The poets are failing us, or we them, if after reading them we do not
find ourselves changed; not with a temporary change, such as luncheon
or slumber will produce, from which we inevitably work back to the
_status quo ante_, but with a permanent alteration of our possibilities
as responsive individuals in good or bad adjustment to an all but
overwhelming concourse of stimulations. How many living poets have the
power to make such deep changes? Let us set aside youthful enthusiasms;
there is a time in most lives when, rightly enough, Mr. Masefield, Mr.
Kipling, Mr. Drinkwater, or even Mr. Noyes or Mr. Studdert Kennedy may
profoundly affect the awakening mind; it is being introduced to poetry.
Later on, looking back, we can see that any one of a hundred other
poets would have served as well or better. Let us consider only the
experienced, the fairly hardened reader, who is familiar with a great
deal of the poetry of the past.
Contemporary poetry which will, accidents apart, modify the attitudes
of this reader must be such as could not have been written in another
age than our own. It must have sprung in part from the contemporary
situation. It must correspond to needs, impulses, attitudes, which did
not arise in the same fashion for poets in the past, and criticism also
must take notice of the contemporary situation. Our attitudes to man,
to nature, and to the universe change with every generation, and have
changed with unusual violence in recent years. We cannot leave these
changes out of account in judging modern poetry. When attitudes are
changing neither criticism nor poetry can remain stationary. To those
who realise what the poet is this will be obvious; but all literary
history bears it out.
It would be of little use to give a list of the chief recent
intellectual revolutions and to attempt to deduce therefrom what must
be happening to poetry. The effects upon our attitudes of changes of
opinion are too complex to be calculated so. What we have to consider
is not men’s current opinions but their attitudes--how they feel
about this or that as part of the world; what relative importance its
different aspects have for them; what they are prepared to sacrifice
for what; what they trust, what they are frightened by, what they
desire. To discover these things we must go to the poets. Unless they
are failing us, they will show us just these things.
They will _show_ them, but, of course, they will not state them. Their
poetry will not be _about_ their attitudes in the sense in which a
treatise on anatomy is about the structure of the body. Their poetry
will arise out of their attitudes and will evoke them in an adequate
reader, but, as a rule, it will not mention any attitudes. We must, of
course, expect occasional essays in verse upon psychological topics,
but these should not mislead us. Most of the attitudes with which
poetry is concerned are indescribable--because psychology is still
in a primitive stage--and can only be named or spoken about as the
attitude of this poem or that. The poem, the actual experience as it
forms itself in the mind of the fit reader, controlling his responses
to the world and ordering his impulses, is our best evidence as to how
other men feel about things; and we read it, if we are serious, partly
to discover how life seems to another, partly to try how his attitudes
suit us, engaged as we also are in the same enterprise.
Although we cannot--for lack of a sufficient psychology--describe
attitudes in terms which do not apply also to others which we are not
considering, and although we cannot deduce a poet’s attitudes from
the general intellectual background, none the less, after reading
his poetry, when his experience has become our own, we can sometimes
profitably look round us to see why these attitudes should be so very
different, in some ways, from those we find in the poetry of 100 or of
1,000 years ago. In so doing we gain a means of indicating what these
attitudes are, useful both for those who are constitutionally unable to
read poetry (an increasing number), and for those victims of education
who neglect modern poetry because they “don’t know what to make of it.”
What, then, has been happening to the intellectual background, to
the world-picture, and in what ways may changes here have caused a
reorganization of our attitudes?
The central dominant change may be described as the _Neutralization
of Nature_, the transference from the Magical View of the world
to the scientific, a change so great that it is perhaps only
paralleled historically by the change, from whatever adumbration of a
world-picture preceded the Magical View, to the Magical View itself.
By the Magical View I mean, roughly, the belief in a world of Spirits
and Powers which control events, and which can be evoked and, to
some extent, controlled themselves by human practices. The belief in
Inspiration and the beliefs underlying Ritual are representative parts
of this view. It has been decaying slowly for some 300 years, but its
definite overthrow has taken place only in the last 60. Vestiges and
survivals of it prompt and direct a great part of our daily affairs,
but it is no longer the world-picture which an informed mind most
easily accepts. There is some evidence that Poetry, together with the
other Arts, arose with this Magical View. It is a possibility to be
seriously considered that Poetry may pass away with it.
The reasons for the downfall of the Magical View are familiar. It seems
to have arisen as a consequence of an increase in man’s knowledge of
and command over nature (the discovery of agriculture). It fell through
the extension of that knowledge of and command over nature. Throughout
its (10,000 years?) reign its stability has been due to its capacity
for satisfying men’s emotional needs through its adequacy as an object
for their attitudes. We must remember that human attitudes have
developed always _inside_ the social group; they are what a man feels,
the mainsprings of his behaviour towards his fellow-men, and they have
only a limited field of applicability. Thus the Magical View, being
an interpretation of nature in terms of man’s own most intimate and
most important affairs, very soon came to suit man’s emotional make-up
better than any other view possibly could. The attraction of the
Magical View lay very little in the actual command over nature which it
gave. That Galton was the first person to test the efficacy of prayer
experimentally is an indication of this. What did give the Magical
View its standing was the ease and adequacy with which the universe
therein presented could be emotionally handled, the scope offered for
man’s love and hatred, for his terror as well as for his hope and his
despair. It gave life a shape, a sharpness, and a coherence that no
other means could so easily secure.
In its place we have the universe of the mathematician, a field
for the tracing out of ever wider and more general uniformities. A
field in which intellectual certainty is, almost for the first time,
available, and on an unlimited scale. Also the despondencies, the
emotional excitements accompanying research and discovery, again on an
unprecedented scale. Thus a number of men who might in other times
have been poets are to-day in bio-chemical laboratories--a fact of
which we might avail ourselves, did we feel the need, in defence of
an alleged present poverty in poetry. But apart from these thrills,
what has the world-picture of science to do with human emotions?
A god voluntarily or involuntarily subject to the General Theory
of Relativity does not make an emotional appeal. So this form of
compromise fails. Various emergent deities have been suggested--by Mr.
Wells, by Professors Alexander and Lloyd Morgan--but, alas! the reasons
for suggesting them have become too clear and conscious. They are there
to meet a demand, not to make one; they do not do the work for which
they were invented.
The revolution brought about by science is, in short, too drastic to
be met by any such half-measures. It touches the central principle by
which the Mind has been deliberately organized in the past, and no
alteration in beliefs, however great, will restore equilibrium while
that principle is retained. I come now to the main purport of these
remarks.
Ever since man first grew self-conscious and reflective he has
supposed that his feelings, his attitudes, and his conduct spring from
his knowledge. That as far as he could it would be wise for him to
organize himself in this way, with knowledge[4] as the foundation on
which should rest feeling, attitude, and behaviour. In point of fact,
he never has been so organised, knowledge having been until recently
too scarce; but he has constantly been persuaded that he was built on
this plan, and has endeavoured to carry the structure further on these
lines. He has sought for knowledge, supposing that it would itself
_directly_ excite a right orientation to existence, supposing that, if
he only knew what the world was like, this knowledge in itself would
show him how to feel towards it, what attitudes to adopt, and with what
aims to live. He has constantly called what he found in this quest,
‘knowledge,’ unaware that it was hardly ever pure, unaware that his
feelings, attitudes, and behaviour were _already_ orientated by his
physiological and social needs, and were themselves, for the most part,
the sources of whatever it was that he supposed himself to be knowing.
Suddenly, not long ago, he began to get genuine knowledge on large
scale. The process went faster and faster; it snowballed. Now he has
to face the fact that the edifices of supposed knowledge, with which
he has for so long buttressed and supported his attitudes, will no
longer stand up, and, at the same time, he has to recognise that pure
knowledge is irrelevant to his aims, that it has no _direct_ bearing
upon what he should feel, or what he should attempt to do.
For science, which is simply our most elaborate way of _pointing_
to things systematically, tells us and can tell us nothing about
the nature of things in any _ultimate_ sense. It can never answer
any question of the form: _What_ is so and so? It can only tell us
_how_ so and so behaves. And it does not attempt to do more than
this. Nor, indeed, can more than this be done. Those ancient, deeply
troubling, formulations that begin with ‘What’ and ‘Why’ prove, when we
examine them, to be not questions at all; but requests--for emotional
satisfaction. They indicate our desire not for knowledge but for
assurance,[5] a point which appears clearly when we look into the ‘How’
of questions and requests, of knowledge and desire. Science can tell us
about man’s place in the universe and his chances; that the place is
precarious, and the chances problematical. It can enormously increase
our chances if we can make wise use of it. But it cannot tell us what
we are or what this world is; not because these are in any sense
insoluble questions, but because they are not questions at all.[6] And
if science cannot answer these pseudo-questions no more can philosophy
or religion. So that all the varied answers which have for ages been
regarded as the keys of wisdom are dissolving together.
The result is a biological crisis which is not likely to be decided
without trouble. It is one which we can, perhaps, decide for ourselves,
partly by thinking, partly by reorganizing our minds in other ways; if
we do not it may be decided for us, not in the way we should choose.
While it lasts it puts a strain on each individual and upon society,
which is part of the explanation of many modern difficulties, the
difficulties of the poet in particular, to come back to our present
subject. I have not really been far away.