merely a philosophical opposition. For it is the nature of the
believer in the unreal to be without a system--a system implies
collective association (it is even impossible to give him a label,
like ‘philosopher’); and the philosopher could only be opposed by a
system. Indeed so thoroughly ‘unselfish’ is the character of the unreal
self that its just conclusion is a sort of social disappearance. This
is practically impossible because to the unreal self is attached a
physical memory of the process by which the self was made, a birthmark
of piecemealness opposing to the complete unreal self a reconstructed,
ideal whole of origin. The unreal self is forced to indulge this. Sex,
for instance, is an indulgence by the unreal self of romantic physical
nostalgia. To the unreal self this indulgence is incidental, to the
philosopher it is fundamental. Herr Spengler’s whole inspiration is
nostalgic. (So is T. S. Eliot’s. So is Mr. C. B. Cochran’s--every
‘Cochran’s Revue’ is a variation on the theme of the integration
of historical pageantry, an epistemological medley of primitivism,
Shakespeareanism, Charlestonianism, etc.)
The philosopher has, however, his formal opponent. His formal opponent
is one who resents the gross personification of man as the ideal
individual of the species; to whom Spenglerish dualism is only ‘bad
philosophy’ (Mr. Lewis); to whom good philosophy is a severe monism,
a literal, aware dwelling in the mathematical (being) self of Nature.
Instead of History we have Criticism: the formal opponent of the
philosopher is the Critic. And, once more, the difference between them
shows itself to be only a difference of degree; criticism defines
itself as ‘better,’ more intellectual philosophy than ‘intellectual,’
‘bad’ philosophy. The critic (this new, anti-philosophical type that I
am speaking of) dismisses the childish, historical self as a travesty
of the adult self of physical reality; as that sick, inner-eyeish,
Strindbergian ‘subjective’ self, which has poisoned instead of
nourished itself on reality, that the psychologist, physician
of reality, attempts to redeem from the subconscious (run-down,
pathological reality). For the philosophical system of logic the critic
substitutes the mathematical system of reason. The world of Self is not
to be deduced from the world of Nature; there is but one world, and
the self is in this, a like fact with other facts, not a subjective
fact in a shadowy world of analogy. What Mr. Lewis calls the ‘success
of reason’ would permanently establish self as objective fact, as the
individual-real. The language of the individual-real neither expresses
the members of a community-self nor isolates each self. It expresses
the extrinsic value of the self for a system in which there are only
extrinsic values; as the language of the collective-real expresses its
intrinsic value for a system in which there are only intrinsic values,
which are made valid, however, by means of oppositional relation to a
system of extrinsic values. So that for the individual-realist, the
self is also poetic self; rational instead of intuitive, ‘physical’
instead of ‘intellectual’; a poetic detail of real reality rather than
a real detail of poetic reality.
The critic, then, like the philosopher, is an opponent of the unreal.
The unreal self is intrinsic self, intrinsic without respect to a
system of extrinsic values; it is without value. It is more than
anarchistic; it does not treat individualistically with values; it
supersedes them. The unreal self is not poetic self, it is self.
It is not a detail of co-ordinated reality.[8] It is an absolute,
disconnected, hopeless whole. To the philosopher thought is memory of
Mother-Nature. To the critic thought is thoughts--diverse, objective,
related facts of reality. There is no antithesis between the position
of the philosopher and that of the critic: the philosopher invents
instruments for observing and measuring reality from afar and has
dream-embraces of reality: the critic says: ‘Sentimental stuff and
nonsense! I am _in_ reality.’ The critic, that is, is a little more
sentimental, ambitious, intellectual, poetic, snobbish than the
philosopher. To both of them thought means connection with reality. To
both of them poetry means eloquent consciousness of life. To the unreal
self, to whom they are both brother-opponents, thought is separation
from reality, and poetry is the consciousness (the perhaps ineloquent
consciousness) of what is not life, of what is self. A tree (even
this is doubtful, for it is a late, nearly human form) is not born;
it lives. What is born ceases with birth to live; it is self, unreal
self. For this reason it is impossible to call the unreal self poetic
self: ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry’ are words drunk with reality, they have
indeed become by popular use rhetorical substitutes for ‘real’ and
‘reality.’ By reality I mean organized, ‘universal’ reality. It would
be possible to speak of the unreal self as the real self, the self of
separate reality, were it not for the community sense that belongs to
philosophical or critical reality. I might have said, instead of unreal
self, dissociated self. The problem of the right word is more difficult
in the case of ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry.’ I can point out that the real
self is poetic, and, in opposition to both real and poetic, put the
unreal self. It is painful, however, to be forced to leave ‘poetry’
to the real self and to call the poetry of the unreal self unreality.
Poetry is a stolen word, and in using it one must remain conscious of
its perverted sense in the service of realism, or one suddenly finds
oneself discussing not poetry but realism; and this is equally painful.
But if poetry is a stolen word, so is reality: reality is stolen from
the self, which is thus in its integrity forced to call itself unreal.
Poetry may perhaps for the moment be saved for the poet and for the
unreal self if the collective-real, the individual-real, philosophy,
criticism, are denominated ‘literature.’ Literature then clearly
represents the symbolical, the rational, the romantic, the classical,
the collective, the individualistic reality of man. Further, if we
make it clear to ourselves that all literature is poetic, then we are
separating poetry from literature and drawing a sharp line between what
is poetic and what is poetry. Further still, we are discovering that
literature is everything but the unreal self, it is the society of
reality; it is History, it is Nature, it is Philosophy, it is Reason,
it is Criticism, it is Art. Most of all perhaps literature is Art, the
seizure and confirmation of reality by the senses, the literalizing of
the world of reality. The more ‘abstract’ Art is (the less symbolical)
the more real it is. Poetry is thus seen to be neither literature nor
Art. Literature is the ladder of reality: the historian yields to the
scientist, the scientist to the philosopher, the philosopher to the
critic, the high-priest of Reason, of which ‘great works of art’ are
the visible signs: for Reason is Reality.[9]
§4
This has been, so far, the elaboration of a point of view. From here
on will be found various applications of this point of view. Generally
in expositive writing there is no distinction made between what is
organically elaborative and what is incidentally applicative: all is
elaborative and therefore over-elaborative. The argument continues to
elaborate itself even though it has come to an end; it incorporates
the application of the point of view in the development of the point
of view; it does not distinguish between argument and comment. I
wish to distinguish carefully here between argument and comment. A
certain very small amount of illustration and instancing is necessary
to focus an argument properly: the smaller the better, since most
specific reference and substantiation is a concession to the audience,
which generally cannot think purely, that is, without the machinery
of learning. Once the argument is focused, it should not develop
further. It should repeat itself, like an acid test, in each fresh
application. All philosophical or critical systems are the absorption
of an original point of view by the facts to which it applies itself:
the force of the point of view is lost, it becomes a convenience by
which facts organize themselves and eventually dominate the point of
view. All philosophical or critical systems are no more than learning,
a synthesis of instances, and therefore develop generalizations that
mean nothing without instances. I have no philosophical or critical
system to advance; I am interested in generalizations that mean
something without instances, that are unreal, since they mean something
by themselves. Generalizations of this sort, when applied to instances,
should not be absorbed by them. The argument should dismiss instances
with comment on instances, remain meaning in itself. If it does this
then it is capable of maintaining an opposition between right and
wrong. If it does not, it only becomes a better wrong than the wrong it
attacks. It becomes real.
By this I do not mean that I am a subjective critic. A subjective
critic is one who converts his point of view into a system, makes
it real: his point of view must be continually fed by works of art,
otherwise it ceases. I propose here a point of view that is completely
unto itself, that is unreal, that is independent of instances. When
it meets instances it comments on them by repeating itself. Nor is it
subjective, since subjectivity implies an objective world of experience
from which it must perpetually derive itself. I speak of a point of
view which is self and only self, of an unreality which is every
one’s to the extent to which he is able to extricate himself from
quantitative reality and be, instead of a purse-proud something, a
proud and purseless nothing. What is this I am describing?--the poetic
(a stolen word) self.
1
Mr. Herbert Read (_Reason and Romanticism_).
‘That the critical spirit, expressed in reason, will ever evolve a
synthesis capable of fulfilling the functions of religion is evidently
impossible. Reason and emotion only unite in very rare and special
perceptions; such perceptions are not capable of generalization....
Emotions are too diffuse, too widely distributed, ever to be unified
in reason, which is an evolved possession, never perfect at all,
and only approaching perfection in the rarest individuals.’ The
impossible, Mr. Read admits, is attainable in the rare ‘universal
mind.’ Universal in the strict critical sense proves itself to mean
‘broad’ in the eighteenth-century sense--aristocratic. So Goethe
(both for Herr Spengler and Mr. Read) is the ideal universal type; so
is Leibnitz, so is Diderot. Mr. Read confirms my description of the
philosophico-critical system in his definition of universality as ‘a
capacity _to receive_ all knowledge and events with equanimity and
unprejudiced percipience; and to build up a positive attitude on this
clear and perceptual basis.’[10] From here we are gently conducted
to the proposition that ‘poetry is, in short, delectation.’ Poetry
is, in short, a game-like, sporting, snobbish exercise of reason, the
most ambitious display of knowledge possible: ‘and the greater our
knowledge, the more surcharged it is with the perception of values, the
deeper will be the delight aroused in us.’ What is reason? Reason is
socialized reality, ‘the sum total of awareness, ordained and ordered
to some specific end or object of attention.’
Mr. Read on metaphysical poetry: metaphysical poetry is ‘emotional
apprehension of thought.’ This means, we discover, individual mind
systematically apprehending reality: ‘... we find in Donne a mind
poised at the exact turn of the course of philosophy drawing his
inspiration right back from scholastic sources, and yet at the same
time eagerly surveying the new future promised by the science of
Copernicus and Galileo. Chapman, on the other hand, is in a remarkable
degree the forerunner of humanist philosophy--of Hume and Spinoza in
particular. He is aware, above all things, of “the constant and sacred
harmony of life.”’ In this way criticism classifies poetry according
to the poet’s intelligence of reality--that is, according to his
conventionality, his politeness; whereas that Donne wrote poetry at all
was because he was able to separate himself rudely from the reality of
which he was in a class sense a privileged agent.[11]
On Dante and Guido Cavalcanti: ‘Or, more exactly, all experience,
whether intellectual or sensual or instinctive, was regarded as equally
and contemporaneously the subject-matter of their poetry. The result
was a desirable continuity or coherence; imagination, contemplation,
and sensibility becoming fused within the perfect limits of a human
mind.’ Mr. Read then quotes from William Walrond Jackson, D.D.,
‘Introduction’ to his translation of the _Convivio_ (Oxford, 1909),
p. 18: ‘The poet was inspired by an overmastering desire to link the
present with the past and with the future, to blend all knowledge
into one coherent system, and to bring the experiences of life into
one harmonious whole....’ Plainly, this donnish, publicly fostered
service of the poet to reason would be absorbed, if he were a poet at
all, in his essential, enduring unreality by the time his work reached
the criticism of four hundred years later. Instead criticism keeps
artificially alive the derived reality of the work, submerging in it
what intrinsic unreality it may have had. ‘The true metaphysical poet
is conscious of no such dualism: his thought is in its very process
poetical.’ Poetry is reason. ‘Leibnitz has defined an intelligent
author as one who includes the most of reality in the least possible
compass.’ And further ... ‘the poet is in a very real sense the
product of his age--witness especially Dante’ (‘age’ meaning ‘the
most of reality in the least possible compass’). These two statements
comment sufficiently on themselves. What recommendation has Mr. Read
for the modern poet? He looks ‘to the modern physicists, whose work
would seem to provide a whole system of thought and imagery ready for
fertilization in the mind of the poet.’ This again, is its own best
comment on itself.
2
Mr. Lewis is merely a pamphleteer of anarchism, T. S. Eliot is a
serious moralist, bent on professing rather than on attacking. We
therefore look to Mr. Lewis for explanatory rhetoric and to Mr. Eliot
for explanatory ritual: in many respects his modest behaviour is more
illuminating than all Mr. Lewis’s language. After years of hard and
brilliant service as a poetical yogi Mr. Eliot suddenly discovered
that he had all the time been acting on behalf of the universe of
man, of human nature, instead of in behalf of the universe of reason,
of natural nature. So he replaced religiousness by priggishness; he
went from a popular, mystical cult to an exclusive Thomist club; from
large, symbolical (ironic) outer circle abstractions to small specific
(concrete) inner circle abstractions.
Instead of attacking the time-mob, like Mr. Lewis, he withdrew
himself from it and left it to carry on the orthodox, unanimous
flux so obnoxious to Mr. Lewis, yet so necessary to both Mr. Lewis’
and Mr. Eliot’s anarchism: the basis of anarchistic individuality
is not authentically individualistic, but snobbish. Mr. Lewis’s
incentives to anarchism are political--‘for the sake of the ride’;
Mr. Eliot’s are moral, that is, self-protective--the ride was for the
sake of running away. He ran away from the collective-real to the
individual-real (the _Criterion_ furnishes us with a progressive record
of Mr. Eliot’s movements). Like Mr. Lewis he opposed aristocratic
orthodoxy (anarchism) to democratic orthodoxy (co-operation); he
deserted the collective dogma of periods for the collective dogma
of individuals. ‘For those of us who are higher than the mob, and
lower than the man of inspiration, there is always _doubt_; and in
doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living
at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have
believed something’ (from the _Enemy_, January, 1927). Mr. Lewis
advocates grandiloquently but vaguely aristocratic orthodoxy in
general; Mr. Eliot is dryly and specifically in pursuit of _the_ or
at least _an_ aristocratic orthodoxy. The difference is that between
irritated rightness and alarmed priggishness. Mr. Lewis is merely led
astray by his extravagant though praiseworthy fury with democratic
orthodoxy; his worshipful enthusiasm for the classical man of quiet
is not dogma but pique against the modern romantic man of action
(time-flux, space-motion). Mr. Eliot upholds the man of quiet from
dogma. He is a minority-representative, as the man of the time-flux is
a majority-representative. Mr. Eliot’s position demonstrates clearly
the relation of the individual-real to the collective-real: it is a
priggish, self-protective minority-attitude to the same material which
is the substance of the dogma of the collective-real. But he objects
to ‘mentalism’ not only, I should say, because it generally means
mob-mentalism, but equally because it may mean unreal, unorthodox
individuality; his anarchism is timidity fallen between two stools.
Mr. Lewis, however, objects to mentalism, I feel, chiefly because it
generally means demogogic mob-mentalism. ‘By this proposed transfer
from the beautiful _objective, material_, world of common sense, over
to the “organic” world of chronological mentalism, you lose not
only the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you
commonly apprehend; you lose also the clearness of outline of your own
individuality which apprehends them.’ I do not think Mr. Eliot would
have been capable of saying ‘your own individuality’; I do not indeed
believe that Mr. Lewis is naturally an individual-realist, but that he
has been unfortunately stung into a pose.[12]
Aristocratic (as opposed to democratic) orthodoxy is not, as I have
already indicated, a pose with Mr. Eliot. I said he had _an_ orthodoxy.
It would be helpful to an understanding of the problem to discover what
the nature of an aristocratic orthodoxy may be. In Mr. Eliot’s case,
this is all too obviously: a humble, up-to-date respect for the best,
internationally sifted great names. A practical-minded Toryism, which
says, in gently criticizing Mr. Anthony M. Ludovici’s more journalistic
Toryism (The _Monthly Criterion_, July, 1927): ‘Mr. Ludovici is engaged
in forming what might be called a myth or idea for the Tory Party. Such
a myth or idea has much to commend it; and I sympathize with so many
of his views that I may declare at once what seems to me the great
weakness of his construction: he isolates politics from economics, and
he isolates it from religion.’ What Mr. Eliot’s attitude to economics
is it is difficult to determine; I should say from various evidences
that economics to him did not mean a human problem but an academic
tradition worthy of study. Mr. Eliot has, from time to time, spoken
more specifically on religion. In the review from which I have just
quoted, Mr. Eliot further says: ‘Toryism is essentially Anglican;
Roman Catholicism, which in our time draws its greatest support
from America, is more in harmony with Republicanism. The problem of
Toryism should be rather to make the Church of Laud survive in an age
of universal suffrage....’ Further, he ardently seconds Mr. Ludovici
in his recommendation that the Conservative Party should encourage
_thought_, ‘the activity of men of thought who are not and who do
not desire to be parliamentarians.’ In such quiet language does Mr.
Eliot phrase his gospel of timid, aristocratic mentalism--a kind of
politico-literary extract of Anglo-Catholicism, if we may judge by
signs. His demands are familiar to every properly brought-up British
schoolboy: that the Church must have more power, that the Kingship must
be strengthened, and that Aristotle must be studied, supplemented by
an Anglican reading of St. Thomas if the lad is to enter literature.
Yes, literature. I had nearly forgotten that Mr. Eliot began his
Progress as a Poet. But Mr. Eliot, finding himself higher than the mob
and lower than the man of inspiration, is modest; he does not ask to
be considered, or consider himself, as a poet. Unless we are deceived
by his modesty, he would be content to be Bishop or to be Professor
Saintsbury.
3
Mr. Roger Fry in _Transformations_ concerns himself with the
distinction between pure and impure art--‘a distinction which Mr.
Richards has the good fortune to be able to ignore.’ Mr. Richards,
we learn from his _Principles of Literary Criticism_ (published in
1925, the first text-book of psychologico-literary criticism) is
interested in value rather than in purity. Criticism is to him a minute
and comprehensive gradation of what T. E. Hulme called the world of
religious and ethical values; purity, a social rather than æsthetic
attribute; a moral term, by which a work is described as a public act
of its author. To Mr. Fry a work is not conduct, it is a thing; its
purity as a thing depends on its dissociation from authorship. It is
impossible not to prefer Mr. Fry’s criterion to Mr. Richards’; the
former is plainly trying to discover the laws of goodness in works, the
latter, the laws of goodness in humanity. The works we have with us;
humanity, the idea of species, must be philosophically evoked.
But what is the nature of the work as thing? According to Mr. Fry its
nature would seem to be reality. It is created by a sharp separation
of the author’s personality from the material with which he works, so
that his work, when complete, is to be classified with nature, the
world of mathematical reality, rather than with man, to whom reality
is a sentimental objectification of his subjectivity. I should say
that Mr. Fry’s criticism made possible a clearer sense of a work’s
_self_ than Mr. Richards’, but that it created a misunderstanding of
the nature of this self by identifying purity with reality. In Mr.
Fry’s criticism the homologue of a work would be a thing. But what is
a thing and how is it pure? Pure means being whole, single in element,
nothing but self, thoroughly new and fresh. Impure means being more
and less than whole, complex in element, not possessing thoroughly new
and fresh selfhood. The ‘things’ of what is called reality are mere
interpretative morsels, tainted with pedigree. To me the thingishness
in a work depends on no real homologue; the work is a thing of its own
kind, without homologue. The material with which an author works is
not reality but what he is able to disentangle from reality: in other
words I think the identity is rather of purity and unreality. An author
must first of all have a sure apprehension of what is self in him, what
is new, fresh, not history, synthesis, reality. In every person there
is the possibility of a small, pure, new, unreal portion which is,
without reference to personality in the popular, social sense, self. I
use ‘self’ in no romantic connotation, but only because it is the most
vivid word I can find for this particular purefaction. When this self
has been _isolated_ from all that is impression and impurity of contact
in an individual, then a ‘thing,’ a work, occurs, it is discharged from
the individual, it is self; not _his_ self, but self. If it is not
discharged, it is immediately reabsorbed in that composite accident of
reality by which he is known to others as a person. Thus many people
without creative ability--the ability to discharge self--must feel for
one passing moment that isolated purity in themselves which might,
if they were able to sustain it a little longer, turn into ‘things.’
In those who can from time to time discharge self, the power is not
constant: if it were, ‘creation’ would cease--creation is intermittent
recurrence and repossession of this power--and there would be death,
bright death.