isolate them; it is an analytic power. Mr. Fry describes the reaction
to works of art as a reaction to a relation. This could only refer to
works which were compositions, attempts to create, by a synthetic,
material (non-personal) action of the senses, real things; for relation
can only result from synthesis. A work-thing of this kind is a pattern
of reality, an arrangement of elements; and pattern is accident. The
author of a synthetic work can choose the elements of which it is to
be composed, but they work themselves out: the so-called necessity
of reality is really _accident_. The reaction therefore to the kind
of work Mr. Fry speaks of, a ‘real’ work, is a reaction to accident:
the critic, himself presumably a pattern of reality, experiences a
shock from meeting another pattern which is commandingly different
and hypnotizes him into a rearrangement of the elements of which he
is composed--‘the esthetic emotion’ is here a sensual recombination
of personality. For this reason I consider such esthetic emotion
false and escapist. The experience, on the other hand, of a critic
confronted with an ‘unreal’ work, would, I believe, be this: if it
were a thing of pure, isolated self, he could not perceive it except
with what was pure, isolated self in him. He would be forced for the
moment to discard what was real in him; he might, by means of the
thing, succeed in discharging self: the operation of the thing on him
would have an analytic effect separating in him the pure from the
impure, protecting him for the moment from the ‘esthetic emotion’ with
which in fact he generally reacts to everything. When Mr. Fry says
‘In literature there is no immediate sensual pleasure,’ he is really
commenting on the analytic, unreal quality of the word as opposed to
the synthetic (sense-combining), real quality of the instrumentalities
of the material arts. Word-works in which there is an immediate sensual
pleasure are ones which have been artified, realized. Words in their
pure use, which I assume to be their poetic use, are denials rather
than affirmations of reality. The word _hat_, say, does not create a
real hat: it isolates some element in the real hat which is not hat,
which is unreal, the hat’s self.
But my description of this unreality would at first seem to correspond
with the unreal world of poetry described by A. C. Bradley. Mr. Fry
quotes Dr. Bradley: ‘For its (poetry’s) nature is not to be 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.’ The
key-word in this definition is _world_: Dr. Bradley is not writing
about unreal self but about romantic humanity. Poetry represents to him
the world of fancy; and by fancy he means ethical, realistic fancy--the
real world of man as opposed to the real world of mathematical nature.
Nor is this a true opposition: it is impossible to overlook the
significance of the term _world_--we have here all over again the
ambitious, analogical Soul-World of Herr Spengler.
Mr. Fry is at pains to point out the alien, psychological, literary
element in various plastic works, in determining what is ‘pure’ art.
The very term ‘art’ forces him to confine his definition to the purely
real. So that he can do no more than make a sharp distinction between
the art of the real world and the art of the unreal (psychological,
literary) world. We are to conclude that in its way the art of the
unreal world (literature) is pure: what is impure is a mixing of these
two worlds. Mr. Fry is only annoyed by literary art, not by artistic
literature.
But the unreal, literary, psychologically organized self-world is the
collective-real: its existence depends on a belief in reality, though
in reality as a myth. Nor is the self of Mr. Fry’s real world any
less ‘psychological’: but merely a more anarchistic, individualistic
associate of reality, reality hence as reason rather than myth, or,
as Mr. Lewis might put it, as God Himself rather than religion. And
so the issue between realism and idealism is no more than a quarrel
over methods of affirming reality: rationalistic instinct as against
emotionalistic intellect, short-way-round as against long-way-round,
anarchistic as against communistic psychology. Realism is the method
of artistic art, idealism, of literary art. Art is the use of self to
make syntheses--things _like_ ‘real’ things: all controversy about
art-methods narrows itself down to a disagreement over what real things
are _like_.[13]
The controversy, that is, is not over principles but over style; and
style is, ultimately, not so much the manner of a work as the manner
in which it is talked about. The end of most criticism is not to
determine what a work must be but to fix the language of criticism; and
it follows that most works are therefore without the quality of self:
they are made merely to fit the language of criticism popular at the
time or that happens to have made an impression on the author.
Criticism has to do with what is already done, with what has already
happened: it is a cataloguing of reality, and reality is the past. A
work that invites criticism is an exercise in history, whether its
author has the man-history point of view or the nature-history point
of view; it is the creation of old stuff. Most works are old stuff,
differing only in style; in how they innovate old stuff; in their
critical language: they agree in principle, that only old stuff is
possible--reality, synthesis, pattern, recombination.
Mr. Read blames Mr. George Moore for using the word ‘objective’
to describe what he means by ‘pure poetry’--‘objective,’ Mr. Read
complains, is a psychological term. It is not one of the what Mr. Read
calls ‘universal terms.’ A universal term should convey ‘an inner
conviction of necessity.’ What Mr. Read is really complaining of is
the unsystematic use of a psychological term. Criticism should use the
same language about art as it does about reality; it should unite
philosophy and art in Reason. Reason is personal, direct, conscious
traffic in reality. It is enlightened magic (‘an inner conviction
of necessity’). Primitive man, being more instinctively aware of
reality, did not need to have his magic (his art) enlightened. The
primitive artist was a seer, the civilized artist is a visionary: to
Mr. Read reason is the ability to have correct visions of reality.
It is interesting to find that Mr. Lewis uses the same language of
criticism. The artist is to him a wide-awake dreamer; ‘Don Quixote, or
the Widow Wadman, is as _real_, to put it no higher than that, as most
people ostensibly alive and walking the earth to-day’; ‘For me art is
the civilized _substitute_ for magic.’ To both Mr. Read and Mr. Lewis
purity means that magical intelligence, that inspired (rather than
primitive, stupid ‘objective’) literalness which may be philosophically
defined as the individual-real. Both, moreover, object to art that is
magical in the primitive sense as to an anachronism; it is fabricated
sensationism, it is the collective-real, it is ideological rather
than natural symbolism.[14] They are interested in getting man into
proper focus in reality, and in his usefulness as an instrument of
measurement: they are interested, that is, in psychology, in the
language of criticism, the mathematics of synthesis.
Mr. Richards, too, is primarily interested in the language of
criticism. He condemns Beauty-and-Truth terminology--the criticism
that treats civilized art as unintelligent magic, in fact. He not only
recognizes Reason as man’s participation in the patterns of reality;
he insists on Reason as social duty; criticism is to him morality. The
mathematics of synthesis by which reality may be accurately apprehended
are to be developed by turning the human world into a world of values:
making conduct (communication, relation) achieve significant pattern.
Conduct is then the training of the community as a whole in traffic in
reality, with the artist as band-master--‘the arts are the supreme form
of communicative activity.’ Value (the graded necessity of reality) is
to be discovered by a ‘systematization of impulses.’ We have here that
intelligent, superior, adult instinct which Mr. Lewis believes should
supply the civilized substitute for magic--the instinct equally of the
collective-real, with only a difference of degree in sophistication,
manners. Instinct in the collective-real is always either unconsciously
or consciously flamboyant, grossly poetic; in the individual-real
always consciously reserved, meticulously poetic (art, Mr. Richards
says, deals with ‘minute particulars’). But it is always the same
instinct, the nostalgic desire to reconstitute an illusory whole that
has no integrity but the integrity of accident.
Respect for this accidental quality of reality (necessity) may be
expressed either by the enthusiasm of what Mr. Lewis calls the
Revolutionary Simpleton, who is always religiously anticipating
accident, or by what I should like to call Mr. Richards’ Moral
Simpleton, who observes a reverent plasticity in the development
(accidental rearrangement) of custom. And I should like to add Mr.
Lewis’s own hero, the Individualistic Simpleton, who is to be forced
‘to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day.’ Why? To
become unreal? No, to become more real, to be made into ‘much better
people.’ But if they were much better people already (if a kind of
criticism of reality prevailed which satisfied Mr. Lewis), then Mr.
Lewis, however free he might permit himself to be, would certainly not
worry them with individualism.[15] He wants them free now only as a
protest, an act of spiteful superiority against the collective-real.
The individual-real is not concerned with self but with exposing the
stupidity, the hypocrisy of the fanatic mob. Instead of freeing the
self to self, it frees it to Reason, to prove merely that intelligent
civilized individuals can be in closer touch with reality than a
stupid civilized mob: that they can know more, conform more perfectly
to customs of more perfect taste, control what is unreal self in
them more systematically, respond more respectfully, regularly
(classical-poetically) to the stimuli of accidental reality. That they
can behave, that is, by finding a civilized substitute for magic, like
a perfect primitive mob of philosophy-fed art students.
4
Mr. Richards quotes Dr. Bradley’s definition of poetry as an
illustration of the sort of criticism to which he is opposed. In
principle, however, I do not think they are opposed. Dr. Bradley’s
‘world by itself’ is fundamentally allied with Mr. Richards’ world of
values: the difference is that Dr. Bradley’s world--not ‘a copy of the
real world,’ not bound up with human affairs--gets its revelations
of reality through the imagination, that is, dreaming, while Mr.
Richards’ world gets its revelations of reality through waking. Both
worlds are trying to prove how real they are, the one lying down, the
other standing up. They are the same world in different attitudes,
the æsthetic attitude and the moral attitude. The protagonist of the
first says, ‘I cannot do two things at once--apprehend reality and
make money or eat my supper at the same time, I must set aside a part
of the day sacred to reality, in which I do nothing else, sleep over
it, as it were.’ The protagonist of the second says: ‘Pshaw, affected
sensitiveness. I can sharpen knives, shave, cook, travel, marry, go
to church and apprehend reality at the same time: in fact, whatever I
do is all the better done for this, and I apprehend reality all the
better for what I do.’ Whether a person apprehends reality from the
moral or from the æsthetic point of view is all a matter of energy:
what seems easy to one person may seem difficult to another, and
_vice versa_. Thus, to Mr. Richards, the moral theory of art ‘has the
most great minds behind it,’ ‘the most prominent of these great minds
being Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth
Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater.’ Which leads us
to believe that as a ‘moral’ critic Mr. Richards is something of an
æsthetician.
5
Modern criticism has supplemented itself with psychology, or rather
with its literary version, psycho-analysis. If criticism is primarily
interested in the language in which reality is discussed, then
it must have a partner to deal with the rough physical side of
reality--a field worker in reality. Criticism confines itself to taste;
psycho-analysis to substantiating taste with practical data.
‘We are our bodies,’ Mr. Richards says: that is, we should try to be
our bodies, to exist psycho-analytically, to provide criticism with
data. The view that we are our bodies, Mr. Richards says, should
not be described as Materialism--‘it might equally well be called
_Idealism_.’ All criticism, he means to say, is an appreciation of
reality; criticisms differ in method, never in principle. With the
help of psycho-analysis we pay reality the compliment of saying ‘we
are our bodies’; and reality, with the help of criticism, returns the
compliment, permitting us to say ‘our bodies are us.’
As bodies we are acted upon by reality; this is the psycho-analytic
half of the trick. The action of reality on us produces effects which
reveal the nature of this reality which acts on us; a description of
this nature is the critical half of the trick. It is not suggested
that as bodies we may act on reality, for this would reveal the fact
that bodies were not like reality a solid lump, but separate and
independently acting; it would indicate a break-up of reality, open up
the problem of the unreal, and O! What a mess we should be in then. Let
us have order while we can.
‘To know anything,’ Mr. Richards says, ‘is to be influenced by it.’
This makes things still more simple and comfortable: we do not have to
worry about anything which is not _here_, which does not affect us,
which is not reality. We are what we know, and what we know is also
what we know. The echo of matter in mind proves that there is matter,
and also that mind is matter. The mind need have no fear of becoming
lost in itself so long as it continues to know, to be affected. It
need not be afraid to produce art so long as art remains a knowing
of reality; knowing of reality is reality: as echo of sound is also
sound. Mr. Read quotes sympathetically Professor Sonnenschein’s
learned expression of this echo-theory as applied to poetry: ‘Rhythm
is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on
the mind of the observer the impression of proportion between the
duration of several events or groups of events of which the sequence
is composed.’ ‘A good artist,’ Mr. Read says, ‘is firstly a good
critic.’ He predisposes his mind materially to apprehend reality, to
receive echoes: ‘The work of art emerges within a radiation of critical
perceptions.’
If every one began systematically treating himself as mind, we should
all quickly become separate individuals and know ourselves, and the
symbols we used would not be echoes of reality but themselves, and
then indeed we should be in deep water. To prevent this possibility
psycho-analysis is called on to supplement ‘the narrowness of
criticism’ (Mr. Read’s phrase). Criticism is presumably narrow because
it deals with forms, while psycho-analysis can roll up its sleeves,
poke around in the stuff from which the symbol is derived, and ‘help
us test its social validity’ (Mr. Read)--‘social’ meaning pro-matter,
anti-mind: mind can only be pro-matter when it is collective mind.
Psycho-analysis divides people into two types--introverted and
extraverted. Introversion represents error in man, a straying away from
reality into self, a going of the mind into mind. Both psycho-analysis
and criticism agree that this process cannot, or rather _should not_
produce art. Both processes, _or their possibility_, exist in each
individual (psycho-analysis is forced to admit that introversion always
exists; extraversion exists if the individual is ‘successful’). They
may, it is held, be combined in _phantasy_, and phantasy produces
‘living reality,’ art. But what is this phantasy but the whole
introversive world of man behaving extraversively--the collective-real?
Unless it is introversion actually transformed in the individual into
extraversion, individual mind into matter of ‘more than individual
use’ (as Mr. Read defines creative phantasies)--the individual real?
The opposition between collective-real and individual-real disappears
in the general agreement between all parties that, by no matter what
method, introversion must be extraverted. Likewise the opposition
between romanticism and classicism: romanticism is acceptable if it has
an extraverted, classical touch; classicism is not necessarily damaged
by an introverted, romantic touch, so long as it does not lose complete
hold of extraversion.
Extraversion, it is clear, is intelligent body-being. What
introversion is it seems difficult to say, since it is always defined
by defamatory comparison with extraversion. ‘Jung,’ Mr. Read says,
‘further differentiates _active_ and _passive_ phantasy--the latter
a morbid state which we do not need to stop to consider here.’
Complete introversion is presumably not intelligent mind-being, but
a pathological condition. Individual mind-being is not intelligent,
pathological, because it does not make for unanimity. And both
psycho-analysis and criticism want some unanimous, collective mind in
contemporary man like the collective mind in primitive man, with the
distinction--made in consideration of the grown-up, individualized
character of modern man--that this must be an intelligent collective
mind, inspired with Reason, a refined version of brutish objectivity.
‘We need some unanimity,’ Mr. Read says, ‘to focus the vague desires
that exist in the collective mind.’
But what is the collective mind? A herd of deer clinging together
may be said to have unanimity, but it can scarcely be said to have
a mind: it has unanimity because to the extent to which it clings
together it _is_ brutish, natural reality. And the same is true of
primitive man up to the point where individual works of art occur;
at this point the hold on reality has been lost, unanimity can only
be maintained by force, and by the force of a few masterful but
pathological, introversive, mind-being individuals. Collective mind is
a contradiction in terms: what is meant is intelligent (self-enslaving)
collective matter.
And here psycho-analysis is more consistent than criticism because
it is frankly interested in extraversion rather than in extraversive
works: it would not seriously worry psycho-analysis if works and their
authors were discontinued: it would still have Case B, in which Mr. X
and Miss Y.... Criticism, on the other hand, cannot get along without
famous works by famous authors, which are, moreover, a continual
source of discord since they are all introversive in origin and cannot
be allowed to take their place in literature until they have been
rigorously extraversified.
6
Psychoanalytic criticism makes the emotion with which a work is
experienced merely a more complicated, appreciative kind of sensation.
In sensation the cause of sensation, a real object (experience),
attacks the individual; he is helpless _not_ to respond, he can only
classify his response according to whether he does or does not enjoy
it. Every sensory experience is a destruction of his originality. The
work of art presented to him on this response-basis is a deliberately
aggressive real object intended to usurp his originality in a more
constructive way than ordinary sensation. Even the freedom of
classifying sensation according to its enjoyableness is denied him: a
forced classification is contained in the object-work, representing
not a principle of personal preference, but of social preference,
expressing the criticism, or Reason, of the time. The ordinary object
has generally only an immediate, disorganized sensory effect; the
object-work reaches back into the whole past of the individual,
re-adapting it to itself by means of memory. All image-making involved
in so-called appreciative, reactive experience is a perversion of
originality, of the independent power of acting upon initiative, to
the derived power of acting upon incentive: the critical bias, first
interpreting works as object-works, then inspiring works to be
object-works means ‘imitation’.
So little does pure, original action seem possible or desirable that
we have no word for an impulse contrary in its nature to the nature of
reaction, for dissociative rather than associative conduct--disaction.
To the psycho-analyst all activity is interpretable only as reaction
to sensation; to the professional critic (Mr. Richards, for example)
all critical conduct is imaginary re-activity: we have the individual’s
originality not momentarily eclipsed, but actually engaged in
destroying itself, enriching sensation with the complicated depth of
personality.
Art so conceived thus becomes a skilful thwarting of originality.
The immediate shock to the consciousness which a work brings, which
might be expected to encourage an independence in the consciousness,
a dissociation from reality (influences) and a development of its
differences from reality, is utilized to possess the consciousness for
reality, to force it to organize itself according to its resemblances
(responses) to the particular object-work by which it is attacked.
Art is an exaggeration of the hostile operation of reality on the
individual consciousness, an exaggeration proportioned to overcome
the originality which offers a casual, disorganized resistance to
ordinary objects. Between object and object there is a complete
hypnotic interaction by which reality is maintained and which exists
only partially between man and object because man is possessed of
originality. The object-work is therefore an object especially designed
to correct this originality in man by ensnaring him in a more than
ordinarily intense field of hypnotic action.
A poem, then, in the critical scheme, is only a work in the sense that
it achieves a value equal to an exceptionally ‘good’ experience; it is
an especially high-class object, one that makes use of all man’s powers
for reconstructing reality: a model object, as the poet is supposed to
be a model man. But man’s powers for reconstructing reality are really
a misuse of his powers for constructing himself out of the wreckage
which is reality. The only true entity possible to man is an analytic
entity: the synthetic entities of art are all parodies of self. An
original poem is only seemingly synthetic; the words of which it is
made are both the instrument of the analysis and the substance of the
pure self of the poem which emerges from the analysis. Every poem of
this kind is an instance of fulfilled originality, a model, to the
reader, of constructive dissociation: an incentive not to response
but to initiative. Poetry is properly an art of individualization as
opposed to the other arts, which are arts of communication. To compare
a poem with a picture or with a piece of music or sculpture, is to
treat analytic entities and synthetic entities as if they were objects
of similar reality. Synthetic entities are imitative, communicative,
provocative of association: their keynote is organized social sanity.
Analytic entities are original, dissociative, and provocative of
dissociation: their keynote is organized personal insanity. This
is why, in hurried scientific fear, the shamen of psycho-analysis
and criticism explain as pure introversion only obviously morbid
conditions, making out art to be, wherever possible, redeemed
introversion. If criticism of this sort persists there is no doubt that
art will in time produce only synthetic entities: that is, poetry will
disappear. Indeed it may be the prevalence of such criticism that is
responsible for the present situation of poetry; why, in Mr. Read’s
words, there is ‘no adequate literary equivalent in England for the
impressive organization and intellectual content of the modern movement
in painting.’ For poems as synthetic entities must obviously always run
a very poor second to pictures.
7