

might discover in the home circle how widely people disagree,

but the effect of education is to suppress these scientific efforts.

It has needed the vast accumulations of anthropological evidence

now available to establish the fact that as the organisation

of life and affairs alters very different experiences are perceived

to be good or bad, are favoured or condemned. The Bakairi of

Central Brazil and the Tahitians, among others, are reported,

for example, to look upon eating with the same feelings which

we reserve for quite different physiological performances, and

to regard the public consumption of food as a grave breach of

decency. In many parts of the world feelings of forgiveness towards

enemies, for example, are looked upon as low and ignoble. The

experiences which one person values are thought vicious by another.

We must allow, it is true, for widespread confusion between intrinsic

and instrumental values, and for the difficulty of identifying

experiences. Many states of mind in other people which we judge

to be bad or indifferent are no doubt unlike what we imagine

them to be, or contain elements which we overlook, so that with

fuller knowledge we might discover them to be good. In this manner

it may be possible to reduce the reported disparity of value

intuitions, but few people acquainted with the varying moral

judgments of mankind will doubt that circumstances and necessities,

present and past, explain our approval and disapproval. We start,

then, with a hearty scepticism of all immediate intuitions, and

inquire how it is that individuals in different conditions, and

at different stages of their development, esteem things so differently.

With the exception of some parents and nursemaids we have lately

all been aghast at revelations of the value judgments of infants.

Their impulses, their desires, their preferences, the things

which they esteem, as displayed by the psycho-analysts, strike

even those whose attitude towards humanity is not idealistic

with some dismay. Even when the stories are duly discounted,

enough which is verifiable remains for _infans polypervers_

to present a truly impressive figure dominating all future psychological

inquiry into value.

There is no need here to examine in detail how these early impulses

are diverted and disguised by social pressures. The rough outlines

are familiar of the ways in which by growth, by the appearance

of fresh instinctive tendencies, by increase of knowledge and

of command over the world, under the control of custom, magical

beliefs, public opinion, inculcation and example, the primitive

new-born animal may be gradually transformed into a bishop. At

every stage in the astonishing metamorphosis, the impulses, desires,

and propensities of the individual take on a new form, or, it

may be, a further degree of systematisation. This systematisation

is never complete. Always some impulse, or set of impulses, can

be found which in one way or another interferes, or conflicts,

with others. It may do so in two ways, directly or indirectly.

Some impulses are in themselves psychologically incompatible,

some are incompatible only indirectly, through producing contrary

effects in the world outside. The difficulty some people have

in smoking and writing at the same time is a typical instance

of the first kind of incompatibility; the two activities get

in each other’s way by a psychological accident as it were. Interference

of this kind can be overcome by practice to an unexpected degree,

as the feats of jugglers show; some, however, are insurmountable;

and these incompatibilities are often, as we shall see, of supreme

consequence in moral development. Indirect incompatibilities

arising through the consequences of our acts are more easy to

find. Our whole existence is one long study of them, from the

infant’s first choice whether he shall use his mouth for screaming

or for sucking, to the last codicil to his Will.

These are simple instances, but the conduct of life is throughout

an attempt to organise impulses so that success is obtained for

the greater number or mass of them, for the most important and

the weightiest set. And here we come face to face again with

the problem of value. How shall we decide which among these are

more important than: others, and how shall we distinguish different

organisations as yielding more or less value one than another?

At this point we need to be on our guard not to smuggle in any

peculiar ethical, non-psychological, idea under some disguise,

under ‘important’ or ‘fundamental’, for example.

Among those who reject any metaphysical view of value it has

become usual to define value as capacity for satisfying feeling

and desire in various intricate ways.[19] For the purpose of tracing

in detail the very subtle and varied modes in which people actually

value things, a highly intricate treatment is indispensable,

but here a simpler definition will suffice.

We may start from the fact that impulses may be divided into

appetencies and aversions, and begin by saying that anything

is valuable which satisfies an appetency or ‘seeking after.’

The term ‘desire’ would do as well if we could avoid the implication

of accompanying conscious beliefs as to what is sought and a

further restriction to felt and recognised longings. The term

‘want’ used so much by economists has the same disadvantages.

Appetencies may be, and for the most part are, unconscious, and

to leave out those which we cannot discover by introspection

would involve extensive errors. For the same reason it is wiser

not to start from feeling. Appetencies then, rather than felt

appetencies or desires, shall be our starting-point.

The next step is to agree that apart from consequences anyone

_will actually prefer_ to satisfy a greater number of equal

appetencies rather than a less. Observation of people’s behaviour,

including our own, is probably sufficient to establish this agreement.

If now we look to see what consequences can intervene to upset

this simple principle, we shall find that only interferences,

immediate or remote, direct: or indirect, with other appetencies,

need to be considered. The only _psychological_ restraints

upon appetencies are other appetencies.[20]

We can now extend our definition. Anything is valuable which

will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of

some equal or _more important_ appetency; in other words,

the only reason which can be given for not satisfying a desire

is that more important desires will thereby be thwarted. Thus

morals become purely prudential, and ethical codes merely the

expression of the mast general scheme of expediency[21] to which

an individual or a race has attained. But we have still to say

what ‘important’ stands for in this formulation. (Cf. p. 51).

There are certain evident priorities among impulses, some of

which have been studied in various ways by economists under the

headings of primary wants and secondary wants. Some needs or

impulses must be satisfied in order that others may be possible.

We must eat, drink, sleep, breathe, protect ourselves and carry

on an immense physiological business as a condition for any further

activities. Some of these impulses, breathing, for example, can

be satisfied directly, but most of them involve us in complicated

cycles of instrumental labour. Man for the most part must exert

himself half his life to satisfy even the primitive needs, and

these activities, failing other means of reaching the same ends,

share their priority. In their turn they involve as conditions

a group of impulses, whose satisfaction becomes only second in

importance to physiological necessities, those, namely, upon

which communication and the ability to co-operate depend. But

these, since man is a social creature, also become more directly

necessary to his well-being.

The very impulses which enable him to co-operate in gaining his

dinner would themselves, if not satisfied, wreck by their mere

frustration all his activities. This happens all through the

hierarchy. Impulses, whose exercise may have been originally

only important as means, and which might once have been replaced

by quite different sets, become in time necessary conditions

for innumerable quite different performances. Objects, again,

originally valued because they satisfy one need, are found later

to be also capable of satisfying others. Dress, for example,

appears to have originated in magical, ‘life-giving,’ ornaments[22],

but so many other interests derive satisfaction from it that

controversy can still arise as to its primitive uses.

The instances of priorities given must only be taken as examples.

It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that for a civilised

man, activities originally valuable as means only, often become

so important through their connections with the rest of his activities,

that life without them is regarded as intolerable. Thus acts

which will debar him from his normal relations with his fellows

are often avoided, even at the cost of death. Total cessation

of all activities is preferred to the dreadful thwarting and

privation which would ensue. The case of the soldier, or of the

conscientious objector, is thus no exception to the principle.

Life deprived of all but the barest physiological necessities,

for example, prison life, is for many people worse than non-existence.

Those who even so incur it in defence of some ‘moral ideal’ do

so because they are so organised, either permanently or temporarily,

that only in this way can their dominant impulses secure satisfaction.

The self-regarding impulses form only a part of the total activities

of social man, and the impulse of the martyr to bear witness

at any cost to what he regards as truth, is only one extreme

instance of the degree to which other impulses often assume supremacy.

For another reason any priorities mentioned must be taken only

as illustrations. We do not know enough yet about the precedences,

the hierarchies, the modes of systematisation, actual and possible,

in that unimaginable organisation, the mind, to say what order

in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds.

We only know that a growing order is the principle of the mind,

that its function is to co-ordinate, and we can detect that in

some of its forms the precedence is different from that in others.

This we could do by observation, by comparing the drunken man

with the sober, but from our own experience of our own activity

we can go much further. We can feel differences between clear

coherent thinking and confusion or stupidity, between free, controlled

emotional response and dull or clogged impassivity, between moments

when we do with our bodies more delicate and dexterous things

than seem possible, and moments of clumsiness, when we are ‘all

thumbs’, have no ‘balance’ or ‘timing’, and nothing ‘comes off’.

These differences are differences in momentary organisation,

differences in precedence between rival possible systematisations.

The more permanent and more specifically ‘moral’ differences

between individuals grow out of differences such as these and

correspond to similar precedences between larger systems.

The complications possible in the systematisation of impulses

might be illustrated indefinitely. The plasticity of special

appetencies and activities varies enormously. Some impulses can

be diverted more easily than others. Sex has a wider range of

satisfactions than hunger, for example; some are weaker than

others; some (not the same necessarily) can be suppressed in

the long run with less difficulty. Some can be modified; some

obey the ‘all or none’ rule—they must either be satisfied specifically

or completely inhibited—well-established habits may have this

peculiarity. In judging the importance of any impulse all these

considerations must be taken into account. The affiliations of

impulses, at present often inexplicable, need especially to be

considered. Within the whole partially systematised organisation,

numerous sub-systems can be found, and what would be expected

to be quite trivial impulses are often discovered to be important,

because they belong to powerful groups. Thus there are reasonable

persons who, without a high polish on their shoes, are almost

incapacitated.

The importance of an impulse, it will be seen, can be defined

for our purposes as _the extent of the disturbance of other

impulses in the individual’s activities which the thwarting of

the impulse involves_. A vague definition, it is true, but

therefore suitable to our at present incomplete and hazy knowledge

of how impulses are related. It will be observed that no special

ethical idea is introduced. We can now take our next step forward

and inquire into the relative merits of different systematisations.

No individual can live one minute without a very intricate and,

so far as it goes, very perfect co-ordination of impulses. It

is only when we pass from the activities which from second to

second maintain life to those which from hour to hour determine

what kind of life it shall be, that we find wide differences.

Fortunately for psychology we can each find wide enough differences

in ourselves from hour to hour. Most people in the same day are

Bonaparte and Oblomov by turns. Before breakfast Diogenes, after

dinner Petronius or Bishop Usher. But throughout these mutations

certain dispositions usually remain much the same, those which

govern public behaviour in a limited number of affairs varying

very greatly from one society or civilisation to another. Every

systematisation in the degree to which it is stable involves

a degree of sacrifice, but for some the price to be paid in opportunities

foregone is greater than for others. By the extent of the loss,

the range of impulses thwarted or starved, and their degree of

importance, the merit of a systematisation is judged. That organisation

which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short,

the best. Some individuals, hag-ridden by their vices, or their

virtues, to a point at which the law of diminishing returns has

deprived even these of their appropriate satisfactions, are still

unable to reorganise; they go through life incapacitated for

most of its possible enjoyments.[23] Others, paralysed with their

conflicts, are unable to do anything freely; whatever they attempt

some implicated but baffled impulse is still fitfully and fretfully

stirring. The debauchee and the victim of conscience alike have

achieved organisations whose price in sacrifice is excessive.

Both their individual satisfactions, and those for which they

are dependent upon sympathetic relations with their fellows,

an almost equal group, are unduly restricted. Upon grounds of

prudence alone they have been injudicious, and they may be condemned

without any appeal to peculiarly ‘ethical’ standards. The muddle

in which they are forced to live is itself sufficient ground

for reprobation.

At the other extreme are those fortunate people who have achieved

an ordered life, whose systems have developed clearing-houses

by which the varying claims of different impulses are adjusted.

Their free, untrammelled activity gains for them a maximum of

varied satisfactions and involves a minimum of suppression and

sacrifice. Particularly is this so with regard to those satisfactions

which require humane, sympathetic, and friendly relations between

individuals. The charge of egoism, or selfishness, can be brought

against a naturalistic or utilitarian morality such as this only

by overlooking the importance of these satisfactions in any well-balanced

life. Unfair or aggressive behaviour, and preoccupation with

self-regarding interests to the exclusion of due sensitiveness

to the reciprocal claims of human intercourse, lead to a form

of organisation which deprives the person so organised of whole

ranges of important values. No mere loss of social pleasures

is in question, but a twist or restriction of impulses, whose

normal satisfaction is involved in almost all the greatest goods

of life. The two senses in which a man may ‘take advantage’ of

his fellows can be observed in practice to conflict. Swindling

and bullying, whether in business matters or in personal relations,

have their cost; which the best judges agree to be excessive.

And the greater part of the cost lies of in the consequences

of being found out, in the loss of social esteem and so forth,

but in actual systematic disability to attain important values.

Although the person who habitually disregards the claims of his

fellows to fair treatment and sympathetic understanding may be

condemned, in most cases, upon the ground of his own actual loss

of values in such behaviour, this of course is not the reason

for the steps which may have to be taken against him. It may

very well be the case that a person’s own interests are such

that, _if he understood them_, were well organised in other

words, he would be a useful and charming member of his community;

but, so long as people are about who are not well organised,

communities must protect themselves. They can defend their action

on the ground that the general loss of value which would follow

if they did not protect themselves far outweighs such losses

as are incurred by the people whom they suppress or deport.

To extend this individual morality to communal affairs is not

difficult. Probably the best brief statement upon the point is

the following note by Bentham, if we interpret ‘happiness’ in

his formula not as pleasure but as the satisfaction of impulses.

_June_ 29, 1827.

1. Constantly actual end of action on the part of every individual

at the moment of action, his greatest happiness, according to

his view of it at that moment.

2. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual

at the moment of action, his real greatest happiness from that

moment to the end of life.

3. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual

considered as trustee for the community, of which he is considered

as a member, the greatest happiness of that same community, in

so far as it depends upon the interest which forms the bond of

union between its members.[24]

But communities, as is well known, tend to behave in the same

way to people who are better organised as well as to people who

are worse organised than the standard of the group. They deal

with Socrates or Bruno as severely as with Turpin or Bottomley.

Thus mere interference with ordinary activities is not by itself

a sufficient justification for excluding from the group people

who are different and therefore nuisances. The precise nature

of the difference must be considered, and whether and to what

degree it is the group, not the exceptional member, which ought

to be condemned. The extent to which alteration is practicable

is also relevant, and the problem in particular cases becomes

very intricate.

But the final court of appeal concerns itself in such cases with

questions, not of the wishes of majorities, but of the actual

range and degree of satisfaction which different possible systematisations

of impulse yield. Resentment at interference and gratitude for

support and assistance are to be distinguished from disapproval

and approval. The esteem and respect accorded to persons with

the social[25] virtues well developed is only in a small degree

due to the use which we find we can make of them. It is much

more a sense that their lives are rich and full.

When any desire is denied for the sake of another, the approved

and accepted activity takes on additional value; it is coveted

and pursued all the more for what it has cost. Thus the spectacle

of other people enjoying both activities without difficulty,

thanks to some not very obvious adjustment, is peculiarly distressing,

and such people are usually regarded as especially depraved.

In different circumstances this view may or may not be justified.

The element of sacrifice exacted by any stable system explains

to a large extent the tenacity with which custom is clung to,

the intolerance directed sea innovations, the fanaticism of converts,

the hypocrisy of teachers, and many other lamentable phenomena

of the moral attitudes. However much an individual may privately

find his personality varying from hour to hour, he is compelled

to join in maintaining a public facade of some rigidity and buttressed

with every contrivance which can be invented. The Wills of Gods,

the Conscience, the Catechism, Taboos, Immediate Intuitions,

Penal Laws, Public Opinion, Good Form, are all more or less ingenious

and efficient devices with the same aim—to secure the uniformity

which social life requires. By their means and by Custom, Convention,

and Superstition, the underlying basis of morality, the effort

to attain maximum satisfaction through coherent systematisation,

is a veiled and disguised to an extraordinary degree. Whence

arise great difficulties and many disasters. It is so necessary

and so difficult to secure a stable and general system of public

behaviour that any means whatever are justifiable, failing the

discovery of better. All societies hitherto achieved, however,

involve waste and misery of appalling extent.

Any public code of behaviour must, it is generally agreed, represent

a cruder and more costly systematisation than those attained

to by many of the individuals who live under the code, a point

obviously to be remembered in connection with censorship problems.

Customs change more slowly than conditions, and every change

in conditions brings with it new possibilities of systematisation.

None of the afflictions of humanity are worse than its obsolete

moral principles. Consider the effects of the obsolete virtues

of nationalism under modern conditions, or the absurdity of the

religious attitude to birth control. The present lack of plasticity

in such things involves a growing danger. Human conditions and

possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they

had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm

us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality. The view

that what we need in this tempestuous turmoil of change is a

Rock to shelter under or to cling to, pane than an efficient

aeroplane in which to ride it, is comprehensible but mistaken.

To guard against a possible misunderstanding it may be added

that the organisation and systematisation of which I have been

speaking in this chapter are not primarily an affair of conscious

planning or arrangement, as this is understood, for example,

by a great business house or by a railway. (Cf. p. 202.) We pass

as a rule from a chaotic to a better organised state by ways

which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence

of other minds. Literature and the arts are the chief means by

which these influences are diffused. It should be unnecessary

to insist upon the degree to which high civilisation, in other

words, free, varied and unwasteful life, depends upon them in

a numerous society.

[19] E.g., “The value of the object is its capacity of becoming

the object of feeling and desire through actualisation of dispositional

tendencies by acts of presumption, judgment, and assumption.”

Urban, _Valuation_, p. 53.

[20] Or, of course, aversions. In what follows we shall take no

further note of aversions. To do so would introduce inessential

complications. The omission in no way affects the argument, since

for our present purposes they may be counted in with appetencies.

[21] This view plainly has close connections with Utilitarianism.

In fact if Bentham’s editor is to be trusted in his interpretation

of his master’s doctrine, it would be what Bentham intended to

teach. “The term nearest to being synonymous with pleasure is

_volition_: what it pleases a man to do is simply what he

wills to do. . . . What a man wills to do, or what he pleases

to do, may be far from giving him enjoyment; yet shall we say

that in doing it, he is not following his own pleasure? .. .

A native of Japan, when he is offended, stabs himself to prove

the intensity of his feelings. It is difficult to prove enjoyment

in this case: yet the man obeyed his impulses.” John Hill Burton,

_Jeremy Bentham’s Works_, vol. 1, p. 22.

[22] Cf. W. J. Perry, _The Origin of Magic and Religion_,

p. 15.

[23] Both ‘enjoyment’ and ‘satisfaction’ are unsuitable terms

in this connection. An unfortunate linguistic gap must be recognised.

The full exercise of an activity is commonly its own ‘satisfaction’,

and, as we shall see later, what pleasure may accompany it is

derivative and incidental.

“Beatitudo non est virtutis premium, sed ipsa virtus.”

[24] _Works_, Vol. X, p. 560.

[25] Not necessarily ‘social workers.’ Only personal communication

can show who have the virtues here referred to.

CHAPTER VIII

Art and Morals

Com, no more,

This is meer moral babble, and direct

Against the canon laws of our foundation.—_Comus_.

From this excursus let us return to our proper task, the attempt

to outline a morality which will change its values as circumstances

alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness,

a morality which will explain, as no morality has yet explained,

the place and value of the arts in human affairs. What is good

or valuable, we have said, is the exercise of impulses and the

satisfaction of their appetencies. When we say that anything

is good we mean that it satisfies, and by a good experience we

mean one in which the impulses which make it are fulfilled and

successful, adding as the necessary qualification that their

exercise and satisfaction shall not interfere in any way with

more important impulses. Importance we have seen to be a complicated

matter, and which impulses are by an extensive inquiry into what

actually happens. The problem of morality then, the problem of

how we are to obtain the greatest possible value from life, becomes

a problem of organisation, both in the individual life and in

the adjustment of individual lives to one another, and is delivered

from all non-psychological ideas, from absolute goods and immediate

convictions, which incidentally help greatly to give unnecessary

stiffness and fixity to obsolescent codes. Without system, needless

to say, value vanishes, since in a state of chaos important and

trivial impulses alike are frustrated.

A minor problem may occur here to the reader. It concerns the

choice between a ‘crowded hour’ and an age without a name, and

the place of the time factor in valuation. There are many very

valuable states which cannot last very long in the nature of

the case, and some of these seem to have disabling consequences.

But, to take merely the most interesting instance, if we knew

more about the nervous constitution of genius we might discover

that the instability from which so many people suffer who are

at times best able to actualise the possibilities of life is

merely a consequence of their plasticity; not in the least a

price which they pay for such ‘high moments,’ but rather a result

in systems of great delicacy of wear and tear at lower levels

of adjustment. It is generally those who have the least refined

views of value who most readily believe that highly valuable

hours must be paid for afterwards. Their conception of a ‘hectic

time’ as the summit of human possibilities explains the opinion.

For those who find that the most valuable experiences are those

which are also most fruitful of further valuable experiences

no problem arises. To the query whether they prefer a long life

to a joyous one, they will reply that they find very satisfactory

a life which is both.

The most valuable states of mind then are those which involve

the widest and most comprehensive co-ordination of activities

and the least curtailment, conflict, starvation and restriction.

States of mind in general are valuable in the degree in which

they tend to reduce waste and frustration. We must be careful

in considering this formulation to remember how varied human

activities are and avoid, for example, undue admiration for practical

efficient persons whose emotional life is suppressed. But, thanks

to the psycho-analysts, we are hardly likely at the moment to

overlook the consequences of suppressions.

It is plain that no one systematisation can claim a supreme position.

Men are naturally different and in any society specialisation

is inevitable. There are evidently a great number of good systematisations

and what is good for one person will not be good for another.

A sailor, a doctor, a mathematician and a poet can hardly have

the same organisation throughout. With different conditions different

values necessarily arise. Doubtless conditions may be, and too

often are, such that no life of high value is possible. With

a naturalistic morality the reasons for altering them and the

way to do so both become clearer. But even with our present resources

and command over nature, it is universally agreed that intelligence

and goodwill could contrive that no man should be so situated

as to be deprived of all the generally accessible values. The

clearing away from moral questions of all ethical lumber and

superstitious interpolations is a step long overdue in this undertaking.

But until it has been carried further, so it is often thought,

to be busied with such apparently ‘unpractical’ activities as

art or criticism is to behave too much like a passenger on a

short-handed ship. This is true enough doubtless of some who

so busy themselves. But it is not true that criticism is a luxury

trade. The rear-guard of society cannot be extricated until the

vanguard has gone further. Goodwill and intelligence are still

too little available. The critic, we have said, is as much concerned

with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of

the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values.

What are the other qualifications required we shall see later.

For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions

of the artist an appraisal of existence. Matthew Arnold when

he said that poetry is a criticism of life was saying something

so obvious that it is constantly overlooked. The artist is concerned

with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem

to him most worth having. For reasons which we shall consider

in Chapter XXII, he is also the man who is most likely to have

experiences of value to record. He is the point at which the

growth of the mind shows itself. His experiences those at least

which give value to his work, represent conciliations of impulses

which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting.

His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered.

That his _failures_ to bring order out of chaos are often

more conspicuous than those of other men is due in part at least

to his greater audacity; it is a penalty of ambition and a consequence

of his greater plasticity. But when he succeeds, the value of

what he has accomplished is found always in a more perfect organisation

which makes more of the possibilities of response and activity

available.

What value is and which experiences are most valuable will never

be understood so long as we think in terms of those large abstractions,

the virtues and the vices. “You do invert the covenants of her

trust,” said Comus, that disreputable advocate of Utilitarianism,

to the Lady, that enemy of Nature. Instead of recognising that

value lies in the ‘minute particulars’ of response and attitude,

we have tried to find it in conformity to abstract prescriptions

and general rules of conduct. The artist is an expert in the

‘minute particulars’ and _qua_ artist pays little or no

attention to generalisations which he finds in actual: practice

are too crude to discriminate between what is valuable and the

reverse. For this reason the moralist has always tended to distrust

or to ignore him. Yet since the fine conduct of life springs

only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched

by any general ethical maxims, this neglect of art by the moralist

has been tantamount to a disqualification. The basis of morality,

as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad

taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise

admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other

defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary

responses are disorganised and confused.

CHAPTER IX

Actual and Possible Misapprehensions

Who

Saith that? It is not written so on high!—_Cain_.

Every true view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes

to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes

to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mistaken offshoots

are responsible for the difficulty with which the true view gains

acceptance. Like shadows, reflections, or echoes, they obscure

and baffle apprehension. Nowhere are they more inconvenient than

in the problem of the moral function of art. A consideration

of some instances will help to make clearer what has been said,

to distinguish the view recommended from its disreputable relatives

and to remove possible misapprehensions.

Allusion has several times been made to Tolstoy, and nothing

in the recent history of æsthetic opinion is so remarkable as

the onslaught made by that great artist against all the arts.

No better example could be found of how _not_ to introduce

moral preoccupations into the judgment of values. Blinded by

the light of a retarded conversion, knowing, as an artist, the

extreme importance of the arts, but forgetting in the fierceness

of his new convictions all the experience that had in earlier

years made up his own creations, he flung himself, a Principle

in each hand, upon the whole host of European masterpieces and

left as he believed hardly a survivor standing.

He begins by emphasising the enormous output of energy which is devoted

to Art in civilised countries. He then very rightly asserts that it is

of great importance to know what this activity is about; and he devotes

thirty pages to the various definitions which have been attempted of

Art and Beauty. He concludes, after ransacking the somewhat uncritical

compilations of Schasler and Knight, that æsthetics have been hitherto

an idle amalgam of reverie and phantasy, from which no definition of

Art emerges. Partly he traces this result to the use in æsthetics of

notions of beauty; partly to an anxiety in the critics to justify the

existent forms of Art. They are, he insists, less concerned to discover

what Art is, than to show that those things which are currently termed

Art must in fact be Art. To these sections of _What is Art?_ assent may

be accorded. He then sets out his own definition. “To evoke in oneself

a sensation which one has experienced before, and having evoked it in

oneself, to communicate this sensation in such a way that others may

experience the same sensation . . . so that other men are infected by

these sensations and pass through them; in this does the activity of

Art consist.”[26] So far excellent; if we translate ‘sensation’, the

current æsthetico-psychological jargon of the art schools in Tolstoy’s

day, by some more general term such as experience. But this is only a

first stage of the definition; there are additions to be made. Any Art

which is infective, as he uses that word in the quotation above, is

pure Art as opposed to modern or adulterated Art; but in deciding the

full value of any work of Art we have to consider the nature of its

contents, the nature, that is, of the experiences communicated. The

value of art contents is judged, according to Tolstoy, by the religious

consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is

the higher comprehension of the meaning of life, and this, according to

him, is the universal union of men with God and with one another.

When Tolstoy applies his criterion to the judgment of particular

works of art, he is able to deduce striking results: “Christian Art,

that is, the Art of our time, must be catholic in the direct sense

of that word—that is, universal—and so must unite all men. There are

but two kinds of sensations which unite all men—the sensations which

arise from the recognition of man’s filial relation to God and of

the brotherhood of men, and the simplest vital sensations which are

accessible to all men without exception, such as the sensations of joy,

meekness of spirit, alacrity, calm, etc. It is only these two kinds

of sensations that form the subject of the Art of our time, which is

good according to its contents.” Tolstoy in fact denied the value of

all human endeavours except those which tend _directly_ to the union

of men. It may be suspected that his religious enthusiasm was due

to his belief that Religion had this tendency. He distinguished, it

will be remembered, very sharply between Religion and religions; a

distinction with which many besides Tolstoy have consoled themselves.

But his essential aim, his single value, was the union of men. All

other things are of value only in so far as they tend to promote this,

and art shares the general subordination. Even a joke, for Tolstoy, is

only a joke so long as all men may share in it, a truly revolutionary

amendment. The sharing is more important than the merriment. On these

principles he surveys European Art and Literature. With magnificent

defiance of accepted values, and the hardness of heart of a supreme

doctrinaire, one after another of the unassailables is toppled from

its eminence. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc., are rejected; Wagner

in especial is the object of a critical _tour de force_. In their

place are set _A Tale of Two Cities_, _The Chimes_, _Adam Bede_, _Les

Miserables_ (almost the only thing in French literature of which

Tolstoy could approve), and _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.[27] All art which does

not directly urge the union of men, or whose appeal is suspected to be

limited to cultured and aristocratic circles, is condemned. “All who

are not hand in hand with me are against me,” thought Tolstoy, under

the urgency of his sense of human misery. Any diversion of art from a

single narrow channel seemed to him an irreparable waste. Remembering

no doubt how deeply he had been affected and influenced in the past

by the things which he now deplored, he came in the end to assign

unlimited powers to art when rightly directed. But, if we think of the

other things which he also invoked to the same end, there is a ring of

despair in his final cry: “Art must remove violence, only Art can do

this.”

We may compare with this a famous utterance of another aristocrat,

equally a supreme artist, equally in rebellion against the whole

fabric of conventional civilisation, whose “passion for reforming

the world” was not less than Tolstoy’s, but who differed from

him in the possession of a wider and more complete sense of values

and a mind not riven and distorted by a late conversion.

“The whole objection of the immorality of poetry rests upon a

misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the

moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements

which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes

examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable

doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive

and subjugate one another.

“But poetry acts in a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges

the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand

unapprehended combinations of thought. Whatever strengthens and

purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit

to sense, is useful. It exceeds all imagination to conceive what

would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante,

Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon,

nor Milton, had ever existed.”

It is curious how the insertion of particular names here seems

to weaken the argument. The world, we feel fairly certain, would

be on the whole much the same even if there had been no Boccaccio

and no Lord Bacon. Things would not be very different, some people

will think, even if none of these authors had ever bestirred

themselves to write. Shakespeare, as so often, would perhaps

be counted an exception. But this sense that there are, after

all, very few poets who individually make much difference is

not in the least an objection to Shelley’s main thesis. We could

bale a vast amount of water out of the sea without making any

apparent difference to it, but this would not prove that it does

not consist of water. Even if the removal of the influence of

all the poets whose names we know made no appreciable difference

in human affairs, it would still be true that the enlargement

of the mind, the widening of the sphere of human sensibility,

is brought about through poetry.

A too narrow view of values, or a too simple conception of morality

is usually the cause of these misunderstandings of the arts.

The agelong controversy as to whether the business of poetry

is to please or to instruct shows this well. “Poets wish either

to instruct or to delight or to combine solid and useful with

the agreeable.” “It is only for the purpose of being useful that

Poetry ought to be agreeable; pleasure is only a means which

she uses for the end of profit.” So thought Boileau and Rapin.

Dryden, modest and penetrating in his fashion, was “satisfied

if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only,

end of poetry: instruction can be admitted but in the second

place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” But he does

not further specify the nature of the delight or the instruction,

an omission in which most critics except Shelley agree. Our view

on the point entirely depends upon this. If we set the sugarcoated-pill

view aside as beneath serious consideration, there still remains

a problem. A reviewer of the recent performance of the _Cenci_

will state it excellently for us.

“It had been better had Shelley’s _Cenci_ remained for ever

banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved, agonising misery.

. . . What excuse is there for the depicting of horrors such

as these? There must be some, for a house packed with literary

celebrities fiercely applauded. If the function of the theatre

is to amuse, then in the presentation of the _Cenci_ it

has missed its aim. If it is to instruct, what moral can be pointed

for the better conduct of our lives by a tragedy such as this?

If Art be the answer, then Art may well be sacrificed.”

No doubt the literary celebrities, with their applause, were

to blame, in part, for this. Our relic of the Age of Good Sense

made a just reaction. He accurately registered the effect to

which bad acting and inept production[28] gave rise. But it is

with his argument not with his reaction that we are concerned.

The celebrities, if they had not been too busy giving vent (though

in a mistaken form) to their loyalty to the memory of Shelley,

and to their sense of triumph over the Censor, might have told

him that neither amusement nor instruction is what the judicious

seek from Tragedy, and referred him to Aristotle. Neither term,

unless we wrench it right out of its usual setting, is appropriate

to the greater forms of art. The experiences which they occasion

are too full, too varied, too whole, too subtly balanced upon

opposing impulses, whether of pity and terror or of joy and despair,

to be so easily described. Tragedy—

beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs as if for festal purpose decked

With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton

And Time the Shadow,

is still the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely

contemplate the human situation, its issues unclouded, its possibilities

revealed. To this its value is due and the supreme position among

the arts which it has occupied in historical times and still

occupies; what will happen in the future we can only conjecture.

Tragedy is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed

among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle

for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified

in a moral. But the fuller discussion of Tragedy we must defer.

These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression,

which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are

merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations

of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.”

It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would

identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic

theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of

the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of

a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the

whole. Pleasure, however, has its place in the whole account

of values, and an important place, as we shall see later. But

it must not be allowed to encroach on ground to which it has

no right.

[26] _What is Art?_ Section V.

[27] _What is Art?_ Section XVI.

[28] “This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and

monstrous: anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage

would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject

must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the

events.” From Shelley’s preface. The producers, however, were

of the contrary opinion.

CHAPTER X

Poetry for Poetry’s Sake

On passe plus facilement d’un extrême à un autre

que d’une nuance à une autre nuance.

_Attirance de la Mort_.

Another possible misapprehension which cannot be left unmentioned

arises in connection with the doctrine ‘Art for Art’s sake’,

a doctrine definitely and detrimentally dated; it concerns the

place of what are called ulterior effects in the valuing of a

work of art. It has been very fashionable to turn up the nose

at any attempt to apply, as it is said, ‘external canons’ to

art. But it may be recalled that of all the great critical doctrines,

the ‘moral’, theory of art (it would be better to call it the

‘Ordinary values’ theory) has the most great minds behind it.

Until Whistler came to start the critical movements of the last

half-century, few poets, artists or critics had ever doubted

that the value of art experiences was to be judged as other values

are. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth

Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater, to name

only the most prominent, all with varying degrees of refinement,

held the same view.[29] The last is a somewhat unexpected adherent.

“Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting

good art, then if it be devoted further to the increase of men’s

happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or to the enlargement

of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of

new and old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world

as may fortify us in our sojourn here . . . it will also be great

art; if, over and above those qualities which I have summed up

. . . it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds

its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure

of human life.”[30] No better brief emotive account of the conditions

under which an experience has value could be desired.

Against all these weighty opinions, the view—supported largely

by a distinction between Form and Content, Subject and Handling,

which will be examined elsewhere,[31] and relying upon the doctrine

of intrinsic, supersensible, ultimate Goods discussed above—that

the values of art are unique, or capable of being considered

in isolation from all others, has held sway for some thirty years

in many most reputable quarters. The reasons for this attempted

severance have already been touched upon; they are of all sorts.

Partly it may be due to the influence of Whistler and Pater,

and of those still more influential disciples who spread their

doctrines. Partly it may be due to a massed reaction against

Ruskin. Partly again we may suspect the influence, rather suddenly

encountered, of Continental and German æsthetics upon the English

mind. Almost from the beginning of scientific æsthetics, the

insistence on the æsthetic experience as an experience, peculiar,

complete, and capable of being studied in isolation, has received

prominence. Often it is no more than an extension into this considering,

whenever possible, one thing at a time. When critics in England,

not very long ago, heard that there was something connected with

art and poetry—namely, the æsthetic experience—which could be

considered and examined in isolation by the methods of introspection,

they not unnaturally leapt to the conclusion that its value also

could be isolated and described without reference to other things.

In some hands the further conclusions drawn were too queer to

outlive their hour of fashion. They amounted often to the postulation

of a ‘specific thrill’ yielded by works of art and nothing else,

unlike and unconnected with all other experiences. “No queerer,”

it was said, “than anything else in this incredibly queer universe.”[32]

But the queerness of the universe is of a different and a more

interesting sort. It may be a curiosity shop but it nowhere seems

to be a chaos.

For our present purposes we need only consider the view as it

is put forward by its ablest exponent, a critic who by his own

explanations of this formula goes very far towards meeting the

objection we urge.

“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

ifs own account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its _poetic_

value is this intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may have also have

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. . . . 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[33].”

There seem four points well worth close consideration here. The

first is that the things mentioned as possible ulterior values

in Dr Bradley’s list—culture, religion, instruction, softening

of the passions, furtherance of good causes, the poet’s fame,

or money, or quiet conscience—these things are plainly upon quite

different levels. He says of all of them that they cannot possibly

determine the poetic worth of an æsthetic experience; that whether

or no any poetic experience is poetically valuable cannot depend

upon any of these ulterior values. But it is certain that some

of these stand in a quite different relation to the poetic experience

than do others. Culture, religion, instruction in some special

senses, softening of the passions, and the furtherance of good

causes may be directly concerned in our judgments of the _poetic_

values of experiences. Otherwise, as we shall see, the word ‘poetic’

becomes a useless sound. On the other hand, the poet’s fame,

his reward, or his conscience, seem plainly to be irrelevant.

That is the first point.

The second point is that what Dr Bradley says as to the imaginative

experience—that it is to be judged entirely from within—is misleading.

In most cases we do not judge it from within. Our judgment as

to its value is no part of it. In rare instances such a judgment

may be part of it, but this is exceptional. As a rule we have

to come out of it in order to judge it, and we judge it by memory

or by other residual effects which we learn to be good indices

to its value. If by judging it in the experience we mean merely

while these residual effects are fresh, we may agree. In so judging

it, however, it’s “place in the great structure of human life”

cannot possibly be ignored. The value which it has is dependent

upon this, and we cannot judge that value without taking this

place, and with it innumerable ulterior worths, into account.

It is not that we shall evaluate it wrongly if we neglect them,

but that evaluation is just this taking account of everything,

and of the way things hang together.

The third point arises with regard to Dr Bradley’s third position,

that 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. Here all depends upon _which are

the ulterior ends in question_, and what the kind of poetry.

It will not be denied that for some kinds of poetry the _intrusion_

of certain ulterior ends may, and often does, lower their value;

but there seem plainly to be other kinds of poetry in which its

value as poetry definitely and directly depends upon the ulterior

ends involved. Consider the Psalms, Isaiah, the New Testament,

Dante, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, Rabelais, any really universal

satire, Swift, Voltaire, Byron.

In all these cases the consideration of ulterior ends has been

certainly essential to the act of composing. That needs no arguing;

but, equally, this consideration of the ulterior ends involved

is inevitable to the reader.

Dr Bradley puts this third position forward in a tentative form;

he says that the ulterior _tends_ to lower poetic value,

an important reservation, but it would be better to distinguish

two kinds of poetry, one to which his doctrine applies and one

to which it does not. As illustrations of the cases in which

his doctrine does apply, _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Hartleap

Well_ may be mentioned. Here in both cases the experiences

are of a kind into which no ulterior ends enter in any important

degree. Thus when Coleridge and Wordsworth introduce moral considerations,

the effect is undeniably one of intrusion. As Mrs Meynell comically

remarks, “_The Ancient Mariner_ offends upon a deliberate

plan. It denies the natural function of observation when it invents

sanctions for the protection of a wild bird’s life, and for the

punishment of its slaughter. Coleridge intends to enforce a lesson

by telling us that 200 mariners died of thirst because they had—with

the superstition pardonable in their state of education—supposed

an albatross to be the bringer of foggy weather, and had approved

its slaughter, as almost all men implicitly approve the daily

slaughter of innocent beast and bird.” But this charge against

Coleridge is only reasonable if we make of this ulterior end,

this ‘lesson’ against cruelty to animals, a vital part of the

poem. Mrs Meynell, we may think, takes Coleridge’s moral too

seriously. It may be this possibility which Coleridge had in

mind when he said, long afterwards, that _The Ancient Mariner_

did not contain enough of the moral. As the poem stands, it is

of a kind into which ulterior ends do not enter. If we are to

take this alien element, this lesson, into account in our judgment,

we shall have deliberately to misread the poem, with Mrs Meynell.

The same considerations apply to _Hartleap Well_; and so

far as Dr Bradley is merely enforcing this point, we may agree;

but he fails to notice—it is only fair to say that few critics

seem ever to notice it—that poetry is of more than one kind,

and that the different kinds are to be judged by different principles.

There is a kind of poetry into the judgment of which ulterior

ends directly and essentially enter; a kind part of whose value

is directly derivable from the value of the ends with which it

is associated. There are other kinds, into which ulterior ends

do not enter in any degree, and there are yet other kinds whose

value may be lowered by the intrusion of ends relatively trivial

in value. Dr Bradley is misled by the usual delusion that there

is in this respect only one kind of poetry, into saying far more

than the facts of poetic experience will justify.

The fourth point is of more general importance perhaps than these

three. It is in fact the real point of disagreement between the

view we are upholding and the doctrine which Dr Bradley, together

with the vast majority of modern critics, wishes to maintain.

It is stated in the concluding sentence of the paragraph which

I have quoted. He says of poetry that “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. To possess it fully, you must enter that world, conform

to its laws, and ignore, for the time being, the beliefs, aims,

and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world

of reality.” This doctrine insists: upon a severance between

poetry and what, in opposition, may be called life; a complete

severance, allowing however, as Dr Bradley goes on to insist—an

‘underground’ connection. But this ‘underground’ connection is

all-important. Whatever there is in the poetic experience has

come through it. The world of poetry has in no sense any different

reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws

and no other-worldly peculiarities. It is made up of experiences

of exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways.

Every poem however is a strictly limited piece of experience,

a piece which breaks up more or less easily if alien elements

intrude. It is more highly and more delicately organised than

ordinary experiences of the street or of the hillside; it is

fragile. Further it is communicable. It may be experienced by

many different minds with only slight variations. That this should

be possible is one of the conditions of its organisation. It

differs from many other experiences, whose value is very similar,

in this very communicability. For these reasons when we experience

it, or attempt to, we must preserve it from contamination, from

the irruptions of personal particularities. We must keep the

poem undisturbed by these or we fail to read it and have some

other experience instead. For these reasons we establish a severance,

we draw a boundary between the poem and what is not the poem

in our experience. But this is no severance between unlike things

but between different systems of the same activities. The gulf

between them is no greater than that between the impulses which

direct the pen and those which conduct the pipe of a man who

is smoking and writing at once, and the ‘disassociation’ or severance

of the poetic experience is merely a freeing of it from extraneous

ingredients and influences. The myth of a ‘transmutation’ or

‘poetisation’ of experience and that other myth of the ‘contemplative’

or ‘æsthetic’ attitude, are in part due to talking about Poetry

and the ‘poetic’ instead of thinking about the concrete experiences

which are poems.

The separation of poetic experience from its place in life and

its ulterior worths, involves a definite lop-sidedness, narrowness,

and incompleteness in those who preach it sincerely. No one,

of course, would bring such charges against the author of _Shakespearean

Tragedy_; his is that welcome and not unfamiliar case of the

critic whose practice is a refutation of his principles. When

genuinely held the view leads to an attempted splitting up of

the experiencing reader into a number of distinct faculties or

departments which have no real existence. It is impossible to

divide a reader into so many men—an æsthetic man, a moral man,

a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so

on. It cannot be done. In any genuine experience all these elements

inevitably enter. But if it could be done, as many critics pretend,

the result would be fatal to the wholeness and sanction of the

critical judgment. We cannot e.g. read Shelley adequately while

believing that all his views are moonshine—read _Prometheus

Unbound_ while holding that ‘the perfectibility of man is

an undesirable ideal’ and that ‘hangmen are excellent things.’

To say that there is a purely æsthetic or poetic approach to,

let us say, the _Sermon on the Mount_, by which no consideration

of the intention or ulterior end of the poem enters, would appear

to be merely mental timidity, the shrinking remark of a person

who finds essential literature too much for him. Into an adequate

reading of the greater kinds of poetry everything not private

and peculiar to the individual reader must come in. The reader

must be required to wear no blinkers, to overlook nothing which

is relevant, to shut off no part of himself from participation.

If he attempts to assume the peculiar attitude of disregarding

all but some hypothetically-named æsthetic elements, he joins

Henry James’ Osmond in his tower, he joins Blake’s Kings and

Priests in their High Castles and Spires.

[29] It is true that in mechanics one might draw up a formidable

list of names and say “Opposed to all these appeared a certain

Einstein”, but the cases are not parallel. A scientific advance

is different from a change of fashion, and no new facts nor any

new hypothesis—no Michelson-Morley experiment, nor any widened

purview—led up to the separate value theory of art. Although

historians of æsthetics are sometimes pleased to present their

facts as though they represented a progress from cruder to more

refined opinion, from ignorance to wisdom, there is no sound

basis for the procedure. Aristotle was at least as clearly and

fully aware of the relevant facts and as adequate in his explanations

as any later inquirers. Æsthetics in fact has hardly yet reached

the scientific stage, in which succeeding investigators can start

where their predecessors left off.

[30] _An Essay on Style_. The final paragraph.

[31] See Chapters XVI, XVIII and XXXI.

[32] Clive Bell, _Art_, p. 49.

[33] A. C. Bradley, _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, p. 5.

CHAPTER XI

A Sketch for a Psychology

“Wot’s wot?” repeated one of the buccaneers in a deep growl. “Ah,

he’d be a lucky one as knowed that!”—_Treasure Island_.

M. Jules Romains recently observed[34] that psychology hitherto

has merely contrived to say laboriously and obscurely, and with

less precision, what we all know without its aid already. This

is regrettably difficult to deny; any particular remark of a

psychologist, if true, is unlikely to be startling. But at certain

points new light has none the less crept in. Incoherences and

flaws have been found in the common-sense picture, adumbration

rather, of the mind; connections between bits of our behaviour,

which common-sense had missed, have been noted; and, still more

important, a general outline of the kind of thing a mind is has

begun to take shape. The next age but two, if an oncoming Age

of Relativity is to be followed as Mr Haldane supposes[35] by

an Age of Biology, will be introduced by a recognition on the

part of many minds of their own nature, a recognition which is

certain to change their behaviour and their outlook considerably.

We are still far removed from such an age. None the less enough

is known for an analysis of the mental events which make up the

reading of a poem to be attempted. And such an analysis is a

primary necessity for criticism. The psychological distinctions

which have hitherto served the critic are too few and his use

of them in most cases too unsystematic, too vague, and too uncertain,

for his insight to yield its full advantages.

The view put forward here is in many respects heterodox, a disadvantage

in a sketch. But so many difficulties attend any exposition of

psychology, however orthodox and however full, that the dangers

of misunderstanding are outweighed by the advantages of a fresh

point of view. It is the general outline and in particular the

insistence upon an account of knowledge in terms merely of the

causation of our thoughts which is contrary to received opinion.

The detail of the analysis of poetic experience, the account

of imagery, of emotion, of pleasure, of incipient action and

so forth, although, so far as I am aware, no similar analysis

has before been explicitly set out, may be taken as comparatively

orthodox.

For our immediate purpose, for a clearer understanding of values

and for the avoidance of unnecessary confusions in criticism,

it is necessary to break away from the set of ideas by which

popular and academic psychology alike attempt to describe the

mind. We naturally tend to conceive it as a thing of a peculiar

spiritual kind, fairly: persistent though variable, endowed with

attributes, three in number, its capacities namely for knowing,

willing and feeling, three irreducible modes of being aware of

or concerned with objects. A violent shock to this entity comes

when we are forced by a closer examination of the facts to conceive

it as doing all these three unconsciously as well as consciously.

An unconscious mind is a fairly evident fiction, useful though

it may be, and goings on in the nervous system are readily accepted

as a satisfactory substitute. From this to the recognition of

the conscious mind as a similar fiction is no great step, although

one which many people find difficult. Some of this difficulty

is due to habit. It wears off as we notice how many of the things

which we believed true of the fiction can be stated in terms

of the less fictitious substitute. But much of the difficulty

is emotive, non-intellectual, more specifically religious, in

origin.[36] It is due to desire, to fear, or to exaltation as

the case may be, to emotion masquerading as thought, and is a

difficulty not so easily removed.

That the mind is the nervous system, or rather a part of its

activity, has long been evident, although the prevalence among

psychologists of persons with philosophic antecedents has delayed

the recognition of the fact in an extraordinary fashion. With

every advance of neurology—and a decided advance here was perhaps

the only good legacy left by the War[37]—the evidence becomes

more overwhelming. It is true that as our knowledge of the nervous

system stands at present much of the detail of the identification

is impenetrably obscure, and the account which we give must frankly

be admitted to be only a degree less fictitious than one in terms

of spiritual happenings. But the kind of account which is likely

to be substantiated by future research has become clear, largely

through the work of Behaviourists and Psycho-analysts, the assumptions

and results of both needing to be corrected however in ways which

the recent experimental and theoretical investigations of the

‘_Gestalt_’ School are indicating.

The view that we are our bodies, more especially our nervous

systems, more especially still the higher or more central co-ordinating

parts of it, and that the mind is a system of impulses should

not be described as Materialism. It might equally well be called

Idealism. Neither term in this connection has any scientific,

any strictly symbolic meaning or reference. Neither stands for

any separable, observable group of things, or character in things.

Each is primarily an emotive term used to incite or support certain

emotional attitudes. Like all terms used in the vain attempt

(vain because the question is nonsensical) to say what things

are, instead of to say how they behave, they state nothing. Like

all such terms they change in different hands from banners to

bludgeons, being each for some people an emotive agent round

which attitudes, aspirations, values are rallied, and for other

people a weapon of offence by which persons supposed adverse

to these attitudes, aspirations and values may, it is hoped,

be discomfited. That the Materialist and the Idealist believe

themselves to be holding views which are incompatible with one

another is but an instance of a very widespread confusion between

scientific statement and emotive appeal, with which we shall

in later chapters be much concerned. The Mind-Body problem is

strictly speaking no problem; it is an _imbroglio_ due to

failure to settle a real problem, namely, as to when we are making

a statement and when merely inciting an attitude. A problem simpler

here than in many cases, since the alleged statement is of an

impossible form[38], but complicated on both sides of the controversy

by misunderstanding of the attitudes which the other side is

concerned to maintain. For if mental events are recognised as

identical with certain neural events, neither the attitudes which

ensue towards them nor the attitudes they themselves will warrantably

take up, are changed so much as either Idealists or Materialists

have commonly supposed. To call anything mental or spiritual,

as opposed to material, or to call anything material as opposed

to mental, is only to point out a difference between the two

kinds. The differences which can actually be detected between

a mental event, such as a toothache, and a non-mental event,

such as a sunspot, remain when we have identified the mental

event with a neural change. So recognised, it loses none of its

observable peculiarities, only certain alleged unstatable and

ineffable attributes are removed. It remains unlike any event

which is not mental; it is as unparalleled as before. It retains

its privileges as the most interesting of all events, and our

relations to one another and to the world remain essentially

as they were before the recognition. The extreme ecstasies of

the mystic, like the attitudes of the engineer towards a successful

contrivance, remain just as much and just as little appropriate

with regard to the humblest or the proudest of our acts. Thus

the identification of the mind with a part of the working of

the nervous system, need involve, theology apart, no disturbance

of anyone’s attitude to the world, his fellow-men, or to himself.

Theology, however, is still more implicit in current attitudes

than traditional sceptics suspect.

The nervous system is the means by which stimuli from the environment,

or from within the body, result in appropriate behaviour. All

mental events occur in the course of processes of adaptation,

somewhere between a stimulus and a response. Thus every mental

event has an origin in stimulation, a character, and consequences,

in action or adjustment for action. Its character is sometimes

accessible to introspection. What it feels like, in those cases

in which it feels or is felt at all, is consciousness, but in

many cases nothing is felt, the mental event is unconscious.

Why some events are conscious but not others is at present a

mystery; no one has yet succeeded in bringing the various hints

which neurology may offer into connection with one another. In

some important respects conscious and unconscious mental events

must differ, but what these are no one can as yet safely conjecture.

On the other hand there are many respects in which they are similar,

and these are the respects which are at present most open to

investigation.

The process in the course of which a mental event may occur,

a process apparently beginning in a stimulus and ending in an

act, is what we have called an impulse. In actual experience

single impulses of course never occur. Even the simplest human

reflexes are very intricate bundles of mutually dependent impulses,

and in any actual human behaviour the number of simultaneous

and connected impulses occurring is beyond estimation. The simple

impulse in fact is a limit, and the only impulses psychology

is concerned with are complex. It is often convenient to speak

as though simple impulses were in question, as when we speak

of an impulse of hunger, or an impulse to laugh, but we must

not forget how intricate all our activities are.

To take the stimulus as a starting-point is in some ways misleading.

Of the possible stimuli which we might at any moment receive,

only a few actually take effect. Which are received and which

impulses ensue depends upon which of our interests is active,

upon the general set, that is, of our activities. This is conditioned

in a large degree by the state, of satisfaction or unrest, of

the recurrent and persistent needs of the body. When hungry and

when replete we respond differently to the stimulus of a smell

of cooking. A change in the wind unnoticed by the passengers

causes the captain to reduce sail. Social needs in this respect

are often as important as individual. Thus some people walking

in a Gallery with friends before whom they wish to shine will

actually receive far more stimulus from the pictures than they

would if by themselves.

A stimulus then must not be conceived as an alien intruder which

thrusts itself upon us and, after worming a devious way through

our organism as through a piece of cheese, emerges at the other

end as an act. Stimuli are only received if they serve some need

of the organism and the form which the response to them takes

depends only in part upon the nature of the stimulus, and much

more upon what the organism ‘wants’, i.e. the state of equilibrium

of its multifarious activities.

Thus experience has two sources which in different cases have

very different importance. So far as we are thinking about or

referring to certain definite things our behaviour in all probability

will only be appropriate (i.e. our thoughts true) in so far as

it is determined by the nature of the present and past stimuli

we have received from those things and things like them. So far

as we are satisfying our needs and desires a much less strict

connection between stimulus and response is sufficient. A baby

howls at first in much the same way, whatever the cause of his

unrest, and older persons behave not unlike him. Any occasion

may be sufficient for taking exercise, or for a quarrel, for

falling in love or having a drink. To this partial independence

of behaviour (from stimulus) is due the sometimes distressing

fact that views, opinions and beliefs vary so much with our differing

moods. Such variation shows that the view, belief or opinion

is not a purely intellectual product, is not due to thinking

in the narrower sense, of response that is governed by stimuli,

present or past, but is an attitude adopted to satisfy some desire,

temporary or lasting. Thought in the strictest sense varies only

with evidence: but attitudes and feelings change for all manner

of reasons.

The threefold division between the causes, character and consequences

of a mental event, conscious or unconscious, corresponds, with

certain qualifications, to the usual division in traditional

psychology of thought (or cognition), feeling, and will (or conation).

To be cognisant of anything, to know it, is to be influenced

by it; to desire, to seek, to will anything is to act towards

it. In between these two are the conscious accompaniments, if

any, of the whole process. These last, the conscious characters

of the mental event, include evidently both sensations and feelings.

(Cf. Chapter XVL, pp. 125-128.)

The correspondence is not by any means simple. Many things are included

under knowing, for example, which on this reconstruction of psychology

would have to be counted as willing.[39] Expectation, usually described

as a cognitive attitude, becomes a peculiar form of action, getting

ready, namely, to receive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others.

The opposite case is equally common. Hunger, a typical desire on

the usual account, would become knowledge, giving us, when genuine

hunger, obscure awareness of a lack of nourishment, when habit-hunger,

awareness of a certain phase in a cyclic visceral process. These

illustrations bring out clearly what is everywhere recognised, that the

customary cognition-feeling-conation classification of mental goings on

is not a pigeon-holing of exclusive processes. Every mental event has,

in varying degrees, all three characteristics. Thus expectation as a

preparation for certain stimuli may lower the threshold for them, and

sometimes makes their reception more and sometimes less discriminating;

hunger also is characteristically accompanied by a search for food.

The advantage of substituting the causation, the character and

the consequences of a mental event as its fundamental aspects

in place of its knowing, feeling, and willing aspects is that

instead of a trio of incomprehensible ultimates we have a set

of aspects which not only mental events but all events share.

We have, of course, to introduce qualifications. Stimuli, as

we have mentioned above, are not the only causes of mental events.

The nervous system is specialised to receive impressions through

the organs of sense, but its state at any moment is also determined

by a host of other factors. The condition of the blood and the

position of the head are typical instances. Only that part of

the cause of a mental event which takes effect through incoming

(sensory) impulses or through effects of past sensory impulses

can be said to be thereby known. The reservation no doubt involves

complications. But any plausible account of what knowledge is

and how it happens is bound to be complicated.

Similarly, not all the effects of a mental event are to be counted

as what that event wills or seeks after; apoplectic strokes,

for example, can be ruled out. Only those movements which the

nervous system is specialised to incite, which take place through

motor impulses, should be included.

On all other accounts the relation between an awareness and what

it is aware of is a mystery. We can name the relation as we please,

apprehension, presentation, cognition or knowledge, but there

we have to leave the matter. On this account we make use of the

fact that an awareness, say of a variety of black marks on this

page, is caused in a certain peculiar way, namely through impressions

on a part of the brain (the retina) and various complicated connected

goings on in other parts of the brain. To say that the mental

(neural) event so caused is aware of the black marks is to say

that it is caused by them, and here ‘aware of’ = ‘caused by’.

The two statements are merely alternative formulations.

In extending this account to more complicated situations where

we know or, less ambiguously, _refer to_ things which are

past or future we have to make use of the fact that impressions

are commonly _signs_, have effects which depend not on themselves

alone but upon the other impressions which have co-operated with

them in the past.

A sign[40] is something which has once been a member of a context

or configuration that worked in the mind as a whole. When it

reappears its effects are as though the rest of the context were

present. In analysing complex events of referring we have to

break them up artificially into the simpler sign-situations out

of which they arise; not forgetting meanwhile how interdependent

the parts of any interpretation of a complex sign are.

The detail of this procedure is most easily studied in connection

with the use of words. We shall deal with it therefore in Chapter

XVI, where the reading of a poem is discussed. Here only the

general principle matters that to know anything is to be influenced

by it, directly when we sense it, indirectly when the effects

of past conjunctions of impressions come into play. More will

be added later, in connection with the process of reading, about

the receptive, the knowledge aspect of mental events. The other

two aspects need less explanation. They are also more generally

important for the understanding of poetic, musical and other

experiences. For a theory of knowledge is needed only at one

point, the point at which we wish to decide whether a poem, for

example, is true, or reveals reality, and if so in what sense;

admittedly a very important question. Whereas a theory of feeling,

of emotion, of attitudes and desires, of the affective-volitional

aspect of mental activity, is required at all points of our analysis.

[34] _Eyeless Sight_, p. 22.

[35] _Dedalus, or Science and the Future_, by J. B. S. Haldane.

[36] Compare Chapter XXXIV where the ways in which emotive factors

interfere with thought are considered.

[37] Cf. Piéron, _Thought and the Brain_, Chapter I.

[38] Many apparent questions which begin with the words ‘What’

and ‘Why’ are not questions at all, but requests for emotive

Satisfaction.

[39] ‘Willing’ is a bad word; I would use conation throughout

were it not so likely to increase unnecessarily the difficulty

which this chapter will unavoidably present to readers who are

not familiar with psychological jargon. The essential thing is

to think of willing (desiring, striving towards, trying) as an

unconscious as much as a conscious process.

[40] This topic is discussed at length in _The Meaning of Meaning_.

CHAPTER XII

Pleasure

The poor benefit of a bewitching minute.—_The Revenger’s Tragedy_.

Sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure,

unpleasure and pain are names for the conscious characteristics

of impulses: How they may best be sorted out is a problem whose

difficulty is much aggravated by the shortcomings of language

at this point. We speak, for instance, of pleasures and pains

in the same fashion, as though they were of the same order, but,

strictly, although pains as single self-sufficing modifications

of consciousness are easily enough obtainable, pleasures by themselves

do not seem to occur. Pleasure seems to be a way in which something

happens, rather than an independent happening which can occur

by itself in a mind. We have, not pleasures, but experiences

of one kind or another, visual, auditory, organic, motor, and

so forth, which are pleasant. Similarly we have experiences which

are unpleasant. If, however, we call them painful we give rise

to an ambiguity. We may be saying that they are unpleasant or

we may be saying that they are accompanied by pains, which is

a different matter. The use of the term pleasure, as though like

pain it was itself a complete experience, instead of being something

which attaches to or follows along with or after other experiences,

has led to a number of confusions; especially in those critical

theses, to which objection has already been taken in Chapter

IX, which identify value with pleasure.

The twenty or more distinct kinds of sensations, into which modern

psychology has elaborated the old five senses, can be observed

to differ very widely in the degree to which they are susceptible

of and accompanied by pleasantness and unpleasantness. The higher

senses, sight and hearing, in most persons seem to yield sensations

which vary much less from neutrality or indifference than the

others. We must be careful to understand this difference correctly

however. An arrangement of colours and shapes, a sequence of

notes or a musical phrase may, of course, in suitable people,

be as intensely toned, pleasantly or unpleasantly, as any organic

or taste sensations, for example. But even this is not usual.

The right experiment is to compare a single colour, say, or a

single note, with such a sensation as a uniform touch or temperature

gives rise to, a bath for example, or with a simple uniform taste

or smell, or with hunger, or nausea. Fair comparison is difficult,

equivalent levels of simplicity and uniformity being impossible

to discover, but few will doubt that the degree of pleasure-unpleasure

aroused by tastes, for example, far exceeds that which auditory

or visual sensations excite by themselves. We must of course

be careful here to avoid confusing the intrinsic pleasure-unpleasure

of the sensations with that which arises through memory, through

the effects of other sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, which

may have accompanied them in the past, and through expectations

agreeable or disagreeable.

To speak of the intrinsic pleasure-unpleasure of a sensation

is perhaps misleading. The pleasantness of a sensation as we

know is a highly variable thing. It may alter completely while

the strictly sensory characteristics of the sensation remain

as before. The difference in the same smell of liquor, before

and after an alcoholic excess is a striking example. A sound

which is pleasant for a while may become very unpleasant if it

continues and does not lapse from consciousness. And yet indisputably

it may remain _qua_ sensation the same. A sound-sensation

may remain unchanged in tone, volume and intensity yet vary widely

in pleasure-unpleasure. This difference is important. It is one

of the chief reasons which have caused feeling (pleasure-unpleasure)

to be distinguished from sensation as altogether of a different

nature. Tone, volume and intensity are features in the sound

closely dependent upon the stimulus, pleasantness is dependent

not on external stimulus but upon factors, very obscure at present,

in us. All here is conjecture. The close connection of stimulus

with sensation we know because it happens to be comparatively

accessible to experiment. And introspection of sensations of

external origin is for that reason much more easy than introspection

of most visceral or organic sensations. We can practise it freely

and repeat it and so control our results. To a lesser extent

those sensations of internal origin which we can in part consciously

control, those due to voluntary movements, share this double

accessibility. But all the rest of the multifarious conscious

goings on in the nervous system remain obscure. One broad fact,

however, is important. The effects in the body of almost all

stimuli of whatever nature are extraordinarily numerous and varied.

“You cannot show the observer a wall-paper pattern without by

that very fact disturbing his respiration and circulation.”[41]

And no man knows what other disturbances do not join in. The

whole body resounds in what would seem to be a fairly systematic

way. Whether the outpouring of this tide of disturbance makes

up a part of, gives a tone to consciousness, or whether only

the incoming reports of the results can be conscious is a question

upon which no conclusive evidence would seem to be yet available.

The incoming reports of some at least of these disturbances certainly

can become conscious. A lump in the throat, a yearning of the

bowels, horripilation, breathlessness, these are their coarser

and more obvious forms. Usually, they are less salient and fuse

with the whole mass of internal sensations to form the _cœnesthesia_,

the whole bodily consciousness, tinging it, altering its general

character in some one of perhaps a thousand different ways.

It has been much disputed whether pleasure-unpleasure is a quality

of general bodily or organic consciousness, of some part of it

perhaps, or whether it is something quite different from any

quality of any sensation or set of sensations. As we have seen,

it is not a quality of an auditory sensation in the sense in

which its loudness, for instance, is a quality. There seem to

be similar objections to making it a quality of any sensation

of any kind. A sensation is what an impulse at a certain stage

in its development feels like, and its sensory qualities are

characters[42] of the impulse at that stage. The pleasure-unpleasure

attaching to the impulse may be no character of the impulse itself,

but of its fate, its success or failure in restoring equilibrium

to the system to which it belongs.

This is perhaps as good a guess at what pleasure and unpleasure

are as can yet be made, pleasure being successful activity of

some kind, not necessarily of a biologically useful kind, and

unpleasure being frustrated, chaotic, mal-successful activity.

We shall consider this theory again at a later stage (cf. Chapter

XXIV). The point to be made here is that pleasure and unpleasure

are complicated matters arising in the course of activities which

are directed to other ends. The old controversies as to whether

pleasure is the goal of all striving or whether avoidance of

unpleasure the starting-point, are thus escaped. As Ribot pointed

out[43] the exclusive quest of pleasure for itself, _plaisir-passion_,

is a morbid form of activity and self-destructive. Pleasure on

this view is originally an _effect_ signifying that certain

positive or negative tendencies have instinctively attained their

aim and are satisfied. Later through experience it becomes a

cause. Instructed by experience man and animal alike place themselves

in circumstances which will arouse desire and so through satisfaction

lead to pleasure. The gourmet, the libertine, the æsthete, the

mystic do so alike. But when the pleasure which is the result

of satisfying the tendency becomes the end pursued rather than

the satisfying of the tendency itself, then an ‘_inversion_

of the psychological mechanism’ comes about. In the one case

the activity is propagated from below upwards, in the other from

above downwards, from the brain to the organic functions. The

result is often an exhaustion of the tendency, ‘disillusionment’

and the _blasé_, world-wearied attitude.

The evil results, as Ribot remarks, are largely confined to those

individuals in whom the quest for pleasure has the force of an

obsession. But on the view of pleasure which we have indicated

above, it is clear that all those doctrines, very common in critical

literature, which set up pleasure as the goal of activity, are

mistaken. Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very

probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that

is a different matter. To read a poem for the sake of the pleasure

which will ensue if it is successfully read is to approach it in an

inadequate attitude. Obviously it is the poem in which we should be

interested, not in a by-product of having managed successfully to read

it. The orientation of attention is wrong if we put the pleasure in

the forefront. Such a mistake is perhaps not common among instructed

persons, but to judge by many remarks which appear in reviews and

dramatic notices the percentage of instructed persons among reviewers

and theatre-goers does not seem high. This error, a legacy in part

from the criticism of an age which had a still poorer psychological

vocabulary[44] than Our own, is one reason why Tragedy, for example,

is so often misapproached. It is no less absurd to suppose that a

competent reader sits down to read for the sake of pleasure, than to

suppose that a mathematician sets out to solve an equation with a view

to the pleasure its solution will afford him. The pleasure in both

cases may, of course, be very great. But the pleasure, however great

it may be, is no more the aim of the activity in the course of which

it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motor-cycle—useful

though it is as an indication of the way the machine is running—is the

reason in the normal case for its having been started.

This very common mistake noted, the significance of pleasure

and unpleasure may be insisted upon without misgiving. They are

our most delicate signs of how our activities are thriving. But

since even the most intense delight may indicate only a local

success and the activity be generally detrimental, they are signs

which need a very wary interpretation.

[41] Titchener, _Text-book of Psychology_, p. 248.

[42] Into conjectures as to what these are, it seems as yet not

profitable to enter.

[43] _Problèmes de Psychologie affective_, pp. 141-144.

[44] It is probable that Wordsworth and certain that Coleridge

if writing to-day would use quite other terms in place of pleasure

for describing poetic values.

CHAPTER XIII

Emotion and the Cœnesthesia

They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings.

_The Broken Heart_.

In alluding to the cœnesthesia we came very near to giving an

account of emotion as an ingredient of consciousness. Stimulating

situations give rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout

the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness.

These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger

and the other emotional states. They arise for the most part

when permanent or periodical tendencies of the individual are

suddenly either facilitated or frustrated. Thus they depend far

less upon the nature of the external stimulus than upon the general

internal circumstances of the individual’s life at the time the

stimulus occurs. These emotional states, with pleasure and unpleasure,

are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling[45] from

sensations, which are, as we have seen, very closely dependent

for their character upon their stimulus. Thus sensations are

ranked together as cognitive elements, concerned, that is, with

our knowledge of things rather than with our attitude or behaviour

towards them, or our emotion about them. Pleasure, however, and

emotion have, on our view, also a cognitive aspect. They give

us knowledge; in the case of pleasure, of how our activities

are going on, successfully or otherwise; in the case of emotion,

knowledge primarily of our attitudes. But emotion may give us

further knowledge. It is a remarkable fact that persons with

exceptional colour sense apparently judge most accurately whether

two colours are the same, for example, or whether they have or

have not some definite harmonic relation to one another, not

by attentive optical comparison or examination, but by the general

emotional or organic reaction which the colours evoke when simply

glanced at. This is an indirect way of becoming aware of the

specific nature of the external world, but none the less a very

valuable way. A similar method is probably involved in those

apparently immediate judgments of the moral character of persons

met with for the first time which many people make so readily

and successfully. They may be quite unable to mention any definite

feature of the person upon which their judgment could be based.

It is none the less often extraordinarily just and discriminating.

The remarkable sensitiveness to its mother’s expression which

the infant shows is a striking example. The part played by this

kind of judgment in all æsthetic appreciation need not be insisted

upon. It is notable that artists are often pre-eminently adepts

at such judgments. The topic is usually discussed under the wide

and vague heading of intuition; a rubric which completely obscures

and befogs the issues.

For such judgments are not a simpler and more direct way of taking

cognisance of things, but a more indirect and more complex way.

It is not thereby shown to be a less primitive process. On the

contrary, simplified ways of thinking are commonly advanced products.

The ‘intuitive’ person uses his cœnesthesia as a chemist uses

his reagents or a physiologist his galvanometer. As far as the

sensations which the colour stimuli excite can be optically discriminated,

no difference is perceptible. But an actual yet sensorily imperceptible

difference becomes apparent through the difference in organic

reaction. The process is merely one of adding further and more

delicate signs to the situation, it is analogous to attaching

a recording lever to a barograph.

The differences between sensitive or ‘intuitive’ and more ‘rational’

and obtuse individuals may be of two kinds. It may be that the

sensitive person’s organic response is more delicate. This is

a difficult matter to decide. It is certain, however, that the

chief difference (a derivative difference very likely) lies in

the fact that the obtuse person has not learned to _interpret_

the changes in his general bodily consciousness in any systematic

fashion. The changes may occur and occur systematically, but

they mean nothing definite to him.

This kind of intervention of organic sensation in perception

plays a part in all the arts. Much neglected, it is probably

of very great importance. What here needs to be noticed is that

it is not a mode of gaining knowledge which differs in any essential

way from other modes. No unique and peculiar relation of ‘feeling’

towards things needs to be introduced to explain it, any more

than a unique and peculiar mode of ‘cognitively apprehending’

them needs to be introduced to explain ordinary knowing. In both

instances their causes, which have to be assumed in any case,

will suffice. When we sense something our sensation is caused

by what we sense. When we refer to something absent, a present

sensation similar to sensations which in the past have been coincident

with it, is thereby a sign for it, and so on, through more and

more intricate mnemic sign-situations. Here a present colour

sensation gives rise to an organic response which has in the

past accompanied a definite colour; the response becomes then

a sign of that colour which the sensitive and discriminating

person trusts, although he is optically unable to make sure whether

that colour is present or merely one very like it. Other cases

differ from this in complexity but not in principle. If it is

objected that this account of referring or thinking in terms

of causes gives us at best but a very indirect way of knowing,

the reply is that the prevalence of error is itself a strong

argument against a too direct theory of knowledge.

In popular parlance the term ‘emotion’ stands for those happenings

in minds which accompany such exhibitions of unusual excitement

as weeping, shouting, blushing, trembling, and so on. But in

the usage of most critics it has taken an extended sense, thereby

suffering quite needlessly in its usefulness. For them it stands

for any noteworthy ‘goings on’ in the mind almost regardless

of their nature. The true and profound emotions, as spoken of

by critics, are often lacking in all the characteristics which

govern the more refined linguistic usage of common people, and,

as it happens, of psychologists also, for what may perhaps be

regarded now as the standard usage in psychology, sets out from

the very same bodily changes accompanying experience as were

noted above.

Two main features characterise every emotional experience. One

of these is a diffused reaction in the organs of the body brought

about through the sympathetic systems. The other is a tendency

to action of some definite kind or group of kinds. These extensive

changes in the visceral and vascular systems, characteristically

in respiration and in glandular secretion, commonly take place

in response to situations which call some instinctive tendency

into play. As a result of all these changes a tide of sensations

of internal bodily origin comes into consciousness. It is generally

agreed that these sensations make up at least the main part of

the peculiar consciousness of an emotion. Whether they are necessary

to it or not is disputed. It may perhaps be suggested that insufficient

attention has been paid in the theory of emotion to images of

such sensations. The fact that fear, for example, may be felt

in the absence of any detectable bodily changes of the kind described

(a disputed fact) may be explained by supposing images of these

sensations to be taking their place.

These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient

of an emotional experience and account for its peculiar ‘colour’

or tone, for the voluminousness and massiveness as well as for

the extreme acuteness of emotions. But of equal or greater importance

are the changes in consciousness due to reactions in the nervous

systems which control movement, governing muscular response to

the stimulating situation. These range, in the case of fear,

from the awakening of a simple tendency, an impulse to run away

or hide under the table, to such elaborate readjustments as we

make when we prepare to counter a threat against some favourite

opinion. As a rule a process of extraordinary complexity takes

place between perceiving the situation and finding a mode of

meeting it. This complicated process contributes the rest of

its peculiar flavour to an emotional experience.

A more detailed discussion from the same angle of the points

raised in this and the surrounding chapters will be found in

_The Meaning of Psychology_ (1926) by C. K. Ogden, where

the author’s view of mental activity is elaborated.

[45] The fashion in which the term ‘feeling’ shifts about in psychology

is notorious as a source of confusion. It would be convenient

if it could be kept for pleasure-unpleasure, and used no longer

as a synonym for ‘emotion’, since emotions can much more easily

be regarded as built up from organic sensations.

CHAPTER XIV

Memory

Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay

Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!

Shelley, _Ode to Liberty_.

So far we have alluded only casually to memory, to that apparent

revival of past experience to which the richness and complexity

of experience is due. Every stimulus which is ever received leaves

behind it, so it is said, an imprint, a trace capable of being

revived later and of contributing its quota to consciousness

and to behaviour. To these effects of past experience the systematic,

the organised character of our behaviour is due; the fact that

they intervene is the explanation of our ability to learn by

experience. It is a way peculiar to living tissue by which the

past influences our present behaviour across, as it might appear,

a gulf of time.

How we should conceive this influence is perhaps the most puzzling

point in psychology. The old theory of a kind of Somerset House

of past impressions has given place to an account in terms of

facilitations of neural paths, lowered resistances in synapses,

and so forth. It was natural that as the broad outlines of neural

activity came to be known, psychologists should attempt to make

use of them. But on close examination it is clear that their

interpretations were far too crude. Fixed ‘paths’, one for every

item of experience which has ever taken place, and others for

every kind of connection into which the items come, however multitudinous

we make them, no longer explain what can be observed in behaviour

and experience. As Von Kries and, more recently, Koffka have

insisted, the fact, for example, that we _recognise_ things

in cases where it is certain that quite different paths must

be involved, is fatal to the scheme. And mere multiplication

of the entities invoked leads to no solution. Semon even goes

so far as to say that when we listen to a song for the hundredth

time we hear not only the singer but a chorus of nine and ninety

mnemic voices. This corollary by itself is almost a refutation

of his theory.

We have to escape from the crude assumption that the only way

in which what is past can be repeated is by records being kept.

The old associationists supposed the records to be writ small

inside separate cells. The more modern view was that they were

scored large through a deepening of the channels of conduction.

Neither view is adequate.

Imagine an energy system of prodigious complexity and extreme

delicacy of organisation which has an indefinitely large number

of stable poises. Imagine it thrown from one poise to another

with great facility, each poise being the resultant of all the

energies of the system. Suppose now that the _partial_ return

of a situation which has formerly caused it to assume a stable

poise, throws it into an unstable condition, from which it most

easily returns to equilibrium by reassuming the former poise.

Such a system would exhibit the phenomena of memory; but it would

keep no records though appearing to do so. The appearance would

be due merely to the extreme accuracy and sensitiveness of the

system and the delicacy of its balances. Its state on the later

occasion would appear to be a _revival_ of its state on

the former, but this would not be the case any more than a cumulus

cloud this evening is a revival of those which decorated the

heavens last year.

This imaginary construction can be made more concrete by imagining

a solid with a large number of facets upon any one of which it

can rest. If we try to balance it upon one of its coigns or ridges

it settles down upon the nearest facet. In the case of the neural

system we are trying to suggest each stable poise has been determined

by a definite set, or better, context of conditions. Membership

of this context is what corresponds to nearness to a facet. The

partial return of the context causes the system to behave as

though conditions were present which are not, and this is what

is essential in memory.

That this suggestion in the form here presented is unsatisfactory

and incomplete is evident. It is wildly conjectural no doubt,

but so are the Archival and Pathway Theories. Yet it does avoid

the chief deficiencies of those theories, it does suggest why

only some conjunctions of experiences become ‘associated’, those

namely which yield a stable poise. And it suggests why a thing

should be recognised as the same though appearing in countless

different aspects; every time it appears different conditions

occur which, none the less, lead to one and the same stable poise,

as the polyhedron we imagined may settle down on one and the

same facet from all the surrounding ridges.

One of the collateral advantages of such a view is that it removes

some of the temptations to revert to animism from which psychologists,

and especially literary psychologists, suffer. Dissatisfaction

with current hypotheses as to the mechanism of reflex arcs is

a main cause for the scientifically desperate belief in the soul.

And apart from this, the special emotive factors which disturb

judgment on this point are less obtrusive when this account is

substituted for the usual story of the conditioned reflex, that

sacrilegious contrivance of the mechanists.

There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not

intervene. We are most familiar with it in the case of images,

those fugitive elusive copies of sensations with which psychology

has been hitherto so much, perhaps too much, concerned. Visual

images are the best known of them, but it is important to recognise

that every kind of sensation may have its corresponding image.

Visceral, kinæsthetic, thermal images can with a little practice

be produced, even by people who have never noticed their occurrence.

But individual differences as regards imagery are enormous, more

in the degree to which images become conscious, however, than

in their actual presence or absence on the needful occasion.

Those people who, by their own report, are devoid of images,

none the less behave in a way which makes it certain that the

same processes are at work in them as in producers of the most

flamboyant images.

CHAPTER XV

Attitudes

My Sences want their outward motion

Which now within

Reason doth win,

Redoubled by her secret notion.—John Hoskins.

The interventions of memory are not confined to sensation and

emotion. They are of equal importance in our active behaviour.

The acquisition of any muscular accomplishment, dancing or billiards,

for example, shows this clearly. What we have already done in

the past controls what we shall do in the future. If the perception

of an object and the recognition that it is a tree, for example,

involve a poise in the sensory system concerned, a certain completeness

or ‘closure,’ to use the term employed by Kohler, so an act,

as opposed to a random movement, involves a similar poise in

a motor system. But sensory and motor systems are not independent;

they work together; every perception probably includes a response

in the form of incipient action. We constantly overlook the extent

to which all the while we are making preliminary adjustments,

getting ready to act in one way or another. Reading Captain Slocum’s

account of the centipede which bit him on the head when alone

in the middle of the Atlantic, the writer has been caused to

leap right out of his chair by a leaf which fell upon his face

from a tree. Only occasionally does some such accident show how

extensive are the motor adjustments made in what appear to be

the most unmuscular occupations.

This incipient activity stands to overt action much as an image

stands to a sensation. But such ‘imaginal’ activity is, by its

very nature, extraordinarily hard to detect or to experiment

upon. Psychology has only dealt with fringes of the mind hitherto

and the most accessible fringe is on the side of sensation. We

have therefore to build up our conjectures as to the rest of

mental happenings by analogy with the perhaps not entirely representative

specimens which sensation supplies. This limitation has led the

majority of psychologists to see in imaginal movement no more

than images of the _sensations_ from muscle, joint, and

tendon, which would arise if the movement were actually made.

It is certain that before any action takes place a preliminary

organisation must occur which ensures that the parts do not get

in one another’s way. It appears to the writer that these preliminaries

in his case make up part of consciousness, but there is a heavy

weight of authority against him. The point is no doubt exceptionally

hard to determine.

In any case, whether the consciousness of activity is due to

sensations and images of movements alone, or whether the outgoing

part of the impulse and its preparatory organisation help to

make up consciousness, there is no doubt about the importance

of incipient and imaginal movement in experience. The work done

by Lipps, Groos and others on _einfühlung_, or empathy,

however we may prefer to restate their results, shows that when

we perceive spatial or musical form we commonly accompany our

perception with closely connected motor activity. We cannot leave

this activity out of our account of what happens in the experiences

of the arts, although we may think that those who have built

upon this fact what they have put forward as a complete æsthetic—Vernon

Lee, for example—have been far from clear as to what questions

they were answering.

The extent to which any activity is conscious seems to depend

very largely upon how complex and how novel it is. The primitive

and in a sense natural outcome of stimulus is action; the more

simple the situation with which the mind is engaged, the closer

is the connection between the stimulus and some overt response

in action, and in general the less rich and full is the consciousness

attendant. A man walking over uneven ground, for example, makes

without reflection or emotion a continuous adjustment of his

steps to his footing; but let the ground become precipitous and,

unless he is used to such places, both reflection and emotion

will appear. The increased complexity of the situation and the

greater delicacy and appropriateness of the movements required

for convenience and safety, call forth far more complicated goings

on in the mind. Besides his perception of the nature of the ground,

the thought may occur that a false move would be perilous and

difficult to retrieve. This, when accompanied by emotion, is

called a ‘realisation’ of his situation. The adjustment to one

another of varied impulses—to go forward carefully, to lie down

and grasp something with the hands, to go back, and so forth—and

their co-ordination into useful behaviour alters the whole character

of his experience.

Most behaviour is a reconciliation between the various acts which

would satisfy the different impulses which combine to produce

it; and the richness and interest of the feel of it in consciousness

depends upon the variety of the impulses engaged. Any familiar

activity, when set in different conditions so that the impulses

which make it up have to adjust themselves to fresh streams of

impulses due to the new conditions, is likely to take on increased

richness and fullness in consciousness.

This general fact is of great importance for the arts, particularly

for poetry, painting and sculpture, the representative or mimetic

arts. For in these a totally new setting for what may be familiar

elements is essentially involved. Instead of seeing a tree we

see something in a picture which may have similar effects upon

us but is _not_ a tree. The tree impulses which are aroused

have to adjust themselves to their new setting of other impulses

due to our awareness that it is a _picture_ which we are

looking at. Thus an opportunity arises for those impulses to

define themselves in a way in which they ordinarily do not.

This, of course, is only the most obvious and simple instance

of the way in which, thanks to the unusual circumstances in which

things depicted, or in literature described, come before us,

the experiences that result are modified. To take another obvious

example, the description or the theatrical presentation of a

murder has a different effect upon us from that which would be

produced by most actual murders if they took place before us.

These considerations, of vast importance in the discussion of

artistic form, will occupy us later (pp. 145, 237). Here it is

sufficient to point out that these differences between ordinary

experiences and those due to works of art are only special cases

of the general difference between experiences made up of a less

and of a greater number of impulses which have to be brought

into co-ordination with one another. The bearing of this point

upon the problem of the æsthetic mode with its detachment, impersonality,

etc., discussed in the second chapter, will be apparent. (Compare

Chapter XXXII, p. 249.)

The result of the co-ordination of a great number of impulses

of different kinds is very often that no _overt_ action

takes place. There is a danger here of supposing that no action

whatever results or that there is something incomplete or imperfect

about such a state of affairs. But imaginal action and incipient

action which does not go so far as actual muscular movement are

more important than Overt action in the well-developed human

being. Indeed the difference between the intelligent or refined,

and the stupid or crass person is a difference in the extent

to which overt action can be replaced by incipient and imaginal

action. An intelligent man can ‘see how a thing works’ when a

less intelligent man has to ‘find out by trying’. Similarly with

such responses as are aroused by a work of art. The difference

between ‘understanding’ it and failing to do so is, in most cases,

a difference between being able to make the required responses

in an imaginal or incipient degree, adjusting them to one another

at that stage, and being unable to produce them or adjust them

except overtly and at their fullest development. Though the kinds

of activity involved are different, the analogy with the case

of the mathematician is not misleading. The fact that he will

not make half so many marks on paper as a schoolboy does not

show that he is any less active. His activity takes place at

an earlier stage in which his responses are merely incipient

or imaginal. In a similar manner the absence of any overt movements

or external signs of emotion in an experienced reader of poetry,

or concert-goer, compared to the evident disturbances which are

sometimes to be seen in the novice, is no indication of any lack

of internal activity. The response required in many cases by

works of art is of a kind which can only be obtained in an incipient

or imaginal stage. Practical considerations often prevent their

being worked out in overt form, and this is, as a rule, not in

the least to be regretted. For these responses are commonly of

the nature of solutions to problems, not of intellectual research,

but of emotional accommodation and adjustment, and can usually

be best achieved while the different impulses which have to be

reconciled are still in an incipient or imaginal stage, and before

the matter has become further complicated by the irrelevant accidents

which attend overt responses.

These imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action,

I shall call attitudes. When we realise how many and how different

may be the tendencies awakened by a situation, and what scope

there is for conflict, suppression and interplay—all contributing

something to our experience—it will not appear surprising that

the classification and analysis of attitudes is not yet far advanced.

A thousand tendencies to actions, which do not overtly take place,

may well occur in complicated adjustments. For these what evidence

there is must be indirect. In fact, the only attitudes which

are capable of clear and explicit analysis are those in which

some simple mode of observable behaviour gives the clue to what

has been taking place, and even here only a part of the reaction

is open to this kind of examination.

Among the experiences which are by the nature of the case hidden

from observation are found almost all those with which criticism

is concerned. The outward aspect and behaviour of a man reading

_The Prioresses’ Tale_ and _The Miller’s Tale_ may well be

indistinguishable. But this should not lead us to overlook how

great a part in the whole experience is taken by attitudes. Many

experiences which, if examined by introspection for their actual

content of sensation and imagery, differ very little, are totally

diverse in the kind and degree of implicit activity present. This

aspect of experiences as filled with incipient promptings, lightly

stimulated tendencies to acts of one kind or another, faint preliminary

preparations for doing this or that, has been constantly overlooked

in criticism. Yet it is in terms of attitudes, the resolution,

inter-inanimation, and balancing of impulses—Aristotle’s definition of

Tragedy[46] is an instance—that all the most valuable effects of poetry

must be described.

[46] “Tragedy is an imitation of an action... effecting through

Pity and Terror the correction and refinement (_κάθαρςις_)

of such passions.” _Poetics_, VI. Cf. p. 247, _infra_.

CHAPTER XVI

The Analysis of a Poem

Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute

il faut toujours recommencer.—André Gide.

The qualifications of a good critic are three. He must be an

adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind

relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must

be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards

their less superficial features. Thirdly, he must be a sound

judge of values.

Upon all these matters psychology, even in its present conjectural

state, has a direct bearing. The critic is, throughout, judging

of experiences, of states of mind; but too often he is needlessly

ignorant of the general psychological form of the experiences

with which he is concerned. He has no clear ideas as to the elements

present or as to their relative importance. Thus, an outline

or schema of the mental events which make up the experience of

‘looking at’ a picture or ‘reading’ a poem, can be of great assistance.

At the very least an understanding of the probable structures

of these experiences can remove certain misconceptions which

tend to make the opinions of individuals of less service to other

individuals than need be.

Two instances will show this. There are certain broad features

in which all agree a poem of Swinburne is unlike a poem of Hardy.

The use of words by the two poets is different. Their methods

are dissimilar, and the proper approach for a reader differs

correspondingly. An attempt to read them in the same way is unfair

to one of the poets, or to both, and leads inevitably to defects

in criticism which a little reflection would remove. It is absurd

to read Pope as though he were Shelley, but the essential differences

cannot be clearly marked out unless such an outline of the general

form of a poetic experience, as is here attempted, has been provided.

The psychological means employed by these poets are demonstrably

different. Whether the effects are also dissimilar is a further

question for which the same kind of analysis is equally required.

This separation inside the poetic experience of certain parts

which are means from certain other parts which are the ends upon

which the poetic value of the experience depends, leads up to

our other instance. It is unquestionable that the actual experiences,

which even good critics undergo when reading, as we say, _the

same poem_, differ very widely. In spite of certain conventions,

which endeavour to conceal these inevitable discrepancies for

social purposes, there can be no doubt that the experiences of

readers in connection with particular poems are rarely similar.

This is unavoidable. Some differences are, however, much more

important than others. Provided the ends, in which the value

of the poem lies, are attained, differences in the means need

not prevent critics from agreement or from mutual service. Those

discrepancies alone are fatal which affect the fundamental features

of experiences, the features upon which their _value_ depends.

But enough is now known of the ways in which minds work for superficial

and fundamental parts of experiences to be distinguished. One

of the greatest living critics praises the line:

The fringed curtain of thine eyes advance,

for the ‘ravishing beauty’ of the visual images excited. This

common mistake of exaggerating personal accidents in the means

by which a poem attains its end into the chief value of the poem

is due to excessive trust in the commonplaces[47] of psychology.

[Illustration: Arcadia, Night, a Cloud, Pan, and the Moon]

In the analysis of the experience of reading a poem, a diagram,

or hieroglyph, is convenient, provided that its limitations are

clearly recognised. The spatial relations of the parts of the

diagram, for instance, are not intended to stand for spatial

relations between parts of what is represented; it is not a picture

of the nervous system. Nor are temporal relations intended. Spatial

metaphors, whether drawn as diagrams or merely imagined, are

dangers only to the unwary. The essential service which pictures

can give in abstract matters, namely, the simultaneous and compact

representation of states of affairs which otherwise tend to remain

indistinct and confused, is worth the slight risk of misunderstanding

which they entail.

We may begin then with a diagrammatic representation of the events

which take place when we read a poem. Other literary experiences

will only differ from this in their greater simplicity.

The eye is depicted as reading a succession of printed words.

As a result there follows a stream of reaction in which six distinct

kinds of events may be distinguished.

I The visual sensations of the printed words.

II Images very closely associated with these sensations.

III Images relatively free.

IV References to, or ‘thinkings of,’ various things.

V Emotions.

VI Affective-volitional attitudes.

Each of these kinds of occurrences requires some brief description

and explanation.

Upon the visual sensations of the printed words all the rest

depends (in the case of a reader not previously acquainted with

the poem); but with most readers they have in themselves no great

importance. The individual shapes of the letters, their size

and spacing, have only a minor effect upon the whole reaction.

No doubt readers differ greatly in this respect; with some, familiarity

plays a great part. They find it unpleasant and disturbing to

read a poem in any but the edition in which they first became

acquainted with it. But the majority of readers are less exigent.

Provided that the print is clear and legible, and allows the

habitual eye-movements of reading to be easily performed, the

full response arises equally well from widely differing sensations.

Those for whom this is true have, in the present state of economic

organisation, a decided advantage over the more fastidious. This

does not show that good printing is a negligible consideration;

and the primary place of calligraphy in the Chinese arts is an

indication to the contrary. It shows merely that printing belongs

to another branch of the arts. In the poetic experience words

take effect through their associated images, and through what

we are, as a rule, content to call their meaning. What meaning

is and how it enters into the experience we shall consider.

_Tied Images_.—Visual sensations of words do not commonly

occur by themselves. They have certain regular companions so

closely tied to them as to be only with difficulty disconnected.

The chief of these are the auditory image—the sound of the words

in the mind’s ear—and the image of articulation—the feel in the

lips, mouth, and throat, of what the words would be like to speak.

Auditory images of words are among the most obvious of mental

happenings. Any line of verse or prose slowly read, will, for

most people, sound mutely in the imagination somewhat as it would

if read aloud. But the degree of correspondence between the image-sounds,

and the actual sounds that the reader would produce, varies enormously.

Many people are able to imagine word-sounds with greater delicacy

and discrimination than they can utter them. But the reverse

case is also found. What importance then is to be attached to

clear, rich and delicate sound imagery in silent reading? How

far must people who differ in their capacity to produce such

images differ in their total reactions to poems? And what are

the advantages of reading aloud? Here we reach one of the practical

problems of criticism for which this analysis is required. A

discussion is best postponed until the whole analysis has been

given. The principal confusion which prevents a clear understanding

of the point at issue does, however, concern images and may be

dealt with here. It is of great importance in connection with

the topic of the following section.

The sensory qualities of images, their vivacity, clearness, fullness

of detail and so on, do not bear any constant relation to their

effects. Images differing in these respects may have closely

similar consequences. Too much importance has always been attached

to the sensory qualities of images. What gives an image efficacy

is less its vividness as an image than its character as a mental

event peculiarly connected with sensation. Lissette way which

no one yet knows how to explain, a relict of sensation and our

intellectual and emotional response to it depends far more upon

its being, through this fact, a representative of a sensation,

than upon its sensory resemblance to one. An image may lose almost

all its sensory nature to the point of becoming scarcely an image

at all, a mere skeleton, and yet represent a sensation quite

as adequately as if it were flaring with hallucinatory vividity.

In other words, what matters is not the sensory _resemblance_

of an image to the sensation which is its prototype, but some

other relation, at present hidden from us in the jungles of neurology.

(Cf. Chapter XIV.)

Care then should be taken to avoid the natural tendency to suppose

that the more clear and vivid an image the greater will be its

efficacy. There are trustworthy people who, according to their

accounts, never experience any imagery at all. If certain views

commonly expressed about the arts are true, by which vivid imagery

is an all-important part of the experience, then these people

are incapable of art experiences, a conclusion which is contrary

to the facts. The views in question are overlooking the fact

that _something_ takes the place of vivid images in these

people, and that, provided the image-substitute is efficacious,

their lack of mimetic imagery is of no consequence. The efficacy

required must, of course, include control over emotional as well

as intellectual reactions. Needless perhaps to add that with

persons of the image-producing types an increase in delicacy

and vivacity in their imagery will probably be accompanied by

increased subtlety in effects. Thus it is not surprising that

certain great poets and critics have been remarkable for the

vigour of their imagery, and dependent upon it. No one would

deny the usefulness of imagery to some people; the mistake is

to suppose that it is indispensable to all.

Articulatory imagery is less noticeable; yet the quality of silent

speech is perhaps even more dependent upon these images than

upon sound-images. Collocations of syllables which are awkward

or unpleasant to utter are rarely delightful to the ear. As a

rule the two sets of images are so intimately connected that

it is difficult to decide which is the offender. In ‘Heaven,

which man’s generation draws,’ the sound doubtless is as harsh

as the movements required are cramping to the lips.

The extent to which interference with one set of images will

change the other may be well seen by a simple experiment. Most

people, if they attempt a silent recitation while opening the

mouth to its fullest stretch or holding the tongue firmly between

the teeth, will notice curious transformations in the auditory

images. How the experiment should be interpreted is uncertain,

but it is of use in making the presence of both kinds of verbal

imagery evident to those who may have overlooked them hitherto.

Images of articulation should not, however, be confused with

those minimal actual movements which for some people (for all,

as behaviourists maintain) accompany the silent rehearsing of

words.

These two forms of tied imagery might also be called verbal images,

and supply the elements of what is called the ‘formal structure’

of poetry. They differ from those to which we now proceed in

being images of words, not of things words stand for, and in

their very close connection with the visual sensations of printed

words.

_Free Imagery_.—Free images, or rather one form of these,

visual images, pictures in the mind’s eye, occupy a prominent

place in the literature of criticism, to the neglect somewhat

of other forms of imagery, since, as was remarked in a preceding

chapter, for every possible kind of sensation there is a corresponding

possible image.

The assumption, natural before investigation, that all attentive

and sensitive readers will experience the same images, vitiates

most of the historical discussions from that of Longinus to that

of Lessing. Even in the present day, when there is no excuse

for such ignorance, the mistake still thrives, and an altogether

too crude, too hasty, and too superficial form of criticism is

allowed to pass unchallenged. It cannot be too clearly recognised

that individuals differ not only in the type of imagery which

they employ, but still more in the particular images which they

produce. In their whole reactions to a poem, or to a single line

of it, their free images are the point at which two readings

are most likely to differ, and the fact that they differ may

very well be quite immaterial. Fifty different readers will experience

not one common picture but fifty different pictures. If the value

of the poem derived from the value _qua_ picture of the

visual image excited then criticism might well despair. Those

who would stress this part of the poetic reaction can have but

crude views on pictures.

But if the value of the visual image in the experience is not

pictorial, if the image is not to be judged as a picture, how

is it to be judged? It is improbable that the many critics, some

of them peculiarly well qualified in the visual arts, who have

insisted upon the importance of imagery, have been entirely wasting

their time. It ought to be possible to give an account of the

place of free imagery in the whole poetic experience which will

explain this insistence. What is required will be found if we

turn our attention from the sensory qualities of the imagery

to the more fundamental qualities upon which its efficacy in

modifying the rest of the experience depends. It has been urged

above that images which are different in their sensory qualities

may have the same effects. If this were not the case the absence

of glaring differences between people of different image-types

would be astonishing. But since images may represent sensations

without resembling them, and represent them in the sense of replacing

them, as far as effects in directing thought and arousing emotion

go, differences in their mimetic capacity become of minor importance.

As we have seen, it is natural for those whose imagery is vivid,

to suppose that vivacity and clearness go together with power

over thought and feeling. It is the power of an image over these

that is as a rule being praised when an intelligent and sensitive

critic appears merely to be praising the picture floating before

his mind’s eye. To judge the image as a picture is judged, would,

as we have seen, be absurd; and what is sought in poetry by those

painters and others whose interest in the world is primarily

visual is not pictures but records of observation, or stimuli

of emotion.

Thus, provided the images (or image-substitutes for the imageless)

have the due effects, deficiencies in their sensory aspect do

not matter. But the proviso is important. In all forms of imagery

sensory deficiencies are for many people signs and accompaniments

of defective efficacy, and the habit of reading so as to allow

the fullest development to imagery in its sensory aspect is likely

to encourage the full development of this more essential feature,

its efficacy, if the freaks and accidents of the sensory side

are not taken too seriously.

Some exceptions to this general recommendation will occur to

the reader. Instances in plenty may be found in which a full

development of the sensory aspect of images is damaging to their

effects. Meredith is a master of this peculiar kind of imagery:—

Thus piteously Love closed what he begat

The union of this ever diverse pair!

These two were rapid falcons in a snare,

Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.

The emotional as well as the intellectual effects of the various

images here suggested are much impaired if we produce them vividly

and distinctly.

_Impulses, and References_.—We have now to consider those

more fundamental effects upon which stress has been laid above

as the true places of the values of the experience. It will be

well at this point to reconsult the diagram. The vertical lines

which run capriciously downwards from the visual sensations of

the words, through their tied imagery and onward to the bottom

of the diagram, are intended to represent, schematically, streams

of impulses flowing through in the mind.

They start in the visual sensations, but the depiction of the

tied imagery is intended to show how much of their further course

is due to it. The placing of the free imagery in the third division

is intended to suggest that while some free images may arise

from visual words alone, they take their character in a large

part as a consequence of the tied imagery. Thus the great importance

of the tied imagery, of the formal elements, is emphasised in

the diagram.

These impulses are the weft of the experience, the warp being

the pre-existing systematic structure of the mind, that organised

system of possible impulses. The metaphor is of course inexact,

since weft and warp here are not independent. Where these impulses

run, and how they develop, depends entirely upon the condition

of the mind, and this depends upon the impulses which have previously

been active in it. It will be seen then that impulses—their

direction, their strength, how they modify one another—are the

essential and fundamental things in any experience. All else,

whether intellectual or emotional, arises as a consequence of

their activity. The thin trickle of stimulation which comes in

through the eye finds an immense hierarchy of systems of tendencies

poised in the most delicate stability. It is strong enough and

rightly enough directed to disturb some of these without assistance.

The literal sense of a word can be grasped on the prompting of

the mere sight of it, without hearing it or mentally pronouncing

it. But the effects of this stimulation are immensely increased

and widened when it is reinforced by fresh stimulation from tied

images, and it is through these that most of the emotional effects

are produced. As the agitation proceeds new reinforcement comes

with every fresh system which is excited. Thus, the paradoxical

fact that so trifling an irritation as the sight of marks on

paper is able to arouse the whole energies of the mind becomes

explicable.

To turn now to references, the only mental happenings which are

as closely connected with visual words as their tied images are

those mysterious events which are usually called thoughts. Thus

the arrow symbol in the hieroglyph should perhaps properly be

placed near the visual impression of the word. The mere sight

of any familiar word is normally followed by a thought of whatever

the word may stand for. This thought is sometimes said to be

the ‘meaning’, the literal or prose ‘meaning’ of the word. It

is wise, however, to avoid the use of ‘meaning’ as a symbol altogether.

The terms ‘thought’ and ‘idea’ are less subtle in their ambiguities,

and when defined may perhaps be used without confusion.

What is essential in thought is its direction or reference to things.

What is this direction or reference? How does a thought come to be ‘of’

one thing rather than another? What is the link between a thought and

what it is ‘of’? The outline of one answer to these questions has been

suggested in Chapter XI. A further account must here be attempted.

Without a fairly clear, although, of course, incomplete view, it is

impossible to avoid confusion and obscurity in discussing such topics

as truth in art, the intellect-_versus_-emotion _imbroglio_, the scope

of science, the nature of religion and many others with which criticism

must deal.

The facts upon which speculations as to the relations between

thoughts and the things which they are ‘of’ have been based,

have as a rule been taken from introspection. But the facts which

introspection yields are notoriously uncertain, and the special

position of the observer may well preclude success. Introspection

is competent, in some cases, to discover the relations between

events which take place within the mind, but cannot by itself

give information as to the relations of these events with the

external world, and it is precisely this which we are inquiring

into when we ask, What connection is there between a thought

and that which it is a thought of? For an answer to this question

we must look further.

There is no doubt that causal relations hold between events in

the mind and events outside it. Sometimes these relations are

fairly simple. The striking of a clock is the cause of our thinking

of its striking. In such a case the external thing is linked

with the thought ‘of’ it in a fairly direct fashion, and the

view here taken is that to be a thought ‘of’ the striking is

to be merely a thought caused in this fashion by the striking.

A thought of the striking is nothing else and nothing more than

a thought caused by it.

But most thoughts are ‘of’ things which are not present and not

producing direct effects in the mind. This is so when we read.

What is directly affecting the mind is words on paper, but the

thoughts aroused are not thoughts ‘of’ the words, but of other

things which the words _stand for_. How, then, can a causal

theory of thinking explain the relation between these remote

things and the thoughts which are ‘of’ them? To answer this we

must look at the way in which we learn what words stand for.

Without a process of learning we should only think of the words.

The process of learning to use words is not difficult to analyse.

On a number of occasions the word is heard in connection with

objects of a certain kind. Later the word is heard in the absence

of any such object. In accordance with one of the few fundamental

laws known about mental process, something then happens in the

mind which is like what would happen if such an object were actually

present and engaging the attention. The word has become a _sign_

of an object of that kind. The word which formerly was a part

of the cause of a certain effect in the mind is now followed

by a similar effect in the absence of the rest of the previous

cause, namely, an object of the kind in question. This kind of

causation appears to be peculiar to living tissue. The relation

now between the thought and what it is ‘of’ is more indirect,

the thought is ‘of’ something which formerly was part cause,

together with the sign, of similar thoughts. It is ‘of’ the missing

part of the sign, or more strictly ‘of’ anything which would

complete the sign as a cause.

Thoughts by this account are general, they are of anything _like_

such and such things, except when the object thought of and the

thought are connected by direct causal relations, as, for instance,

when we think of a word we are hearing. Only when these direct

relations hold can we succeed in thinking simply of ‘That’. We

have to think instead of ‘something of a kind’. By various means,

however, we can contrive that there shall only be one thing of

the kind, and so the need for particularity in our thoughts is

satisfied. The commonest way in which we do this is by thoughts

which make the kind spatial and temporal. A thought of ‘mosquito’

becomes a thought of ‘mosquito there now’ by combining a thought

of ‘thing of mosquito kind’ with a thought of ‘thing of there

kind’ and a thought of ‘thing of now kind’. The awkwardness of

these phrases, it may be mentioned, is irrelevant. Combined thoughts

of this sort, we may notice, are capable of truth and falsity,

whereas a simple thought—of ‘whatever is now’ for instance—can

only be true. Whether a thought is true or false depends simply

upon whether there is anything of the kind referred to, and there

must be something now. It is by no means certain that there must

be anything there always. And most probably no mosquito is where

we thought it was then.

The natural generality and vagueness of all reference which is

not made specific by the aid of space and time is of great importance

for the understanding of the senses in which poetry may be said

to be true. (Cf. Chapter XXXV.)

In the reading of poetry the thought due simply to the words,

their _sense_ it may be called, comes first; but other thoughts

are not of less importance. These may be due to the auditory

verbal imagery, and we have onomatopœia,[48] but this is rarely

independent of the sense. More important are the further thoughts

caused by the sense, the network of interpretation and conjecture

which arises therefrom, with its opportunities for aberrations

and misunderstanding. Poems, however, differ fundamentally in

the extent to which such further interpretation is necessary.

The mere sense without any further reflection is very often sufficient

thought, in Swinburne, for instance, for the full response—

There glowing ghosts of flowers

Draw down, draw nigh;

And wings of swift spent hours

Take flight and fly;

She sees by formless gleams

She hears across cold streams

Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.

Little beyond vague thoughts of the things the words stand for

is here required. They do not have to be brought into intelligible

connection with one another. On the other hand, Hardy would rarely

reach his full effect through sound and sense alone—

‘Who’s in the next room?—who?

I seemed to see

Somebody in the dawning passing through

Unknown to me.’

‘Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly’.

Between these and even more extreme cases, every degree of variation

in the relative importance of sound, sense, and further interpretation,

between form and content in short, can be found. A temptation

to which few do not succumb is to suppose that there is some

‘proper relation’ for these different parts of the experience,

so that a poem whose parts are in this relation must thereby

be a greater or better poem than another whose parts are differently

disposed. This is another instance of the commonest of critical

mistakes, the confusion of means with ends, of technique with

value. There is no more a ‘proper place’ for sound or for sense

in poetry than there is one and only one ‘proper shape’ for an

animal. A dog is not a defective kind of cat, nor is Swinburne

a defective kind of Hardy. But this sort of criticism is extraordinarily

prevalent. The objection to Swinburne on the ground of a lack

of thought is a popular specimen.

Within certain types, needless to say, some structures are more

likely to be successful than others. Given some definite kind

of effect as the goal, or some definite structure already being

used, a good deal can of course be said as to the most probable

means, or as to what may or may not be added. Lyric cannot dispense

with tied imagery, it is clear, nor can we neglect the character

of this imagery in reading it. A prose composition has to be

longer than a lyric to produce an equal definiteness of developed

effect. Poems in which there is much turmoil of emotion are likely

to be strongly rhythmical and to be in metre, as we shall see

when we come to discuss rhythm and metre. Drama can hardly dispense

with a great deal of conjecture and further interpretation which

in most forms of the novel is replaced by analysis and explanation,

and in narrative poetry is commonly omitted altogether; and so

on.

But no general prescription that in great poetry there _must_

always be this or that,—deep thought, superb sound or vivid imagery—is

more than a piece of ignorant dogmatism. Poetry may be almost

devoid even of mere sense, let alone thought, or _almost_

without sensory (or formal) structure, and yet reach the point

than which no poem goes further. The second case, however, is

very rare. Almost always, what seems structureless proves to

have still a loose and tenuous (it may be an intermittent) structure.

But we can for example shift the words about very often in Walt

Whitman without loss, even when he is almost at his best.

It is difficult to represent diagrammatically what takes place

in thought in any satisfactory fashion. The impulse coming in

from the visual stimulus of the printed word must be imagined

as reaching some system in the brain in which effects take place

not due merely to this present stimulus, but also to past occasions

on which it has been combined with other stimulations. These

effects are thoughts; and they in their groupings act as signs

for yet other thoughts. The little arrows are intended to symbolise

these references to things outside the mind.

_Emotions, and Attitudes._

Feeling or emotion is not, we have insisted above, another and

a rival mode of apprehending nature. So far as a feeling or an

emotion does refer to anything, it refers in the way described,

through its origin. Feelings, in fact, are commonly signs, and

the differences between those who ‘see’ things by intuition,

or ‘feel’ them, and those who reason them out, is commonly only

a difference between users of signs and users of symbols. Both

signs and symbols are means by which our past experience assists

our present responses. The advantages of symbols, due to the

ease with which they are controlled and communicated, their public

nature, as it were, are obvious. Their disadvantages as compared

with such relatively private signs as emotions or organic sensations

are perhaps less evident. Words, when used symbolically or scientifically,

not figuratively and emotively, are only capable of directing

thought to a comparatively few features of the more common situations.

But feeling is sometimes a more subtle way of referring, more

dangerous also, because more difficult to corroborate and to

control, and more liable to confusion. There is no inherent superiority,

however, in feeling as opposed to thought, there is merely a

difference in applicability; nor is there any opposition or clash

between them except for those who are mistaken either in their

thinking or in their feeling, or in both. How such mistakes arise

will be discussed in Chapter XXXIV.

As regards emotions and attitudes little need be added to what has

already been said. Emotions are primarily signs of attitudes and owe

their great prominence in the theory of art to this. For it is the

attitudes evoked which are the all-important part of any experience.

Upon the texture and form of the attitudes involved its value depends.

It is not the intensity of the conscious experience, its thrill, its

pleasure or its poignancy which gives it value, but the organisation

of its impulses for freedom and fullness of life. There are plenty of

ecstatic instants which are valueless; the character of consciousness

at any moment is no certain sign of the excellence of the impulses from

which it arises. It is the most convenient sign that is available,

but it is very ambiguous and may be very misleading. A more reliable

but less accessible set of signs can be found in the readiness for

this or that kind of behaviour in which we find ourselves after the

experience. Too great insistence upon the quality of the momentary

_consciousness_ which the arts occasion has in recent times been a

prevalent critical blunder. The Epilogue to Pater’s _Renaissance_ is

the _locus classicus_. The after-effects, the permanent modifications

in the structure of the mind, which works of art can produce, have been

overlooked. No one is ever quite the same again after any experience,

his possibilities have altered in some degree. And among all the agents

by which “the widening of the sphere of human sensibility” may be

brought about, the arts are the most powerful, since it is through them

that men may most co-operate and in these experiences that the mind

most easily and with least interference organises itself.

[47] The description of images belongs to the first steps in psychology,

and it is often possible to judge the rank and standing of a

psychologist by the degree of importance which he attaches to

their peculiarities. On theoretical grounds it seems probable

that they are luxury products (cf. _The Meaning of Meaning_,

pp. 148-151) peculiarly connected with the reproduction of emotion.

For a discussion of some experimental investigations into their

utility, Spearman, _The Nature of Intelligence_, Ch. XII,

may be consulted.

[48] Two kinds of onomatopœia should be distinguished. In one

the sound of the words (actual or imaginal) is like some natural

sound (the buzzing of bees, galloping horses, and so forth).

In the other it is not like any such sound but such as merely

to call up free auditory images of the sounds in question. The

second case is by far the more common.

CHAPTER XVII

Rhythm and Metre

. . . when it approaches with a divine hopping.

_The Joyful Wisdom_.

Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition,

and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where

it fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation.

As a rule this anticipation is unconscious. Sequences of syllables

both as sounds and as images of speech-movements leave the mind

ready for certain further sequences rather than for others. Our

momentary organisation is adapted to one range of possible stimuli

rather than to another. Just as the eye reading print unconsciously

expects the spelling to be as usual, and the fount of type to

remain the same, so the mind after reading a line or two of verse,

or half a sentence of prose, prepares itself ahead for any one

of a number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively

incapacitating itself for others. The effect produced by what

actually follows depends very closely upon this unconscious preparation

and consists largely of the further twist which it gives to expectancy.

It is in terms of the variation in these twists that rhythm is

to be described. Both prose and verse vary immensely in the extent

to which they excite this ‘getting ready’ process, and in the

narrowness of the anticipation which is formed, Prose on the

whole, with the rare exceptions of a Landor, a De Quincey, or

a Ruskin, is accompanied by a very much vaguer and more indeterminate

expectancy than verse. In such prose as this page, for example,

little more than a preparedness for further words not all exactly

alike in sound and with abstract polysyllables preponderating

is all that arises. In short, the sensory or formal effect of

words has very little play in the literature of analysis and

exposition. But as’ soon as prose becomes more emotive than scientific,

the formal side becomes prominent.

Let us take Landor’s description[49] of a lioness suckling her

young—

On perceiving the countryman, she drew up her feet gently,

and squared her mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with

content; and they looked, he said, like sea-grottoes, obscurely

green, interminably deep, at once awakening fear and stilling

and suppressing it.

After ‘obscurely green’ would it be possible (quite apart from

sense) to have ‘deeply dark’ or ‘impenetrably gloomy’? Why, apart

from sense, can so few of the syllables be changed in vowel sound,

in emphasis, in duration or otherwise, without disaster to the

total effect? As with all such questions about sensory form and

its effects, only an incomplete answer can be given. The expectancy

caused by what has gone before, a thing which must be thought

of as a very complex tide of neural settings, lowering the threshold

for some kinds of stimuli and raising it for others, and the

character of the stimulus which does actually come, both play

their part.

Even the most highly organised lyrical or ‘polyphonic’ prose raises as

it advances only a very ambiguous expectation. Until the final words

of the passage, there are always a great number of different sequences

which would equally well fit in, which would satisfy the expectancy

so far as that is merely due to _habit_, to the routine of _sensory

stimulation_. What is expected in fact is not this sound or that sound,

not even this kind of sound or that kind of sound, but some one of a

certain thousand kinds of sounds. It is much more a negative thing than

a positive. As in the case of many social conventions it is easier to

say what disqualifies than to say what is required.

Into this very indeterminate expectancy the new element comes

with its own range of possible effects. There is, of course,

no such thing as _the_ effect of a word or a sound. There

is no one effect which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic

literary characters. None are either ugly or beautiful, intrinsically

displeasing or delightful. Every word has instead a range of

possible effects, varying with the conditions into which it is

received. All that we can say as to the sorting out of words,

whether into the ‘combed’ and ‘slippery’, the ‘shaggy’ and ‘rumpled’

as with Dante, or in any other manner, is that some, through

long use, have narrower ranges than others and require more extraordinary

conditions if they are to change their ‘character’. What effect

the word has is a compromise between some one of its possible

effects and the special conditions into which it comes. Thus

in Shakespeare hardly any word ever looks odd until we consider

it; whereas even in Keats the ‘cold mushrooms’ in the _Satyrs’

Song_ give the mind a shock of astonishment, an astonishment

which is full of delight, but none the less is a shock.

But with this example we have broken down the limitation to the

mere sound, to the strictly formal or sensory aspect of word

sequences, and in fact the limitation is useless. For the effect

of a word as sound cannot be separated from its contemporaneous

other effects. They become inextricably mingled at once.

The sound gets its character by compromise with what is going

on already. The preceding agitation of the mind selects from

a range of possible characters which the word might present,

that one which best suits with what is happening. There are no

gloomy and no gay vowels or syllables, and the army of critics

who have attempted to analyse the effects of passages into vowel

and consonantal collocations have, in fact, been merely amusing

themselves. The way in which the sound of a word is taken varies

with the emotion already in being. But, further, it varies with

the sense. For the anticipation of the sound due to habit, to

the routine of sensation, is merely a part of the general expectancy.

Grammatical regularities, the necessity for completing the thought,

the reader’s state of conjecture as to what is being said, his

apprehension in dramatic literature of the action, of the intention,

situation, state of mind generally, of the speaker, all these

and many other things intervene. The way the sound is taken is

much less determined by the sound itself than by the conditions

into which it enters. All these anticipations form a very closely

woven network and the word which can satisfy them all simultaneously

may well seem triumphant. But we should not attribute to the

sound alone virtues which involve so many other factors. To say

this is not in the least to belittle the importance of the sound;

in most cases it is the key to the effects of poetry. This texture

of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, surprisals,

which the sequence of syllables brings about, is rhythm. And

the sound of words comes to its full power only through rhythm.

Evidently there can be no surprise and no disappointment unless

there is expectation and most rhythms perhaps are made up as

much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and betrayals

as of simple, straightforward satisfactions. Hence the rapidity

with which too simple rhythms, those which are too easily ‘seen

through’, grow cloying or insipid unless hypnoidal states intervene,

as with much primitive music and dancing and often with metre.

The same definition of rhythm may be extended to the plastic

arts and to architecture. Temporal sequence is not strictly necessary

for rhythm, though in the vast majority of cases it is involved.

The attention usually passes successively from one complex to

another, the expectations, the readiness to perceive this rather

than that, aroused by the one being either satisfied or surprised

by the other. Surprise plays an equally important part here;

and the difference in detail between a surprising and delightful

variation and one which merely irritates and breaks down the

rhythm, as we say, is here, as elsewhere, a matter of the combination

and resolution of impulses too subtle for our present means of

investigation. All depends upon whether what comes can be an

ingredient in the further response, or whether the mind must,

as it were, start anew; in more ordinary language, upon whether

there is any ‘connection’ between the parts of the whole.

But the rhythmic elements in a picture or a building may be not

successive but simultaneous. A quick reader who sees a word as

a whole commonly overlooks misprints because the general form

of the word is such that he is only able at that instant to perceive

one particular letter in a particular place and so overlooks

what is discrepant. The parts of a visual field exert what amounts

to a simultaneous influence over one another. More strictly what

is discrepant does not get through to more central regions. Similarly,

with those far more intricate wholes, made up of all kinds of

imagery and incipient action of which works of art consist. The

parts of a growing response mutually modify one another and this

is all that is required for rhythm to be possible.

We may turn now to that more complex and, more specialised form

of temporal rhythmic sequence which is known as metre. This is

the means by which words may be made to influence one another

to the greatest possible extent. In metrical reading the narrowness

and definiteness of expectancy, as much unconscious as ever in

most cases, is very greatly increased, reaching in some cases,

if rime also is used, almost exact precision. Furthermore, what

is anticipated becomes through the regularity of the time intervals

in metre virtually dated. This is no mere matter of more or less

perfect correspondence with the beating of some internal metronome.

The whole conception of metre as _‘uniformity_ in variety’,

a kind of mental drill in which words, those erratic and varied

things, do their best to behave as though they were all the same,

with certain concessions, licences and equivalences allowed,

should nowadays be obsolete. It is a survivor which is still

able to do a great deal of harm to the uninitiated, however,

and although it has been knocked on the head vigorously enough

by Professor Saintsbury and others, it is as difficult to kill

as Punch. Most treatises on the subject, with their talk of feet

and of stresses, unfortunately tend to encourage it, however

little this may be the aim of the authors.

As with rhythm so with metre, we must not think of it as in the

words themselves or in the thumping of the drum. It is not _in_

the stimulation, it is in our response. Metre adds to all the

variously fated expectancies which make up rhythm a definite

temporal pattern and its effect is not due to our perceiving

a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned

ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation

in us turns and swings, setting up as it does so extraordinarily

extensive sympathetic reverberations. We shall never understand

metre so long as we ask, ‘Why does: temporal pattern so excite

us’? and fail to realise that the pattern itself is a vast cyclic

agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring

through the channels of the mind.

The notion that there is any virtue in regularity or in variety,

or in any other formal feature, apart from its effects upon us,

must be discarded before any metrical problem can be understood.

The regularity to which metre tends acts through the definiteness

of the anticipations which are thereby aroused. It is through

these that it gets such a hold upon the mind. Once again, here

too, the failure of our expectations is often more important

than success. Verse in which we constantly get exactly what we

are ready for and no more, instead of something which we can

and must take up and incorporate as another stage in a total

developing response is merely toilsome and tedious. In prose,

the influence of past words extends only a little way ahead.

In verse, especially when stanza-form and rime co-operate to

give a larger unit than the line, it may extend far ahead. It

is this knitting together of the parts of the poem which explains

the mnemonic power of verse, the first of the suggestions as

to the origin of metre to be found in the Fourteenth Chapter

of _Biographia Literaria_, that lumber-room of neglected

wisdom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than

all the rest ever written upon the subject.

We do great violence to the facts if we suppose the expectations

excited as we read verse to be concerned only with the stress,

emphasis, length, foot structure and so forth of the syllables

which follow. Even in this respect the custom of marking syllables

in two degrees only, long and short, light and full, etc., is

inadequate, although doubtless forced upon metrists by practical

considerations. The mind in the poetic experience responds to

subtler niceties than these. When not in that experience but

coldly considering their several qualities as sounds by the ear

alone, it may well find two degrees all that are necessary. In

Chapter XIII we saw an analogous situation arising in the case

of the discrimination of colours. The obvious comparison with

the difference between what even musical notation can record

in music and the player’s interpretation can usefully be made

here.

A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists

of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is

of course not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There

is no question of definite pitches at which the syllables must

be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic relations between

different sounds. But that a rise and fall of pitch is involved

in metre and is as much part of the poet’s technique as any other

feature of verse, as much under his control also, is indisputable.

Anyone who is not clear upon this point may compare as a striking

instance Milton’s _Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity_

with Collins’ _Ode to Simplicity_ and both with the second

Chorus of _Hellas_ discussed in Chapter XXVIII. Due allowances

made for the natural peculiarities of different readers, the

scheme of pitch relations, in their contexts, of

That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss;

and of

But com’st a decent maid,

In Attic robe array’ɖ,

are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the

poet’s control in this, as there is nothing arbitrary or out

of his control in the way in which an adequate reader will stress

particular syllables. He brings both about by the same means,

the modification of the reader’s impulses by what has gone before.

It is true that some words resist emphasis far more than perhaps

any resist change of pitch, yet this difference is merely one

of degree. It is as natural to lower the pitch in reading the

word ‘loss’ as it is to emphasise it as compared with ‘our’ in

the same context.

Here again we see how impossible it is to consider rhythm or

metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect

of syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from

the emotional effects which come about through their sense. One

principle may, however, be hazarded. As in the case of painting

the more direct means are preferable to the less direct (see

Chapter XVIII), so in poetry. What can be done by sound should

not be done otherwise or in violation of the natural effects

of sound. Violations of the natural emphases and tones of speech

brought about for the sake of the further effects due to thought

and feeling are perilous, though, on occasion, they may be valuable

devices. The use of italics in _Cain_ to straighten out

the blank verse is as glaring an instance as any. But more liberties

are justified in dramatic writing than elsewhere, and poetry

is full of exceptions to such principles.[50] We must not forget

that Milton did not disdain to use special spelling, ‘mee’, for

example, in place of ‘me’, in order to suggest additional emphasis

when he feared that the reader might be careless.

So far we have been concerned with metre only as a specialised

form of rhythm, giving an increased interconnection between words

through an increased control of anticipation. But it has other,

in some cases even more important powers. Its use as an hypnotic

agent is probably very ancient. Coleridge once again drops his

incidental remark, just beside yet extremely close to the point.

“It tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of

the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces

by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations

of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are

too slight indeed to be at any moment objects of distinct consciousness,

yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated

atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act

powerfully, though themselves unnoticed.” (_Biographia Literaria_,

Chap. XVIII.) Mr Yeats, when he speaks of the function of metre

being to “lull the mind into a waking trance” is describing the

same effect, however strange his conception of this trance may

be.

That certain metres, or rather that a certain handling of metre

should produce in a slight degree a hypnoidal state is not surprising.

But it does so not as Coleridge suggests, through the surprise

element in metrical effects, but through the absence of surprise,

through the lulling effects more than through the awakening.

Many of the most characteristic symptoms of incipient hypnosis

are present in a slight degree. Among these susceptibility and

vivacity of emotion, suggestibility, limitations of the field

of attention, marked differences in the incidence of belief-feelings

closely analogous to those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can

induce, and some degree of hyperæsthesia (increased power of

discriminating sensations) may be noted. We need not boggle at

the word ‘hypnosis’. It is sufficient to say, borrowing a phrase

from M. Jules Romains, that there is a change in the regime of

consciousness, which is directly due to the metre, and that to

this regime the above-mentioned characteristics attach. As regards

the hyperæsthesia, there may be several ways of interpreting

what can be observed. All that matters here is that syllables,

which in prose or in _vers libres_ sound thin, tinny and

flat, often gain an astonishing sonority and fullness even in

verse which seems to possess no very subtle metrical structure.

Metre has another mode of action not hitherto mentioned. There

can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated

with dancing, and that the connections of the two still hold.

This is true at least of some ‘measures’. Either motor images,

images of the sensations of dancing, or, more probably, imaginal

and incipient movements follow the syllables and make up their

‘movement’. A place for these accompaniments should be found

in the diagram in Chapter XVI. Once the metre has begun to ‘catch

on’ they are almost as closely bound up with the sequence of

the words as the tied ‘verbal’ images themselves.

The extension of this ‘movement’ of the verse from dance forms

to more general movements is natural and inevitable. That there

is a very close connection between the sense and the metrical

movement of

And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly

Along a huge cloud’s ridge; and now with sprightly

Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,

cannot be doubted whatever we may think of the rime.

It is not less clear in

Where beyond the extreme sea wall, and between the

remote sea gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep

death waits,

or in

Ran on embattell’d Armies clad in Iron,

than it is in

We sweetly curtsied each to each

And deftly danced a saraband.

Nor is it always the case that the movement takes its cue from

the sense. It is often a commentary on the sense and sometimes

may qualify it, as when the resistless strength of Coriolanus

in battle is given an appearance of dreadful ease by the leisureliness

of the description,

Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy arm doth lie

Which being advanc’d declines, and then men die.

Movement in poetry deserves at least as much study as onomatopœia.

This account, of course, by no means covers all the ways by which

metre takes effect in poetry. The fact that we appropriately

use such words as ‘lulling’, ‘stirring’, ‘solemn’, ‘pensive’,

‘gay’ in describing metres is an indication of their power more

directly to control emotion. But the more general effects are

more important. Through its very appearance of artificiality

metre produces in the highest degree the ‘frame’ effect, isolating

the poetic experience from the accidents and irrelevancies of

everyday existence. We have seen in Chapter X how necessary this

isolation is and how easily it may be mistaken for a difference

in kind. Much which in prose would be too personal or too insistent,

which might awaken irrelevant conjectures or might ‘overstep

itself’ is managed without disaster in verse. There are, it is

true, equivalent resources in prose—irony, for example, very

frequently has this effect—but their scope is far more limited.

Metre for the most difficult and most delicate utterances is

the all but inevitable means.

[49] _Works_, II, 171.

[50] It is worth remarking that any application of critical principles

must be indirect. They are not any the less useful because this

is so. Misunderstanding on this point has often led artists to

accuse critics of wishing to make art a matter of rules, and

their objection to any such attempt is entirely justified.

CHAPTER XVIII

On Looking at a Picture

Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee,

Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew?

_Don Juan_.

The diagram and account given of the processes which make up

the reading of a poem may be easily modified to represent what

happens when we look at a picture, a statue or building, or listen

to a piece of music. The necessary changes are fairly obvious,

and it will only be necessary here to indicate them briefly.

Needless to say the importance to the whole response of different

kinds of elements varies enormously from art to art; so much

so as to explain without difficulty the opinion so often held

by persons interested primarily in one of the arts—that the others

(or some of them) are entirely different in nature. Thus painters

often aver that poetry is so different, so indirect, so second-hand

in the way in which it produces its results, as hardly to deserve

the name of an art at all. But, as we shall see, the differences

between separate arts are sometimes no greater than differences

to be found in each of them; and close analogies can be discovered

by careful analysis between all of them. These analogies indeed

are among the most interesting features which such scrutiny as

we are here attempting can make clear. For an understanding of

the problems of one art is often of great service in avoiding

misconceptions in another. The place of representation in painting,

for example, is greatly elucidated by a sound comprehension of

the place of reference or thought in poetry, just as a crude

view on this latter point is likely to involve unfortunate mistakes

upon the first. Similarly a too narrow view of music which would

limit it to an affair merely of the appreciation of the pitch

and time relations of notes may be corrected most easily by a

comparison with the phenomena of colour in the plastic arts.

Comparison of the arts is, in fact, far the best means by which

an understanding of the methods and resources of any one of them

can be attained. We must be careful of course not to compare

the wrong features of two arts and not to find merely fanciful

or insecurely grounded analogies. The dangers both of too close

assimilation and too wide separation of the structures of different

arts are well illustrated in criticism, both before and since

the days of Lessing. Only a thorough psychological analysis will

allow them to be avoided, and those whose experience leads them

to doubt whether analogies are of service, may be asked whether

their objection is not directed merely to attempts to compare

different arts without a sufficient analysis. With such an analysis,

comparison and the elaboration of analogies involve no attempt

to make one art legislate for another, no attempt to blur their

differences or to destroy their autonomy.

In analysing the experiences of the visual arts the first essential

is to avoid the word ‘see’, a term which is treacherous in its

ambiguity. If we say that we see a picture we may mean either

that we see the pigment-covered surface, or that we see the image

on the retina cast by this surface, or that we see certain planes

or volumes in what is called the ‘picture-space’. These senses

are completely distinct. In the first case we are speaking of

the source of the stimulus, in the second of the immediate effect

of the stimulus on the retina, in the third we are referring

to a complex response made up of perceivings and imaginings due

to the intervention of mental structures left behind by past

experience, and excited by the stimulus. The first case we may

leave out of account as a matter of purely technical interest.

The degree of similarity holding between the second and third,

between the first effect of the stimulus and the whole visual

response, will of course vary greatly in different cases. A perfectly

flat, meticulously detailed depiction of conventionally conceived

objects, such as is so often praised in the Academy for its ‘finish’,

may be very nearly the same from its first impression on the

retina to the last effort which vision can make upon it. At the

other extreme a Cézanne, for example, which to the eye of a person

quite unfamiliar with such a manner of painting may at first

seem only a field or area of varied light, may, as the response

develops, through repeated glances, become first an assemblage

of blots and patches of colour, and then, as these recede and

advance, tilt and spread relatively to one another and become

articulated, a system of volumes. Finally, as the distances and

stresses of their volumes become more definitely imagined, it

becomes an organisation of the entire ‘picture-space’ into a

three-dimensional whole with the characters of the solid masses

which appear in it, their weights, textures, tensions and what

not, very definitely, as it seems, given. With familiarity the

response is of course shortened. Its final visual stage is reached

much sooner, and the stages outlined above become, through this

telescoping, too fleeting to be noticed. None the less the great

difference between the first retinal impression and the complete

_visual_ response remains. The retinal impression, the sign,

that is, for the response, contains actually but a small part

of the whole final product, an all-important part it is true,

the seed in fact from which the whole response grows.

The additions made in the course of the response are of several

kinds. They may, perhaps, for our present purposes be spoken

of without misunderstanding as images, or image-substitutes (see

Chapter XVI). The eye, as is well known, is peculiar among our

sense organs in that the receptor, the retina, is a part of the

brain, instead of being a separate thing connected with the brain

more or less remotely by a peripheral nerve. Moreover there are

certain connections leading from other parts of the brain outwards

to the retina as well as connections leading inwards. Thus there

is some ground for supposing that through these outgoing connections

actual retinal effects may accompany some visual images, which

would thereby become much more like actual sensations than is

the case with the other senses. However this may be, the process

whereby an impression which, if interpreted in one way (e.g.

by a person measuring the pigmented areas of a canvas), is correctly

counted as a sign of a flat coloured surface, becomes, when differently

interpreted, an intricately divided three-dimensional space—this

process is one of the intervention of images of several kinds.

The order of these interventions probably varies from case to

case. Perhaps the most important of the images which come in

to give depth, volume, solidity to the partly imagined and partly

perceived ‘picture-space’ are those which are relicts of eye

movements, kinæsthetic images of the convergence of the eyes

and accommodation of the lenses according to the distance of

the object contemplated. When, as it seems, we look past an object

in a picture to some more distant object, seeming in so doing

to change the focus of our eyes, we do not as a rule actually

make any change. But certainly we feel as though we were focussing

differently and as though the convergence were different. This

felt difference which mainly gives the sense of greater distance

is due to kinæsthetic imagery. Correspondingly the parts of the

‘picture-space’ upon which we seem to be focussing, upon which

we _are_ imaginally focussing, become definite and distinct,

and parts much nearer or much more distant become to some extent

blurred and diffused. This effect is probably due to visual images,

simulating the sensations which would normally ensue were we

actually making a change of focus. The degree to which these

last effects occur appears to differ very greatly from one person

to another. Insufficient attention to the great variation in

the means by which these images are involved by the painting

is responsible for much bad criticism. Thus artists can commonly

be found who are quite unable, when looking at paintings: in

which the means employed are unlike their own, to apprehend forms

over which less specialised persons find no difficulty. In general

most visitors to Galleries pay too little attention to the fact

that few pictures can be instantaneously apprehended, that even

ten minutes’ study is quite inadequate in the case of unfamiliar

kinds of work, and that the capacity for ‘seeing’ pictures (in

sense three), an indispensable but merely an initial step to

appreciating them, is something which has to be acquired. It

is naturally of great assistance if many works by the same painter

or of the same School can be seen together, for then the essential

methods employed become clearer. In a general collection it is

difficult not to look at too great a variety of pictures, and

a confusion results, perhaps unnoticed, which is a serious obstacle

to the coherent building up of any one picture. The fashion in

which most Old Masters are hidden away under grime and glass

and the efforts which are necessary in order to reconstruct them

are additional obstacles. The neglect of these obvious facts

is the chief explanation of the low level of appreciation and

criticism from which the art of painting at present suffers.

Following upon the visual images are a swarm of others varying

from picture to picture: tactile images giving the appearance

of texture to surfaces, muscular images giving hardness, stiffness,

softness, flexibility and so on to the volumes imagined—the lightness

and insubstantiality of muslin, the solidity and fixity of rock

being matters of the intervention of images due originally to

the sensations we have received in the past from these materials.

This muscular imagery is of course called up in differing ways

in different cases. Primarily it is due to the imitation by the

artist of subtleties in the light given off by the materials,

or characteristic peculiarities in their form, but there are,

as we shall see, more indirect but also less stable, less reliable

and less efficacious ways by which they may be evoked. The same

applies to the other images, thermal, olfactory, auditory and

the rest, which may be involved in particular cases. There is

a direct and an indirect way in which they can be evoked. They

may spring up at the visual appeal or they may only respond at

a later stage as a result of roundabout trains of thinking. Thus

a silk scarf may _look_ soft and light; or we may imagine

it as light, it _looking_ all the while iron-hard and heavy,

because we know that it is a scarf and that scarves are soft

and light. The two methods are very different. The second is

a reversal of the natural order of perception and for this reason

the condemnation so often heard from painters, of the literary

or ‘detective’ approach to pictures, of which this would be a

representative specimen, is well merited. We must, however, distinguish

cases in which there is this reversal from those in which it

does not occur, those namely in which by a process of inference

we arrive at conclusions about the represented objects which

could not possibly be directly given. But this question may be

deferred until we come to discuss representation.

Hitherto in considering the growth of the three-dimensional imagined

picture-space we have not explicitly mentioned the part played

by colour nor the equally important effect of this growth in

modifying the original colours of the first retinal impression.

But not only may colour be the chief factor determining form,

i.e. the three-dimensional organisation of space, but it is itself

most vitally modified by form.

Colours as signs, that is to say even at the most optical and

least elaborated stage, have certain very marked spatial characters

of their own. Red, for example, seems to advance towards the

eye and to swell out of its boundaries, while blue seems to retreat

and to withdraw into itself[51]. Degree of saturation may also

give recession in obvious and in more recondite ways. Pure colours

in the foreground and greyed colours in the background are a

simple example. Similarly opposition of colours is one of the

main means by which the stresses and strains of volumes may be

suggested.

These characters of colours, especially when they reinforce and

co-operate with one another, may be made to play a very important

part in determining the way in which the picture-space is constructed

when we look at a picture.

Equally important are the less direct effects upon our picture-space

imagining of the emotional or organic responses which we make

to different colours. Individuals vary greatly in the extent

to which they notice and can reflectively distinguish these responses,

and probably also in the degree to which they actually make different

responses. To persons sensitive in this respect, the colours

excite each a distinct, well-marked emotion (and attitude) capable

of being clearly differentiated from others. The sad poverty

and vagueness of the colour vocabulary, however, misleads many

people with regard to these. Each of the ‘puces’, ‘mauves’, ‘magentas’

etc. has to cover numbers of distinguishable colours, often with

strikingly different effects upon us. Thus people who are content

to say that pink is their favourite colour, or that green always

suits them, are either quite undiscriminating in their attitude

towards colour or little attentive to the actual effects produced

upon them. A similar obtuseness or insincerity is evidenced when

it is maintained, as is often done, that pink and green do not

go together. Some pinks and some greens do not, but some do,

and the test of a colourist is just his ability to feel which

are which. Few if any, in fact, of the colour relations with

which the painter is concerned can be stated with the aid of

such general terms—‘red’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, ‘grey’, ‘primrose’,

etc.—as are at present available. Each of these stands for a

number of different colours whose relations to a given colour

will commonly be different.

Taking ‘colour’ in this sense to stand for specific colours,

not for classes or ranges of varying hues, sets of colours, where

in certain spatial proportions and in certain relations of saturation,

brightness and luminosity relatively to one another, excite responses

of emotion and attitude with marked individual characteristics.

Colours, in fact, have harmonic relations, although the physical

laws governing these relations are at present unknown, and the

relations themselves only imperfectly ascertained. For every

colour another can be found such that the combined response to

the two will be of a recognisable kind, whose peculiarities are

due probably to the compatibility with one another of the impulses

set up by each. This compatibility varies in a number of ways.

The result is that for every colour a set of other colours is

discoverable such that the response to each of them is compatible

with the response to the tonic colour in a definite way.[52] A

sensitive colourist feels these compatibilities as giving to

these combinations of colours a definite character, which no

other combinations possess. Similarly relations of incompatibility

between colours can also be felt such that their combination

yields no ordered response but merely a clash and confusion of

responses. Colours which just fail to be complementary are a

typical example. Similarly the primary colours in combination

are offensive; should this precise kind of offensiveness be part

of the artist’s purpose, he will, of course, make use of them.

The fact that roses, sunsets, and so forth are so often found

to present harmonious combinations of colour may appear a little

puzzling by this account. But the vast range of close gradations,

which a rose petal, for example, presents, supplies the explanation.

Out of all these the eye picks that gradation which best accords

with the other colours chosen. There is usually some set of colours

in some harmonious relation to one another to be selected out

of the multitudinous gradations which natural objects in most

lightings present; and there are evident reasons why the eye

of a sensitive person should, when it can, pick out those gradations

which best accord. The great range of different possible selections

is, however, of importance. It explains the fact that we see

such different colours for instance when gloomy and when gay,

and thus how the actual selection made by an artist may reveal

the kind and direction of the impulses which are active in him

at the moment of selection.

Needless to say in the absence of a clear nomenclature and standardisation

of colours the task of describing and recording colour relations

is of great difficulty, but the unanimity of competent, that

is, sensitive persons as to which colours are related in specific

ways to which, is too great to be disregarded. It is as great

as the unanimity among musicians as to the harmonic relations

of notes to one another. The great differences between the two

cases are not likely to be overlooked. The presence of physical

laws in many cases connecting notes harmonically related and

the absence of similar known physical laws connecting colours

is a glaring difference. But it should not be forgotten that

these physical laws are, as it were, an extra-musical piece of

knowledge. What matters to the musician is not the physical connections

between notes but the compatibilities and incompatibilities in

the responses of emotion and attitude which they excite. The

musical relations between the notes would be the same even though

the physical relations between the stimuli which arouse them

were quite different.

Naturally enough the analogy with the harmonic relations of music

has been the chief guide to those who have systematically investigated

colour relations. Whatever may be the precise limits to which

it may profitably be carried, for anyone who wishes to form a

general conception of the emotional effects of colours in combination

it is of very great value.

Colour is of course primarily the cause and controlling factor

of emotional response to painting, but, as we have said, it may,

and commonly does, help to determine form. Parts of a picture

which are through their colour out of all emotional connection

with the rest of the picture, tend, other things being equal,

to fall out of the picture altogether, appearing as patches accidentally

adhering to the surface or as gaps through which something else

irrelevant is seen. This is the extreme instance, but the influence

of colour upon form through the emotional relations of colours

to one another is all-pervading Sometimes colour strengthens

and solidifies the structure, sometimes it fights against it,

sometimes it turns into a commentary, as it were, the colour

response modifying the form response and _vice versa_. The

great complexity of the colour and form interactions needs no

insistence. They are so various that no rule can possibly be

laid down as to a _right_ relation for all cases. All depends

upon what the whole response which the painter is seeking to

record may be. As with attempts to define a universal proper

relation of rhythm to thought in poetry (e.g. the assertion that

rhythm should echo or correspond to thought, etc.), so with general

remarks as to how form and colour should be related. All depends

upon the purpose, the total response to which both form and colour

are merely means. Mistakes between means and ends, glorifying

particular techniques into inexplicable virtues are at least

as common in the criticism of painting as with any other of the

arts.

One other aspect of the picture-space needs consideration. It

is not necessarily a fixed and static construction, but may in

several ways contain elements of movement. Some of these may

be eye movements, or kinæsthetic images of eye movements. As

the eye wanders imaginally from point to point the relations

between the parts of the picture-space change; thus an effect

of movement is induced. Equally important are the fusions of

successive visual images which may be suggested by drawing. As

we watch, for example, an arm being flexed, the eye receives

a series of successive and changing retinal impressions. Certain

combinations of these, which represent not the position and form

of the arm at any instant, but a compromise or fusion of different

positions and forms, have an easily explicable capacity to represent

the whole series, and thus to represent movement. The use of

such fused images in drawing may easily be mistaken for distortion,

but when properly interpreted it may yield normal forms in movement.

Many other means by which movement is given in Painting might

be mentioned. One means by which colour, may suggest it, for

example, is well indicated in the following description by Signac

of _Muley-abd-er Rahman entouré de sa garde_: “la tumulte

est traduit par l’accord presque dissonant du grand parasol vert

sur le bleu du ciel, surexcité déjà par l’orangé des murailles[53]”.

It need hardly be pointed out that the response made to the picture-space

varies enormously according to whether the forms in it are seen

as in rest or in movement.

So far we have merely discussed what may be described as the

sensory elements in the picture, and the responses in emotion

and attitude due to these elements. But in most painting there

are further elements essentially involved. It has been asserted

that all further elements are irrelevant, at least to appreciation;

and as a reaction to common views that seem to overlook the sensory

elements altogether the doctrine is comprehensible and perhaps

not without value. For too many people do look at pictures primarily

with intent to discover what they are ‘of’, what they represent,

without allowing the most important thing in the picture, its

sensory stimulation through colour and form, to take effect.

But the reaction goes too far when it denies the relevance of

the representative elements in all cases. It may be freely granted

that there are great pictures in which nothing is represented,

and great pictures in which what is represented is trivial and

may be disregarded. It is equally certain that there are great

pictures in which the contribution to the whole response made

through representation is not less than that made more directly

through form and colour. To those who can accept the general

psychological standpoint already outlined, or indeed any modern

account of the working of the mind, the assertion that there

is no reason why representative and formal factors in an experience

should conflict, but much reason why they should co-operate,

will need no discussion. The psychology of ‘unique æsthetic emotions’

and ‘pure art values’ upon which the contrary view relies is

merely a caprice of the fancy.

The place of representation in the work o different masters varies

enormously and it is not true that the value of their works varies

correspondingly. From Raphael and Picasso at one extreme to Rembrandt,

Goya and Hogarth at the other, Rubens, Delacroix and Giotto occupying

an intermediate position, all degrees of participation between

non-representative form and represented subject in the building

up of the whole response can be found. We may perhaps hazard,

for reasons indicated already, as a principle admitting of exception,

that what can be done by sensory means should not be done indirectly

through representation. But to say more than this is to give

yet another instance of the commonest of critical mistakes: the

exaltation of a method into an end.

Representation in painting corresponds to thought in poetry.

The same battles over the Intellect-Emotion _imbroglio_

rage in both fields. The views recently so fashionable that representation

has no place in art and that treatment not subject is what matters

in poetry spring ultimately from the same mistakes as to the

relation of thinking to feeling, from an inadequate psychology

which would set up one as inimical to the other. Reinforced as

they are by the illusion, supported by language, that Beauty

is a quality of things, not a character of our response to them,

and thus that all beautiful things as sharing this Beauty must

be alike, the confusion which such views promote is a main cause

of the difficulty which is felt so widely in appreciating both

the arts and poetry. They give an air of an esoteric mystery

to what is, if it can be done at all, the simplest and most natural

of proceedings.

The fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry

and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value

depends, are alike. The means by which they are brought about

are unlike, but closely analogous critical and technical problems

arise, as we have seen, for each. The misapprehensions to which

thought is liable recur in all the fields in which it is exercised,

and the fact that it is sometimes more easy to detect a mistake

in one field than in another is a strong argument for comparing

such closely allied subjects.

[51] This character of blue is the basis of the doctrine of Reynolds,

that blue is unsuitable in foregrounds, which led Gainsborough,

according to the well-known story, to paint The Blue Boy.

[52] This account of harmony also applies to music. Few modern

authorities are content to regard harmony as an affair merely

of the physical relationships of notes.

[53] _D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme_, p. 39.