Poetry and Beliefs
What I see very well is the wide-spread, infinite harm of putting
fancy for knowledge (to speak like Socrates), or rather of
living by choice in a twilight of the mind where fancy and
knowledge are indiscernible.—_Euripides the Rationalist_.
It is evident that the bulk of poetry consists of statements
which only the very foolish would think of attempting to verify.
They are not the kind of things which can be verified. If we
recall what was said in Chapter XVI as to the natural generality
or vagueness of reference we shall see another reason why references
as they occur in poetry are rarely susceptible of scientific
truth or falsity. Only references which are brought into certain
highly complex and very special combinations, so as to correspond
to the ways in which things actually hang together, can be either
true or false, and most references in poetry are not knit together
in this way.
But even when they are, on examination, frankly false, this is
no defect. Unless, indeed, the obviousness of the falsity forces
the reader to reactions which are incongruent or disturbing to
the poem. And equally, a point more often misunderstood, their
truth, when they are true, is no merit[100]. The people who say
‘How True!’ at intervals while reading Shakespeare are misusing
his work, and, comparatively speaking, wasting their time. For
all that matters in either case is acceptance, that is to say,
the initiation and development of the further response.
Poetry affords the clearest examples of this subordination of
reference to attitude. It is the supreme form of _emotive_
language. But there can be no doubt that originally all language
was emotive; its scientific use is a later development, and most
language is still emotive. Yet the late development has come
to seem the natural and the normal use, largely because the only
people who have reflected upon language were at the moment of
reflection using it scientifically.
The emotions and attitudes resulting from a statement used emotively
need not be directed towards anything to which the statement
refers. This is clearly evident in dramatic poetry, but much
more poetry than is usually supposed is dramatic in structure.
As a rule a statement in poetry arouses attitudes much more wide
and general in direction than the references of the statement.
Neglect of this fact makes most verbal analysis of poetry irrelevant.
And the same is true of those critical but emotive utterances
about poetry which gave rise to this discussion. No one, it is
plain, can read poetry successfully without, consciously or unconsciously,
observing the distinction between the two uses of words. That
does not need to be insisted upon. But further no one can understand
such utterances about poetry as that quoted from Dr Mackail in
our third chapter, or Dr Bradley’s cry that “Poetry is a spirit”,
or Shelley’s that “A poem is the very image of life expressed
in its eternal truth”, or the passages quoted above from Coleridge,
without distinguishing the making of a statement from the incitement
or expression of an attitude. But too much inferior poetry has
been poured out as criticism, too much sack and too little bread;
confusion between the two activities, on the part of writers
and readers alike, is what is primarily responsible for the backwardness
of critical studies. What other stultifications of human endeavour
it is also responsible for we need not linger here to point out.
The separation of prose from poetry, if we may so paraphrase
the distinction, is no mere academic activity. There is hardly
a problem outside mathematics which is not complicated by its
neglect, and hardly any emotional response which is not crippled
by irrelevant intrusions. No revolution in human affairs would
be greater than that which a wide-spread observance of this distinction
would bring about.
One perversion in especial needs to be noticed. It is constantly
present in critical discussion, and is in fact responsible for
Revelation Doctrines. Many attitudes, which arise without dependence
upon any reference, merely by the interplay and resolution of
impulses otherwise awakened, can be momentarily encouraged by
suitable beliefs held as scientific beliefs are held. So far
as this encouragement is concerned, the truth or falsity of these
beliefs does not matter, the immediate effect is the same in
either case. When the attitude is important, the temptation to
base it upon some reference which is treated as established scientific
truths are treated is very great, and the poet thus easily comes
to invite the destruction of his work; Wordsworth puts forward
his Pantheism, and other people doctrines of Inspiration, Idealism
and Revelation.
The effect is twofold; an appearance of security and stability
is given to the attitude, which thus seems to be justified; and
at the same time it is no longer so necessary to sustain this
attitude by the more difficult means peculiar to the arts, or
to pay full attention to form. The reader can be relied upon
to do more than his share. That neither effect is desirable is
easily seen. The attitude for the sake of which the belief is
introduced is thereby made not more but less stable. Remove the
belief, once it has affected the attitude; the attitude collapses.
It may later be restored by more appropriate means, but that
is another matter. And all such beliefs are very likely to be
removed; their logical connections with other beliefs scientifically
entertained are, to say the least, shaky. In the second place
these attitudes, produced not by the appropriate means but, as
it were by a short cut, through beliefs, are rarely so healthy,
so vigorous and full of life as the others. Unlike attitudes
normally produced they usually require an increased stimulus
every time that they are reinstated. The belief has to grow more
and more fervent, more and more convinced, in order to produce
the same attitude. The believer has to pass from one paroxysm
of conviction to another, enduring each time a greater strain.
This substitution of an intellectual formula for the poem or
work of art is of course most easily observed in the case of
religion, where the temptation is greatest. In place of an experience,
which is a direct response to a certain selection of the possibilities
of stimulation, we have a highly indirect response, made, not
to the actual influences of the world upon us, but to a special
kind of belief as to some particular state of affairs.[101] There
is a suppressed conditional clause implicit in all poetry. If
things were such and such then . . . and so the response develops.
The amplitude and fineness of the response, its sanction and
authority, in other words, depend upon this freedom from actual
assertion in all cases in which the belief is questionable on
any ground whatsoever. For any such assertion involves suppressions,
of indefinite extent, which may be fatal to the wholeness, the
integrity of the experience. And the assertion is almost always
unnecessary; if we look closely we find that the greatest poets,
as poets, though frequently not as critics, refrain from assertion.
But it is easy, by what seems only a slight change of approach,
to make the initial step an act of faith, and to make the whole
response dependent upon a belief as to a matter of fact. Even
when the belief is true, the damage done to the whole experience
may be great, in the case of a person whose reasons for this
belief are inadequate, for example, and the increased temporary
vivacity which is the cause of perversion is no sufficient compensation.
As a convenient example it may be permissible to refer to the
Poet Laureate’s anthology, _The Spirit of Man_, and I have
the less hesitation since the passages there gathered together
are chosen with such unerring taste and discrimination. But to
turn them into a statement of a philosophy is very noticeably
to degrade them and to restrict and diminish their value. The
use of verse quotations as chapter headings is open to the same
objection. The experiences which ensue may seem very similar
to the experiences of free reading; they feel similar; but all
the signs which can be most trusted, after-effects for example,
show them to be different. The vast differences in the means
by which they are brought about is also good ground for supposing
them to be dissimilar, but this difference is obscured through
the ambiguities of the term ‘belief’.
There are few terms which are more troublesome in psychology
than belief, formidable though this charge may seem. The sense
in which we believe a scientific proposition is not the sense
in which we believe emotive utterances, whether they are political
‘We will not sheathe the sword’, or critical ‘The progress of
poetry is immortal’, or poetic. Both senses of belief are complicated
and difficult, to define. Yet we commonly appear to assume that
they are the same or that they differ only in the kind and degree
of evidence available. Scientific belief we may perhaps define
as readiness to act as though the reference symbolised by the
proposition which is believed were true. Readiness to act in
_all_ circumstances and in _all_ connections into which
it can enter. This rough definition would, of course, need elaborating
to be complete, but for our present purposes it may suffice.
The other element usually included in a definition of belief,
namely a feeling or emotion of acceptance, the ‘This is sooth,
accept it!’ feeling, is often absent in scientific belief and
is not essential.
Emotive belief is very different. Readiness to act as though
some references were true is often involved, but the connections
and circumstances in which this readiness remains are narrowly
restricted. Similarly the extent of the action is ordinarily
limited. Consider the acceptances involved in the understanding
of a play, for example. They form a system any element of which
is believed while the rest are believed and so long as the acceptance
of the whole growing system leads to successful response. Some,
however, are of the form ‘Given this then that would follow’,
general beliefs, that is to say, of the kind which led Aristotle,
in the passage quoted above, to describe Poetry as a more philosophical
thing than history because chiefly conversant of universal truth.
But if we look closely into most instances of such beliefs we
see that they are entertained only in the special circumstances
of the poetic experience. They are held as conditions for further
effects, our attitudes and emotional responses, and not as we
hold beliefs in laws of nature, which we expect to find verified
on all occasions. If dramatic necessities were actually scientific
laws we should know much more psychology than any reasonable
person pretends that we do. That these beliefs as to “how any
person of a certain character would speak or act, probably or
necessarily”, upon which so much drama seems to depend, are not
scientific, but are held only for the sake of their dramatic
effect, is shown clearly by the ease with which we abandon them
if the advantage lies the other way. The medical impossibility
of Desdemona’s last speech is perhaps as good an example as any.
The bulk of the beliefs involved in the arts are of this kind,
provisional acceptances, holding only in special circumstances
(in the state of mind which is the poem or work of art) acceptances
made for the sake of the ‘imaginative experience’ which they
make possible. The difference between these emotive beliefs and
scientific beliefs is not one of degree but of kind. As feelings
they are very similar, but as attitudes their difference in structure
has widespread consequences.
There remains to be discussed another set of emotive effects
which may also be called beliefs. Instead of occurring part way
in, or at the beginning of a response, they come as a rule at
the end, and thus are less likely to be confused with scientific
beliefs. Very often the whole state of mind in which we are left
by a poem, or by music, or, more rarely perhaps, by other forms
of art, is of a kind which it is natural to describe as a belief.
When all provisional acceptances have lapsed, when the single
references and their connections which may have led up to the
final response are forgotten, we may still have an attitude and
an emotion which has to introspection all the characters of a
belief. This belief, which is a consequence not a cause of the
experience, is the chief source of the confusion upon which Revelation
Doctrines depend.
If we ask what in such cases it is which is believed, we are
likely to receive, and to offer, answers both varied and vague.
For strong belief-feelings, as is well known and as is shown
by certain doses of alcohol or hashish, and pre-eminently of
nitrous oxide, will readily attach themselves to almost any reference,
distorting it to suit their purpose. Few people without experience
of the nitrous-oxide revelation have any conception of their
capacity for believing or of the extent to which belief-feelings
and attitudes are parasitic. Thus when, through reading _Adonais_,
for example, we are left in a strong emotional attitude which
feels like belief, it is only too easy to think that we are believing
in immortality or survival, or in something else capable of statement,
and fatally easy also to attribute the value of the poem to the
alleged effect, or conversely to regret that it should depend
upon such a scientifically doubtful conclusion. Scientific beliefs,
as opposed to these emotive beliefs, are beliefs ‘_that_
so and so’. They can be stated with greater or less precision,
as the case may be, but always in some form. It is for some people
difficult to admit beliefs which are objectless, which are not
about anything or in anything; beliefs which cannot be stated.
Yet most of the beliefs of children and primitive peoples, and
of the unscientific generally seem to be of this kind. Their
parasitic nature helps to confuse the issue. What we have to
distinguish are beliefs which are grounded in fact, i.e., are
due to reference, and beliefs which are due to other causes,
and merely attach themselves to such references as will support
them.
That an objectless belief is a ridiculous or an incomplete thing
is a prejudice deriving only from confusion. Such beliefs have,
of course, no place in science, but in themselves they are often
of the utmost value. Provided always that they do not furnish
themselves with illicit objects. It is the objectless belief
which is masquerading as a belief in this or that, which is ridiculous;
more often than not it is also a serious nuisance. When they
are kept from tampering with the development of reference such
emotional attitudes may be, as revelation doctrines in such strange
forms maintain, among the most important and valuable effects
which the arts can produce.
It is often held that recent generations suffer more from nervous
strain than some at least of their predecessors, and many reasons
for this have been suggested. Certainly the types of nervous
disease most prevalent seem to have changed. An explanation not
sufficiently noticed perhaps is the break-down of traditional
accounts of the universe, and the strain imposed by the vain
attempt to orient the mind by belief of the scientific kind alone.
In the pre-scientific era, the devout adherent to the Catholic
account of the world, for example, found a sufficient basis for
nearly all his main attitudes in what he took to be scientific
truth. It would be fairer to say that the difference between
ascertained fact and acceptable fiction did not obtrude itself
for him. To-day this is changed, and if he believes such an account,
he does not do so, if intelligent, without considerable difficulty
or without a fairly persistent strain. The complete sceptic,
of course, is a new phenomenon, dissenters in the past having
commonly disbelieved only because they held a different belief
of the same kind. These topics have, it is true, been touched
upon by psycho-analysts, but not with a very clear understanding
of the situation. The Vienna School would merely have us away
with antiquated lumber; the Zurich School would hand us a new
outfit of superstitions. Actually what is needed is a habit of
mind which allows both reference and the development of attitudes
their proper independence. This habit of mind is not to be attained
at once, or for most people with ease. We try desperately to
support our attitudes with beliefs as to facts, verified or accepted
as scientifically established, and by so doing we weaken our
own emotional backbone. For the justification of any attitude
_per se_ is its success for the needs of the being. It is
not justified by the soundness of the views which may seem to
be, and in pathological cases are, its ground and causes. The
source of our attitudes should be in experience itself; compare
Whitman’s praise of the cow which does not worry about its soul.
Opinion as to matters of fact, knowledge, belief, are not necessarily
involved in any of our attitudes to the world in general, or
to particular phases of it. If we bring them in, if, by a psychological
perversion only too easy to fall into, we make them the basis
of our adjustment, we run extreme risks of later disorganisation
elsewhere.
Many people find great difficulty in accepting or even in understanding
this position. They are so accustomed to regarding ‘recognised
facts’ as the natural basis of attitudes, that they cannot conceive
how anyone can be otherwise organised. The hard-headed positivist
and the convinced adherent of a religion from opposite sides
encounter the same difficulty. The first at the best suffers
from an insufficient material for the development of his attitudes;
the second from intellectual bondage and unconscious insincerity.
The one starves himself; the other is like the little pig in
the fable who chose to have his house built of cabbages and ate
it, and so the grim wolf with privy paw devoured him. For clear
and impartial awareness of the nature of the world in which we
live and the development of attitudes which will enable us to
live in it finely are both necessities, and neither can be subordinated
to the other. They are almost independent, such connections as
exist in well-organised individuals being adventitious. Those
who find this a hard saying may be invited to consider the effect
upon them of those works of art which most unmistakably attune
them to existence. The central experience of Tragedy and its
chief value is an attitude indispensable for a fully developed
life. But in the reading of _King Lear_ what facts verifiable
by science, or accepted and believed in as we accept and believe
in ascertained facts, are relevant? None whatever. Still more
clearly in the experiences of some music, of some architecture
and of some abstract design, attitudes are evoked and developed
which are unquestionably independent of all beliefs as to fact,
and these are exceptional only in being protected by accident
from the most insidious perversion to which the mind is liable.
For the intermingling of knowledge and belief is indeed a perversion,
through which both activities suffer degradation.
These objectless beliefs, which though merely attitudes seem
to be knowledge, are not difficult to explain. Some system of
impulses not ordinarily in adjustment within itself or adjusted
to the world finds something which orders it or gives it fit
exercise. Then follows the peculiar sense of ease, of restfulness,
of free, unimpeded activity, and the feeling of acceptance, of
something more positive than acquiescence. This feeling is the
reason why such states may be called beliefs. They share this
feeling with, for example, the state which follows the conclusive
answering of a question. Most attitude-adjustments which are
successful possess it in some degree, but those which are very
regular and familiar, such as sitting down to meat or stretching
out in bed, naturally tend to lose it. But when the required
attitude has been long needed, where its coming is unforeseen
and the manner in which it is brought about complicated and inexplicable,
where we know no more than that formerly we were unready and
that now we are ready for life in some particular phase, the
feeling which results may be intense. Such are the occasions
upon which the arts seem to lift away the burden of existence,
and we seem ourselves to be looking into the heart of things.
To be seeing whatever it is as it really is, to be cleared in
vision and to be recipients of a revelation.
We have considered already the detail of these states of consciousness
and their conjectural impulse basis. We can now take this feeling
of a revealed significance, this attitude of readiness, acceptance
and understanding, which has led to so many Revelation Doctrines,
not as actually implying knowledge, but for what it is—the conscious
accompaniment of our successful adjustment to life. But it is,
we must admit, no certain sign by itself that our adjustment
is adequate or admirable. Even the most firm adherents to Revelation
Doctrines admit that there are bogus revelations, and on our
account it is equally important to distinguish between ‘feelings
of significance’ which indicate that all is well and those which
do not. In a sense all indicate that _something_ is going
well, otherwise there would be no acceptance, no belief but rejection.
The real question is ‘What is it?’ Thus after the queer reshuffling
of inhibitions and releases which follows the taking of a dose
of alcohol, for example, the sense of revelation is apt to occur
with unusual authority. Doubtless this feeling of significance
is a sign that as the organism is for the moment, its affairs
are for the moment thriving. But when the momentary special condition
of the system has given place to the more usual, more stable
and more generally advantageous adjustment, the authority of
the vision falls away from it; we find that what we were doing
is by no means so wonderful or so desirable as we thought and
that our belief was nonsensical. So it is less noticeably with
many moments in which the world seems to be showing its real
face to us.
The chief difficulty of all Revelation Doctrines has always been
to discover what it is which is revealed. If these states of
mind are knowledge it should be possible to state what it is
that they know. It is often easy enough to find something which
we can suppose to be what we know. Belief feelings, we have seen,
are _parasitic_, and will attach themselves to all kinds
of hosts. In literature it is especially easy to find hosts.
But in music, in the non-representative arts of design, in architecture
or ceramics, for example, the task of finding something to believe,
or to believe in, is not so easy. Yet the ‘feeling of significance’
is as common[102] in these other arts as in literature. Denial
of this is usually proof only of an interest limited to literature.
This difficulty has usually been met by asserting that the alleged
knowledge given in the revelation is non-intellectual. It refuses
to be rationalised, it is said. Well and good; but if so why
call it knowledge? Either it is capable of corroborating or of
conflicting with the other things we usually call knowledge,
such as the laws of thermodynamics, capable of being stated and
brought into connection with what else we know; or it is not
knowledge, not capable of being stated. We cannot have it both
ways, and no sneers at the limitations of logic, the commonest
of the resources of the confused, amend the dilemma. In fact
it resembles knowledge only in being an attitude and a feeling
very similar to some attitudes and feelings which may and often
do accompany knowledge. But ‘Knowledge’ is an immensely potent
emotive word engendering reverence towards any state of mind
to which it is applied. And these ‘feelings of significance’
are those among our states of mind which most deserve to be revered.
That they should be so obstinately described as knowledge even
by those who most carefully remove from them all the characteristics
of knowledge is not surprising.
Traditionally what is said to be known thus mystically through
the arts is Beauty, a remote and divine entity not otherwise
to be apprehended, one of the Eternal Absolute Values. And this
is doubtless emotively a way of talking which is effective for
a while. When its power abates, as the power of such utterances
will, there are several developments which may easily be used
to revive it. “Beauty is eternal, and we may say that it is already
manifest as a heavenly thing—the beauty of Nature is indeed an
earnest to us of the ultimate goodness which lies behind the
apparent cruelty and moral confusion of organic life. . . . Yet
we feel that these three are ultimately one, and human speech
bears constant witness to the universal conviction that Goodness
is beautiful, that Beauty is good, that Truth is Beauty. We can
hardly avoid the use of the word ‘trinity’, and if we are theists
at all we cannot but say that they are one, because they are
the manifestation of one God. If we are not theists there is
no explanation.”[103]
Human speech is indeed the witness, and to what else does it
not witness? It would be strange if in a matter of such moment
as this the greatest of all emotive words did not come into play.
“In religion we believe that God is Beauty and Life, that God
is Truth and Light, that God is Goodness and Love, and that because
he is all these they are all one, and the Trinity in Unity and
Unity in Trinity is to be worshipped.”[104] No one who can interpret
emotive language, who can avoid the temptation to illicit belief
so constantly presented by it need find such utterances ‘meaningless.’
But the wrong approach is easy and far too often pressingly invited
by the speakers, labouring themselves under misconceptions. To
excite a serious and reverent attitude is one thing. To set forth
an explanation is another. To confuse the two and mistake the
incitement of an attitude for a statement of fact is a practice
which should be discouraged. For intellectual dishonesty is an
evil which is the more dangerous the more it is hedged about
with emotional sanctities. And after all there is another explanation,
which would long ago have been quietly established to the world’s
great good had men been less ready to sacrifice the integrity
of their thought and feeling for the sake of a local and limited
advantage.
The last movement of this machine to think with is now completed.
I am too well acquainted with it, and have spent too many hours
putting it together to suppose that it can be worked equally
well by every reader. Half these hours have in fact been spent
in simplifying its structure, in taking out reservations and
qualifications, references to other views, controversial matter,
and supernumerary distinctions. From one point of view, it would
be a better book with these left in, but I wished to make it
manageable by those who had not spent a quite disproportionate
amount of energy in reflection upon abstract matters. And if
to some readers parts of it appear unnecessary—either _irrelevant_,
in the one case; or _over-obvious_ in the other—I have nothing
to add which would make them change their opinion. The first
I can only ask to look again, with the hope that a connection
which has been missed will be noticed. The second, I would remind
that I write in an age when, in the majority of social circles,
to be seriously interested in art is to be thought an oddity.
[100] No merit, that is, _in this connection_. There may be
some exceptions to this, cases in which the explicit recognition
of the truth of a statement as opposed to the simple acceptance
of it, is _necessary_ to the full development of the further
response. But I believe that such cases will on careful examination
be found to be very rare with competent readers. Individual differences,
corresponding to the different degrees to which individuals have
their belief feelings, their references, and their attitudes
entangled, are to be expected. There are, of course, an immense
number of scientific beliefs present among the conditions of
every attitude. But since acceptances would do equally well in
their place they are not _necessary_ to it.
[101] In view of a possible misunderstanding at this point, compare
Chapter X, especially the final paragraph. If a belief in Retributive
Justice, for example, is fatal to _Prometheus Unbound_,
so in another way is the belief that the Millennium is at hand.
To steer an unperplexed path between these opposite dangers is
extremely difficult. The distinctions required are perhaps better
left to the reader’s reflection than laboured further in the
faulty terminology which alone at present is available.
[102] Cf. Gurney, _The Power of Sound_, p. 126. “A splendid melodic
phrase seems continually not like an object of sense, but like an
affirmation; not so much prompting admiring ejaculation as compelling
passionate assent.” His explanation, through association with speech,
seems to me inadequate. He adds that the use of terms such as
“_expressiveness_ and _significance_, as opposed to meaninglessness and
triviality, may be allowed, without the implication of any reference to
transcendental views which one may fail to understand, or theories of
interpretation which one may entirely repudiate.”
[103] Percy Dearmer, _The Necessity of Art_, p. 180.
[104] A.W. Pollard, _ibidem_, p. 135.
APPENDIX A. On Value
A friendly reviewer, Mr. Conrad Aiken, complains that my theory
of value is not sufficiently relativistic, that it inevitably
involves the surreptitious re-entrance of the ‘absolute’ value
which we had been at such pains to exclude. Except for the word
‘surreptitious’ and the suggestion that the ‘absolute’ value
we arrive at is the same thing as the ultimate idea discussed
in Chapter VI., I agree to this. The purpose of the theory is
just to enable us to compare different experiences in respect
of their value; and their value, I suggest, is a quantitative
matter. To put it briefly the best life is that in which as much
as possible of our possible personality is engaged. And of two
personalities that one is the better in which there is more which
can be engaged without confusion. We all know people of unusually
wide and varied possibilities who pay for their width in disorder,
and we know others who pay for their order by narrowness. What
the theory attempts to provide is a system of measurement by
which we can compare not only different experiences belonging
to the same personality but different personalities. We do not
yet know how to make the measurements required. We have to use
the roughest kinds of estimates and very indirect indications.
But to know at least what would have to be measured if we were
to reach precision and how to make the comparison is a step towards
the goal. The parallel, though I am not fond of it, between the
new absolutism which Relativity has reached and this quantitative
way of comparing the experiences and preferences of individuals
may perhaps be helpful. But whereas the physicist has measurements
to work from, the psychologist as yet has none. And further,
it is likely that modes of mental organisation which are at present
impossible or dangerously unstable may become possible and even
easy in the future with changes in social structure and material
conditions. This last consideration might give any critic a nightmare.
Nothing less than our whole sense of man’s history and destiny
is involved in our final decision as to value.
APPENDIX B.
THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT
We too readily forget that, unless something is very wrong with
our civilisation, we should be producing three equal poets at
least for every poet of high rank in our great-great-grandfathers’
day. Something must indeed be wrong; and since Mr. Eliot is one
of the very few poets that current conditions have not overcome,
the difficulties which he has faced, and the cognate difficulties
which his readers encounter, repay study.
Mr. Eliot’s poetry has occasioned an unusual amount of irritated
or enthusiastic bewilderment. The bewilderment has several sources.
The most formidable is the unobtrusiveness, in some cases the
absence, of any coherent intellectual thread upon which the items
of the poem are strung. A reader of ‘Gerontion,’ of ‘Preludes,’
or of ‘The Waste Land,’ may, if he will, after repeated readings,
introduce such a thread. Another reader after much effort may
fail to contrive one. But in either case energy will have been
misapplied. For the items are united by the accord, contrast,
and interaction of their emotional effects, not by an intellectual
scheme that analysis must work out. The value lies in the unified
response which this interaction creates in the right reader.
The only intellectual activity required takes place in the realisation
of the separate items. We can, of course, make a ‘rationalisation’
of the whole experience, as we can of any experience. If we do,
we are adding something which does not belong to the poem. Such
a logical scheme is, at best, a scaffolding that vanishes when
the poem is constructed. But we have so built into our nervous
systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry,
that we find a difficulty in doing without it.
This point may be misunderstood, for the charge most usually
brought against Mr. Eliot’s poetry is that it is overintellectualised.
One reason for this is his use of allusion. A reader who in one
short poem picks up allusions to _The Aspern Papers_, _Othello_,
‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’ Marston, _The Phœnix and the Turtle_,
_Antony and Cleopatra_ (twice), ‘The Extasie,’ _Macbeth_,
_The Merchant of Venice_, and Ruskin, feels that his wits
are being unusually well exercised. He may easily leap to the
conclusion that the basis of the poem is in wit also. But this
would be a mistake. These things come in, not that the reader
may be ingenious or admire the writer’s erudition (this last
accusation has tempted several critics to disgrace themselves),
but for the sake of the emotional aura which they bring and the
attitudes they incite. Allusion in Mr. Eliot’s hands is a technical
device for compression. ‘The Waste Land’ is the equivalent in
content to an epic. Without this device twelve books would have
been needed. But these allusions and the notes in which some
of them are elucidated have made many a petulant reader turn
down his thumb at once. Such a reader has not begun to understand
what it is all about.
This objection is connected with another, that of obscurity.
To quote a recent pronouncement upon ‘The Waste Land’ from Mr.
Middleton Murry: ‘The reader is compelled, in the mere effort
to understand, to adopt an attitude of intellectual suspicion,
which makes impossible the communication of feeling. The work
offends against the most elementary canon of good writing: that
the immediate effect should be unambiguous.’ Consider first this
canon. What would happen, if we pressed it, to Shakespeare’s
greatest sonnets or to _Hamlet_? The truth is that very
much of the best poetry is necessarily ambiguous in its immediate
effect. Even the most careful and responsive reader must reread
and do hard work before the poem forms itself clearly and unambiguously
in his mind. An original poem, as much as a new branch of mathematics,
compels the mind which receives it to grow, and this takes time.
Anyone who upon reflection asserts the contrary for his own case
must be either a demigod or dishonest; probably Mr. Murray was
in haste. His remarks show that he has failed in his attempt
to read the poem, and they reveal, in part, the reason for his
failure—namely, his own overintellectual approach. To read it
successfully he would have to discontinue his present self-mystifications.
The critical question in all cases is whether the poem is worth
the trouble it entails. For ‘The Waste Land’ this is considerable.
There is Miss Weston’s _From Ritual to Romance_ to read,
and its ‘astral’ trimmings to be discarded—they have nothing
to do with Mr. Eliot’s poem. There is Canto xxvi of the _Purgatorio_
to be studied—the relevance of the close of that canto to the
whole of Mr. Eliot’s work must be insisted upon. It illuminates
his persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation,
as religion was the problem of the last. There is the central
position of Tiresias in the poem to be puzzled out—the cryptic
form of the note which Mr. Eliot writes on this point is just
a little tiresome. It is a way of underlining the fact that the
poem is concerned with many aspects of the one fact of sex, a
hint that is perhaps neither indispensable nor entirely successful.
When all this has been done by the reader, when the materials
with which the words are to clothe themselves have been collected,
the poem still remains to be read. And it is easy to fail in
this undertaking. An ‘attitude of intellectual suspicion’ must
certainly be abandoned. But this is not difficult to those who
still know how to give their feelings precedence to their thoughts,
who can accept and unify an experience without trying to catch
it in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine. One form
of this attempt must be mentioned. Some, misled no doubt by its
origin in a Mystery, have endeavoured to give the poem a symbolical
reading. But its symbols are not mystical, but emotional. They
stand, that is, not for ineffable objects, but for normal human
experience. The poem, in fact, is radically naturalistic; only
its compression makes it appear otherwise. And in this it probably
comes nearer to the original Mystery which it perpetuates than
transcendentalism does.
If it were desired to label in three words the most characteristic
feature of Mr. Eliot’s technique, this might be done by calling
his poetry a music of ideas. The ideas are of all kinds, abstract
and concrete, general and particular, and, like the musician’s
phrases, they are arranged, not that they may tell us something,
but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole
of feeling and attitude and produce a peculiar liberation of
the will. They are there to be responded to, not to be pondered
or worked out. This is, of course, a method used intermittently
in very much poetry, and only an accentuation and isolation of
one of its normal resources. The peculiarity of Mr. Eliot’s later,
more puzzling, work is his deliberate and almost exclusive employment
of it. In the earlier poems this logical freedom appears only
occasionally. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ for example,
there is a patch at the beginning and another at the end, but
the rest of the poem is quite straightforward. In ‘Gerontion,’
the first long poem in this manner, the air of monologue, of
a stream of associations, is a kind of disguise, and the last
two lines,
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,
are almost an excuse. The close of ‘A Cooking Egg’ is perhaps
the passage in which the technique shows itself most clearly.
The reader who appreciates the emotional relevance of the title
has the key to the later poems in his hand. I take Pipit to be
the retired nurse of the hero of the poem, and _Views of the
Oxford Colleges_ to be the, still treasured, present which
he sent her when he went up to the University. The middle section
of the poem I read as a specimen of the rather withered pleasantry
in which contemporary culture has culminated and beyond which
it finds much difficulty in passing. The final section gives
the contrast which is pressed home by the title. Even the most
mature egg was new laid once. The only other title of equal significance
that I can recall is Mrs. Wharton’s _The Age of Innocence_,
which might well be studied in this connection. ‘The Waste Land’
and ‘The Hollow Men’ (the most beautiful of Mr. Eliot’s poems,
and in the last section a new development) are purely a ‘music
of ideas,’ and the pretence of a continuous thread of associations
is dropped.
How this technique lends itself to misunderstandings we have
seen. But many readers who have failed in the end to escape bewilderment
have begun by finding on almost every line that Mr. Eliot has
written—if we except certain youthful poems on American topics—that
personal stamp which is the hardest thing for the craftsman to
imitate and perhaps the most certain sign that the experience,
good or bad, rendered in the poem is authentic. Only those unfortunate
persons who are incapable of reading poetry can resist Mr. Eliot’s
rhythms. The poem as a whole may elude us while every fragment,
as a fragment, comes victoriously home. It is difficult to believe
that this is Mr. Eliot’s fault rather than his reader’s, because
a parallel case of a poet who so constantly achieves the hardest
part of his task and yet fails in the easier is not to be found.
It is much more likely that we have been trying to put the fragments
together on a wrong principle.
Another doubt has been expressed. Mr. Eliot repeats himself in
two ways. The nightingale, Cleopatra’s barge, the rats, and the
smoky candle-end, recur and recur. Is this a sign of a poverty
of inspiration? A more plausible explanation is that this repetition
is in part a consequence of the technique above described, and
in part something which many writers who are not accused of poverty
also show. Shelley, with his rivers, towers, and stars, Conrad,
Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Dostoevski spring to mind. When a writer
has found a theme or image which fixes a point of relative stability
in the drift of experience, it is not to be expected that he
will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation. And it
is quite true that the central process in all Mr. Eliot’s best
poems is the same; the conjunction of feelings which, though
superficially opposed,—as squalor, for example, is opposed to
grandeur,—yet tend as they develop to change places and even
to unite. If they do not develop far enough the intention of
the poet is missed. Mr. Eliot is neither sighing after vanished
glories nor holding contemporary experience up to scorn.
Both bitterness and desolation are superficial aspects of his
poetry. There are those who think that he merely takes his readers
into the Waste Land and leaves them there, that in his last poem
he confesses his impotence to release the healing waters. The
reply is that some readers find in his poetry not only a clearer,
fuller realisation of their plight, the plight of a whole generation,
than they find elsewhere, but also through the very energies
set free in that realisation a return of the saving passion.