The Availability of the Poet’s Experience
That he is the wisest, the happiest and the best, inasmuch
as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible; the greatest poets
have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate
prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives,
the most fortunate of men.—_The Defence of Poetry_.
The special communicative gifts, either active or passive, which
have been alluded to, are no peculiar irreducible abilities.
They can be described in terms of activities already mentioned.
The use of past similarities in experience and the control of
these elements through the dependence of their effects upon one
another, make up the speaker’s, the active communicator’s gift.
Discrimination, suggestibility, free and clear resuscitation
of elements of past experience _disentangled from one another_,
and control of irrelevant personal details and accidents, make
up the recipient’s gift. We may now consider these more closely.
Certain favourable and unfavourable special circumstances in
the temperaments or characters of the persons concerned may be
set aside. Thus courage or audacity, enterprise, goodwill, absence
of undue pride or conceit, honesty, humaneness, humility in its
finest sense, humour, tolerance, good health, and the Confucian
characteristics of the ‘superior man’ are favourable general
conditions for communication. But we will assume them present
in sufficient degree and pass on to the less evident because
more fundamental conditions. In the first place all those which
we have enumerated as desirable in the recipient are also necessary
in the artist. He is pre-eminently accessible to external influences
and discriminating with regard to them. He is distinguished further
by the freedom in which all these impressions are held in suspension,
and by the ease with which they form new relations between themselves.
The greatest difference between the artist or poet and the ordinary
person is found, as has often been pointed out, in the range,
delicacy, and freedom of the connections he is able to make between
different elements of his experience. “All the images of nature
were still present to him,” says Dryden, with felicity, of Shakespeare,
“and he drew them not laboriously but luckily.” It is this available
possession of the past which is the first characteristic of the
adept in communication, of the poet or the artist.
Availability, not mere possession, however, is what is essential.
Many people are endowed with memories of marble upon which time
can do little to efface even the slightest mark, but they benefit
little from their endowment. A merely repetitive retention is
rather a disability than an asset in communication, since it
makes the separation of the private and irrelevant from the essential
so difficult. Persons to whom the past comes back as a whole
are likely to be found in an asylum.
What is in question here is not memory, in the stricter sense
in which past experience is dated and placed, but free reproduction.
To be able to revive an experience is not to remember when and
where and how it occurred, but merely to have that peculiar state
of mind available. Why some experiences are available and others
not is unfortunately still a matter for conjecture merely. The
difficulty upon most accounts, Semon’s for example, is to explain
why _all_ our past experience is not being revived all the
time. But some plausible conjectures are not difficult to make,
and the absence of clear evidence or conclusive proof should
not prevent our making them if they are recognised for conjectures.
How far an experience is revivable would seem to depend in the
first place upon the interests, the impulses, active in the experience.
Unless similar interests recur its revival would seem to be difficult.
The original experience is built upon a number of impulses; it
came about only through these impulses. We may even say that
it is those impulses. The first condition for its revival is
the occurrence of impulses similar to _some_ of these.
The patient in the asylum occupied in reliving the same piece
of experience indefinitely does so (if he does) because he is
limited very strictly in the range of his possible impulses,
other impulses not being allowed to intervene. Hence the completeness
with which he is said to reconstruct the past. Most revival is
distorted because only some of the original impulses are repeated,
new impulses being-involved and a compromise resulting.
The impulses implicated in experiences may be many and varied
or few and alike. An experience which has a very simple impulse
structure will, we may suppose, tend to come back only when these
impulses are again relatively dominant. Other things being equal
it will have less chance of revival than an experience with a
more complex structure. Recalling the illustration used in Chapter
XIV, the broader the facet the more numerous are the positions
from which the polyhedron will settle down on that facet. It
is a first principle of psychology that the partial return only
of a situation may reinstate the whole, and since most impulses
have belonged in the past to many varied wholes there must evidently
be much rivalry as to which wholes do actually recur. What seems
to decide the dispute more than anything else is the character
of the original connections between the parts. As has recently
been emphasised by the exponents of _Gestalt-psychologie_,
mere original contiguity or simultaneity is comparatively powerless
to control revival. Compare the learning of a geometric theorem
by heart with understanding it, or even a brief study of some
building with mere daily familiarity.
What then is the difference between understanding a situation
and the more usual reactions to it? It is a difference in the
degree of organisation of the impulses which it arouses. It is
the difference between a systematised complex response, or ordered
sequence of responses, and a welter of responses. We must not
take ‘understanding’ in too specialised a sense here, or we shall
overlook the immense importance of this difference in determining
revival. We are accustomed to make an artificial distinction
between intellectual or theoretical and non-intellectual or emotional
mental activities. To understand a situation in the sense here
intended is not necessarily to reflect upon it, to inquire into
its principles and consciously distinguish its characters, but
to respond to it as a whole, in a coherent way which allows its
parts their due share and their proper independence in the response.
Experience which has this organised character, it is reasonable
to suppose, has more chance of revival, is more available as
a whole and in parts, than more confused experience.
Contrast the behaviour of the sleepy and the fully awake, of
the normal man with the lightly and the more deeply anæsthetised
patient, of the starved or fevered with the healthy. To describe
these differences in neural potency, and to mark the degree of
physiological efficiency, Dr Head has recently[57] suggested the
term _vigilance_, a useful addition to our symbolic machinery.
In a high state of vigilance the nervous system reacts to stimuli
with highly adapted, discriminating, and ordered responses; in
a lowered state of vigilance the responses are less discriminating,
less delicately adapted. Whether we are considering the decerebrate
preparation or the intact poet, the simplest automatisms or the
most highly conscious acts, what happens in a given stimulus
situation varies with the vigilance of the appropriate portion
of the nervous system. The point as regards revival can be put
conveniently by saying that experiences of high vigilance are
the most likely to be available. The degree of vigilance of the
individual at the moment at which revival is attempted is, of
course, equally but more evidently an important factor.
The answer then, at least in part, to the problem of how the
poet’s experience is more than usually available to him is that
it is, as he undergoes it, more than usually organised through
his more than usual vigilance. Connections become established
for him which in the ordinary mind, much more rigid and exclusive
in its play of impulses, are never effected, and it is through
these original connections that so much more of his past comes
to be freely revivable for him at need.
The same explanation may be put in another way. In order to keep
any steadiness and clarity in his attitudes the ordinary man
is under the necessity on most occasions of suppressing the greater
part of the impulses which the situation might arouse. He is
incapable of organising them; therefore they have to be left
out. In the same situation the artist is able to admit far more
without confusion. Hence the fact that his resultant behaviour
is apt to cause dismay, irritation or envy, or to seem incomprehensible.
The wheeling of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square may seem to have
no relation to the colour of the water in the basins, or to the
tones of a speaker’s voice or to the drift of his remarks. A
narrow field of stimulation is all that we can manage, and we
overlook the rest. But the artist does not, and when he needs
it, he has it at his disposal.
The dangers to which he is exposed, the apparent inconsequence,
the difficulty on many occasions of co-operating with him, of
relying upon him, of predicting what he will do, are evident
and often expatiated upon. His superficial resemblance to persons
who are merely mental chaoses, unorganised, without selective
ability and of weak and diffused attention, is likewise clear.
Essentially he is the opposite of these.
[57] Henry Head, ‘The Conception of Nervous and Mental Energy’
in the _British Journal of Psychology_, Oct. 1923, Vol.
XIV, p. 126.