of words, is to happen to poetry, which is assumed as the deliberately
unscientific use of words? Poetry, it appears, deals with evocative
as opposed to symbolic speech. ‘In evocative speech the essential
consideration is the character of the attitude aroused.’ The corollary
to this proposition, which the authors imperfectly and insincerely
develop, is that there is no true antithesis between evocative
(partisan) speech and symbolic (logical) speech. We deduce that
evocative speech is in fact not an independent speech of its own but a
persuasive quality that may be added to symbolic speech: the ‘attitude
aroused,’ that is, is an attitude toward _something_--evocative
(poetic) speech is false _by itself_ (in opposition to symbolic
speech), it is scientifically admissible only where it shows close
dependence on symbols meaningless in themselves but showing close,
scientific dependence on reality.
This deduction we find confirmed in a little book by Mr. I. A.
Richards, _Science and Poetry_. ‘The essential peculiarity of poetry as
of all the arts is that the full appropriate situation is not present.’
The fact that poetry is evocative rather then symbolic gives it a
freedom from the hard-and-fast laws of reality that often enables it
to convey a more faithful impression of the ‘real thing,’ by a sort of
loyal lying, than would painfully truthful symbolic speech. Thus, by
making symbolism the purpose of science rather than of art (as it is
in the vulgar collective-real) Mr. Richards is able to allow poetry
(always by scientific leave, of course) certain aristocratic latitudes
of expression--a certain rhetorical _finesse_--that it lacks when it
is erroneously used as symbolic (pseudo-scientific) speech. Poetry as
symbolic speech is only figurative speech; it invents a fairy-story
of reality. Poetry as evocative speech takes its clue from external
(scientific) symbols of reality rather than from internal (imaginative)
symbols of reality--it means, in Mr. Richards’ words, ‘The transference
from the magical view of the world to the scientific.’
In the magical view the ‘pseudo-statements’ of poetry were connected
with belief. In the scientific view they are disconnected from belief;
we are returned to the assumption scattered through the pages of
_The Meaning of Meaning_, that man has no right to meaning. The poet
armed with the scientific view accepts the ‘contemporary background’
as tentative meaning: so that ‘the essential consideration is the
character of the attitude aroused.’ This attitude has literary licence
according to the degree of scientific acceptance: the more complete the
acceptance, the greater the ‘independence’ (meaninglessness) of the
poetry.
Poetry is according to such criticism, therefore, a socially beneficial
affirmation of reality by means of a denial, or phantasization, of
individual mind. In symbolic (magic) poetic speech reality itself is
the principal of the fairy story; in evocative (scientific) poetic
speech the principal of the fairy-story is the individual mind. In both
cases the one belief from which the poetic mind must not disconnect
itself is the belief in reality; which proves itself in either case to
be only the most advanced ‘contemporary background’ appreciable.
[4] Except here!
[5] As instead of opposing a fine sexual indifference to the sexual
impotence or sentimental feminism that he finds in modern life he
flaunts a sentimental Spartan masculinity.
[6] Deity to the collective-realist is reality as symbolic oneness; to
the individual-realist, reality as rationalistic oneness. To the former
therefore personality is an instrument for conceiving emotionally
the mass character of this oneness; to the latter, an instrument
for corroborating intellectually the individualistic character of
this oneness. (Intellectual democracy as opposed to intellectual
anarchy.) Mr. Lewis says: ‘We have a god-like experience in that only’
(personality). The collective-realist would say: ‘We have a god-like
experience in that only’ (personality). The only difference between
these two expressions is political. ‘Evidences of a oneness seem
everywhere apparent,’ Mr. Lewis says. ‘But we _need_, for practical
purposes, the illusion of a plurality.’ The ‘practical purposes’ are,
presumably, the necessity of protecting this democratic oneness from
the democratic mass: ‘plurality’ here means the plurality of the
few. It is comprehensible, then, that Catholic thought should, by
its scholasticism, appeal to Mr. Lewis--the political wisdom of an
institution that keeps a small body of well-paid intelligentsia to
administer Godhood to the not so individualistic, the not so well-paid
worshipping mass. And Mr. Lewis is here at one with his rather more
scholastic colleague in individualism, Mr. Eliot, who with his French
co-littérateurs phrases the conflict between symbolic oneness and
rationalistic oneness, or symbolic personality and rationalistic
personality, more elegantly as the conflict between intuition and
intelligence (between the feeling whole and the thinking whole, in
Mr. Lewis’s language). Individuality to the individualist is thus an
intellectual fiction, as to the collective-realist it is the oneness
which is the fiction (‘Human individuality is best regarded as a
kind of artificial Godhood’--Mr. Lewis. And again: ‘We at least must
_pretend_ not to notice each other’s presence, God and ourselves to be
alone.’)--the difference here being merely the difference between a
sentimentalized Tory absolute and a sentimentalized Communist absolute.
[7] Spenglerism is male religiosity and symbolism of the vulgar
romantic as opposed to the refined classical kind. ‘The Faustian
soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of
marriage with endless space ... till at last nothing remains visible
but the indwelling depth-and-height energy of this self-extension.’
The historical mind (the ‘Faustian soul’) overcomes its perpetual
temporariness by a perpetual give-and-take between itself and the Great
Mother reality, whom it honours with its philosophical erections (what
Herr Spengler calls third-dimensional extension) and from whom it
receives sensations of infinity--the Great Mother’s gratitude for this
masculine ‘conquest’ of herself. To the Spenglerist (the modernist)
this infinity is vague, collective, metaphorical: ‘somehow we are in
nature’; somehow ‘the “I” overwhelms the “Thou.”’ The scientific world,
the Great Mother, is dead; it is the fairy-tale brought to life in each
fresh embrace of it by the historical world. To the individual-realist
(the classicist) the masculine extension is actual and personal rather
than metaphorical and collective: the fairy-tale individual mind
acquires an immediate ahistorical liveliness from its intercourse with
the Great Scientific Mother. Herr Spengler despises the classical
ahistorical attitude to reality. But overstudiously; for it is rather
more than less than modern; it is based on the minute of the moment,
not on the age of the moment. Both the collective-realist and the
individual-realist function by sexual phantasia; the only difference
between them being that the latter claims to be able to have closer
contact with the Great Mother than the former--one merely historically,
through the experience of the time-group to which he belongs, the other
scientifically, through _his_ experience _now_.
[8] These positions might perhaps be more clearly illustrated in their
respective attitudes to place. The collective-realist is poetically
attached to the idea of the _there_; reality is romantic, far-away,
collective--superior to the personal _here_; it is the eternally old
fountain of eternal youthfulness. From this feeling comes the morbid
fondness of Western man for other races, so severely condemned by
Mr. Lewis. The individual-realist is poetically attached to the idea
of the _here_; reality is classical, local, individual--superior to
the collective _there_; it is the eternally old fountain of eternal
adultishness. The first attitude ends in doctrinaire universalism,
the second in doctrinaire provincialism: both the collective-realist
and the individual-realist believe in the social significance of
locality, differing only in their location of locality. Both, in
fact, suffer from this obsession with social significance. Take, for
example, niggerish jazz: its real strength and attraction is that it
is movement free from significance; pure, ritualistic, barbaric social
pleasure that can only be properly understood and enjoyed by those who
understand and enjoy the civilized individuality of significance. To
the romantic universalist niggerish jazz is a religious devotion of the
sensations to eternal youthfulness. To the classical provincialist it
is a depraved, democratic infantilism. Both emotionalize it, the one
as elevation, the other as degradation: to one the jazz nigger is the
angel-symbol, to the other the devil-symbol. While the only one able
to intellectualize it properly is the jazz nigger himself--generally
an individual, unreal, paleface Jew with a dusky make-up of social
clownishness.
[9] Or again, these positions might be illustrated in their respective
attitudes to size. The collective-realist thinks of society as a
big, symbolical unit, the individual-realist as a small, concrete
unit. The unreal self does not think of size, or of society, as
significant concepts at all. The collective-realist makes the
individual emotionally as large as the many. The individual-realist
makes the individual intellectually as large as himself--that is,
of a standard realistic size. The unreal self gets rid of even the
fractional reality of the self of the individual-realist: it is not the
quantitative nothing derided by Mr. Lewis, but a sizeless invisibility
from reality. Mr. Lewis disapproves of nothing; and he disapproves of
Bradley’s Absolute because ‘he did not succeed in relieving it of a
certain impressive scale and impending weight.’ What he seems to imply
is an Absolute temperately placed between all and nothing--a sort of
safely quantitative qualitative absolute; a short, certain, academic
eternity as opposed to a vulgar, tentatively eternal eternity; a small,
well-bred, provincial church in which to worship a congregationalist
Absolute as opposed to a popular arena erected to a universalist
(demogogic as opposed to pedagogic) Absolute.
[10] We observe the same aristocratic bias in Mr. Lewis. The universal
mind (the artist’s or seeing mind) is not lodged in a collective
all but in a selected few for all: individual-real (cultured
anarchism) opposed to collective-real (cultured democracy) and to
individual-unreal (anarchism is not enough). The anarchistic, artistic,
critical mind is not interested in individuality as individuality but
as superior individuality, as reason: it is an expert in reality, it
sees what is ‘here.’ It is a poetic common-sense seeing (through its
monocle) a vision ‘classical,’ ‘geometric,’ ‘severe’ (‘“Classical” is
for me anything which is nobly defined and exact, as opposed to that
which is fluid’--Mr. Lewis). It does not believe in lower-class doing
but in upper-class thinking: _laissez-faire_ anarchism. It is against
violent sympathies and antipathies; it is provincial but informed.
Reason is aloof, courteous prejudice (‘we should grow more and more
polite’--Mr. Lewis); intelligent conventionality, haughty submission
to reality. For example, Mr. Lewis’s objections to Bolshevism only
apply to it where it is in action, not anarchistic; not to Bolshevism
as a polite ‘vision’--that is, in so far as it is the gospel of an
uncultured many rather than the dogma of a cultured few.
[11] Again we perceive the same emphasis on superior as opposed to
plain, ordinary individuality. The man of reason is an aristocrat of
race-individuality; the race, of course, being a superior race--if it
were not superior it would be unendowed with reason. But (and this is
a point for which we must be grateful to Mr. Lewis) race-superiority
(individuality) is administered for the whole race by only one class in
the race; so that while ‘char-lady’ is lady by race, she is not lady
by class (lady of reason). Char-ladies who confuse race with class
and forget their place do so ‘to their undoing.’ Their undoing is
apparently a muddy-watery, unladylike laughter that is not, of course,
reason. What is reason? Mr. Lewis tells us: ‘Let us rather meet with
the slightest smile all those things that so far we have received with
delirious rapture.’ The change is not so much from laughing rapture to
haughty smiling as from one we to another kind of we--a democratic we
to an aristocratic we. Thus, the true we of the Machine Age is not,
according to Mr. Lewis, the mob but the capitalistic, anarchistic
individualists--the Mr. Ford’s. Mr. Ford admits, Mr. Lewis points out,
that he could not live the life of one of his workmen. While in a
ruthlessly democratic scheme (Bolshevism or Spenglerism) there is only
a mob-life disguised as Culture. Spengler would be the ideal romantic
mob-historian; Tacitus, possibly, the ideal classical, urbane polite,
smiling, anarchistic, _laissez-faire_, perspectiveless, ahistorical,
geometric individualist-historian. To the collective-realist the mob
moves, to the individual-realist it is static (‘The Russian workman
and peasant under the Bolshevik is the same as he was under the Tsar,
though less free and minus the consolations of a religion’--Mr. Lewis).
Mob-philosophy (mob-individualism, liberty, organized _laissez-faire_)
is ‘against human reason, motiveless and hence mad’ (again Mr. Lewis).
What is human reason? Mr. Lewis’s ‘young catholic student’ tells us:
‘not that some bank-clerk on a holiday has discovered that trees
have something to say for themselves.’ But when some bank-president,
superman or Saint ‘traverses a wood with complete safety’--that is with
proud, rational, individualistic submission, with sedate, conventional,
geometric curiosity. Human reason is Authority, authority received and
authority administered; and it is interesting that both Mr. Lewis and
his young catholic student emphasize this sexual duality of reason.
To Mr. Lewis reason is the quiet, conventional, slightly smiling she
availing herself of her feminine privilege to remain seated, and also
the conventional, brainy, impressive, standing-up he, viewing the
general situation with brilliant restraint. The young catholic student
outlines Baron von Hugel’s definition of authority: ‘By it, the force
and light of the few are applied to the dull majority, the highest in a
man to his own average.’ Baron von Hugel’s own words on this Church of
Individualism (for the few), quoted by him, are: ‘The Church is thus,
both ever and everywhere, progressive and conservative; both reverently
free-lance and official; both, as it were, male and female, creative
and reproductive....’
[12] Mr. Lewis’s predominant emotion is disgust and he is therefore
snobbishly old-fashioned; Mr. Eliot’s is moral anxiety, and he is
therefore snobbishly ‘advanced’--what seems old-fashioned or mediæval
or Thomist in Mr. Eliot is really his greater (than the silly
emotional orthodox mob’s) strictness in keeping up-to-date, in time
with the universe of reason. He is at pains to discover the right
side and to fight on it. Mr. Lewis is so disgusted with everything
that he has abandoned all positive questions of right, and like a
Swiss, retained nothing but his fighting conscience, a haughtiness of
bearing in which alone he finds himself in sympathy with Mr. Eliot. In
matters of faith they must certainly disagree. Mr. Eliot’s Toryism is
modern, intellectual, in sober perspective. Mr. Lewis’s is petulantly
old-fashioned, sentimental, ‘geometric’: the good, Swiss stern old days
when everything happened anyhow, without historical significance or
morality, are his fighting, anarchistic slogan against the presumptuous
mob-consciousness of modern life. What Mr. Lewis fails to see is
that if he devoted his energy to individualism (cultivating his own
individuality) instead of anarchism (knocking the mob on the head
with his individuality) the mob might develop a social regularity, an
automatic geometricity that even he might share in without disturbance
to his individuality; that it is the anarchism of a few that gives
false historical significance to the days of man, not the co-operative
unanimity of the many.
[13] See, for example, in Mr. Lewis’s _Time and Western Man_, the
chapter _The Object as King of the Physical World_.
[14] To Mr. Lewis, Science, popularized magic, rather than Reason,
the artist’s personal magic. (Compare, similarly, New Testament
pseudo-primitive communism, with properly modernized Old Testament
individualism.)
[15] ‘I, of course, admit that the principle I advocate is not for
everybody.’--Mr. Lewis.
Transcriber’s Notes
The book cover image that accompanies some ebook formats was made by
the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Surrounding characters have been used to indicate _italics_.
Inconsistent use of hyphens has been retained save as noted below.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the book.
The following changes to the original text are noted:
p. 36 added period following ‘And it is.’
p. 86 changed single quotes to double quotes around “the constant
and sacred harmony of life.”; added close single quote immediately
after
p. 98 retained spelling of ‘esthetic’
p. 109 added close parenthesis in ‘(Mr. Read’s phrase).’
p. 109 added hyphen to ‘the individual-real’
p. 128 added hyphen to ‘re-inforce’ in ‘space-men re-inforce’
p. 155 capitalized ‘To’ in ‘_The Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_’
p. 178 uncapitalized ‘queendom’
p. 196 changed ‘role’ to ‘rôle’
p. 199 changed ‘Bölshe’ to ‘Bölsche’
p. 204 added close quote following ‘maintain it.’
p. 209 joined unhyphenated ‘sincerity’
p. 215 changed single quotes to double quotes around “The fathers of
our girl friends are lecherous,” and “Philosophy is teetotal
whisky.”; added close single quote immediately after
p. 216 changed ‘æsthlete’ to ‘æsthete’
footnote 3 changed ‘considerations’ to ‘consideration’ in ‘the
essential consideration is’