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Title: Science and poetry
Author: I. A. Richards
Release date: March 27, 2026 [eBook #78306]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78306
Credits: Sean – @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE AND POETRY ***
SCIENCE
AND
POETRY
by
I. A. RICHARDS
_Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Author of “Principles of Literary Criticism.”_
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co. Ltd.
Broadway House; 68-74 Carter Lane, London, E.C.
_Printed in Great Britain by_
R. I. SEVERS, CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. The General Situation 1
II. The Poetic Experience 7
III. What is Valuable 28
IV. The Command of Life 38
V. The Neutralization of Nature 43
VI. Poetry and Beliefs 55
VII. Some Contemporary Poets 68
[Footnotes]
[Transcriber’s Note]
_The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry,
where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race,
as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer
stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an
accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable,
not a received tradition which does not threaten to
dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the
fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion
to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for
poetry the idea is everything._--Matthew Arnold.
I. The General Situation
Man’s prospects are not at present so rosy that he can neglect any
means of improving them. He has recently made a number of changes
in his customs and ways of life, partly with intention, partly by
accident. These changes are involving such widespread further changes
that the fairly near future is likely to see an almost complete
reorganization of our lives, in their intimate aspects as much as in
their public. Man himself is changing, together with his circumstances;
he has changed in the past, it is true, but never perhaps so swiftly.
His circumstances are not known to have ever changed so much or so
suddenly before, with psychological as well as with economic, social
and political dangers. This suddenness threatens us. Some parts of
human nature resist change more than others. We risk disaster, if some
of our customs change, while others which should change with them stay
as they are.
Habits that have endured for many thousands of years are not easy to
throw off--least of all when they are habits of thought, and when they
do not come into open conflict with changing circumstances, or do not
clearly involve us in loss or inconvenience. Yet the loss may be great
without our knowing anything about it. Before 1590 no one knew how
inconvenient were our natural habits of thought about the ways in which
a stone may fall; yet the modern world began when Galileo discovered
what really happens. Only persons thought to be crazy knew before 1800
that ordinary traditional ideas as to cleanliness are dangerously
inadequate. The infant’s average ‘expectation of life’ has increased by
about 30 years since Lister upset them. Nobody before Sir Ronald Ross
knew what were the consequences of thinking about malaria in terms of
influences and miasmas instead of in terms of mosquitoes. The Roman
Empire might perhaps have still been flourishing if someone had found
this out before A.D. 100.
With such examples all about us we can no longer, in any department
of life, so easily accept what was good enough for our fathers as good
enough for ourselves, or for our children. We are forced to wonder
whether our ideas, even upon subjects apparently of little practical
importance, such as poetry, may not be dangerously inadequate. It
becomes indeed somewhat alarming to recognize, as we must, that our
habits of thought remain, as regards most of our affairs much as
they were 5,000 years ago. The Sciences are, of course, simply the
exceptions to this rule. Outside the Sciences--and the greater part of
our thinking still goes on outside the Sciences--we think very much
as our ancestors thought a hundred or two hundred generations ago.
Certainly this is so as regards official views about poetry. Is it not
possible that these are wrong, as wrong as most ideas of an equally
hoary antiquity? Is it not possible that to the men of the future our
life to-day will seem a continual, ceaseless disaster due only to our
own stupidity, to the nervelessness with which we accept and transmit
ideas which do not and never have applied to anything?
_The average educated man is growing more conscious_, an
extraordinarily significant change. It is probably due to the fact
that his life is becoming more complex, more intricate, his desires
and needs more varied and more apt to conflict. And as he becomes
more conscious he can no longer be content to drift in unreflecting
obedience to custom. He is forced to reflect. And if reflection often
takes the form of inconclusive worrying, that is no more than might be
expected in view of the unparalleled difficulty of the task. To live
reasonably is much more difficult to-day than it was in Dr. Johnson’s
time, and even then, as Boswell shows, it was difficult enough.
To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone--the mistake is easy,
and, if carried far, disastrous--but to live in a way of which reason,
a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve. And the most
important part of the whole situation, as always, is ourselves, our
own psychological make-up. The more we learn about the physical world,
about our bodies, for example, the more points we find at which our
ordinary behaviour is out of accord with the facts, inapplicable,
wasteful, disadvantageous, dangerous or absurd. Witness our habit of
boiling our vegetables. We have still to learn how to feed ourselves
satisfactorily. Similarly, the little that is yet known about the mind
already shows that our ways of thinking and feeling about very many of
the things with which we concern ourselves are out of accord with the
facts. This is pre-eminently true of our ways of thinking and feeling
about poetry. We think and talk in terms of states of affairs which
have never existed. We attribute to ourselves and to things, powers
which neither we nor they possess. And equally we overlook or misuse
powers which are all important to us.
Day by day, in recent years, man is getting more out of place in
Nature. Where he is going to he does not yet know, he has not yet
decided. As a consequence he finds life more and more bewildering,
more and more difficult to live coherently. Thus he turns to consider
himself, his own nature. For the first step towards a reasonable way of
life is a better understanding of human nature.
It has long been recognized that if only something could be done in
psychology remotely comparable to what has been achieved in physics,
practical consequences might be expected even more remarkable than any
that the engineer can contrive. The first positive steps in the science
of the mind have been slow in coming, but already they are beginning to
change man’s whole outlook.
II. The Poetic Experience
Extraordinary claims have often been made for poetry--Matthew Arnold’s
words quoted at the head of this essay are an example--claims which
very many people are inclined to view with astonishment or with
the smile which tolerance gives to the enthusiast. Indeed a more
representative modern view would be that the future of poetry is
_nil_. Peacock’s conclusion in his _The Four Ages of Poetry_ finds a
more general acceptance. “A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a
civilized community. He lives in the days that are past ... In whatever
degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of
some branch of useful study: and it is a lamentable thing to see minds,
capable of better things, running to seed in the specious indolence of
these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion. Poetry was the
mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy
of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious
business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a
grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed asleep by
the jingle of silver bells.” And with more regret many others--Keats
was among them--have thought that the inevitable effect of the advance
of science would be to destroy the possibility of poetry.
What is the truth in this matter? How is our estimate of poetry going
to be affected by science? And how will poetry itself be influenced?
The extreme importance which has in the past been assigned to poetry
is a fact which must be accounted for whether we conclude that it was
rightly assigned or not, and whether we consider that poetry will
continue to be held in such esteem or not. It indicates that the case
for poetry, whether right or wrong, is one which turns on momentous
issues. We shall not have dealt adequately with it unless we have
raised questions of great significance.
Very much toil has gone to the endeavour to explain the high place
of poetry in human affairs, with, on the whole, few satisfactory or
convincing results. This is not surprising. For in order to show how
poetry is important it is first necessary to discover to some extent
what it is. Until recently this preliminary task could only be very
incompletely carried out; the psychology of instinct and emotion was
too little advanced; and, moreover, the wild speculations natural
in pre-scientific enquiry definitely stood in the way. Neither the
professional psychologist, whose interest in poetry is frequently not
intense, nor the man of letters, who as a rule has no adequate ideas
of the mind as a whole, has been equipped for the investigation. Both
a passionate knowledge of poetry and a capacity for dispassionate
psychological analysis are required if it is to be satisfactorily
prosecuted.
It will be best to begin by asking ‘What _kind of a thing_, in the
widest sense, is poetry?’ When we have answered this we shall be ready
to ask ‘How can we use and misuse it?’ and ‘What reasons are there for
thinking it valuable?’
Let us take an experience, ten minutes of a person’s life, and describe
it in broad outline. It is now possible to indicate its general
structure, to point out what is important in it, what trivial and
accessory, which features depend upon which, how it has arisen, and how
it is probably going to influence his future experience. There are, of
course, wide gaps in this description, none the less it _is_ at last
possible to understand in general how the mind works in an experience,
and what sort of stream of events the experience is.
A poem, let us say Wordsworth’s _Westminster Bridge_ sonnet, is such
an experience, it is the experience the right kind of reader has when
he peruses the verses. And the first step to an understanding of the
place and future of poetry in human affairs is to see what the general
structure of such an experience is. Let us begin by reading it very
slowly, preferably aloud, giving every syllable time to make its full
effect upon us. And let us read it experimentally, repeating it,
varying our tone of voice until we are satisfied that we have caught
its rhythm as well as we are able, and--whether our reading is such as
to please other people or not--we ourselves at least are certain how it
should ‘go.’
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open to the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at its own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
We may best make our analysis of the experience that arises through
reading these lines from the surface inwards, to speak metaphorically.
The surface is the impression of the printed words on the retina. This
sets up an agitation which we must follow as it goes deeper and deeper.
The first things to occur (if they do not, the rest of the experience
will be gravely inadequate) are the sound of the words ‘in the mind’s
ear’ and the feel of the words imaginarily spoken.[1] These together
give the _full body_, as it were, to the words, and it is with the
full bodies of words that the poet works, not with their printed
signs. But many people lose nearly everything in poetry through these
indispensable parts escaping them.
Next arise various pictures ‘in the mind’s eye’; not of words but
of things for which the words stand; perhaps of ships, perhaps of
hills; and together with them, it may be, other images of various
sorts. Images of what it feels like to stand leaning on the parapet of
Westminster Bridge. Perhaps that odd thing, an image of ‘silence.’ But,
unlike the image-bodies of the words themselves, those other images of
things are not vitally important. Those who have them may very well
think them indispensable, and _for them_ they may be necessary; but
other people may not require them at all. This is a point at which
differences between individual minds are very marked.
Thence onwards the agitation which is the experience divides into a
major and a minor branch, though the two streams have innumerable
interconnections and influence one another intimately. Indeed it is
only as an expositor’s artifice that we may speak of them as two
streams.
The minor branch we may call the intellectual stream; the other, which
we may call the active, or emotional, stream, is made up of the play of
our interests.
The intellectual stream is fairly easy to follow; it follows itself, so
to speak; but it is the less important of the two. In poetry it matters
only _as a means_; it directs and excites the active stream. It is made
up of thoughts, which are not static little entities that bob up into
consciousness and down again out of it, but fluent happenings, events,
which reflect or point to the things the thoughts are ‘of.’ Exactly how
they do this is a matter which is still much disputed.
This pointing to or reflecting things is all that thoughts do. They
appear to do much more; which is our chief illusion. The realm of
thought is never a sovereign state. Our thoughts are the servants of
our interests, and even when they seem to rebel it is usually our
interests that are in disorder. Our thoughts are pointers and it is the
other, the active, stream which deals with the things which thoughts
reflect or point to.
Some people who read verse (they do not often read much of it), are so
constituted that very little more happens than this intellectual stream
of thoughts. It is perhaps superfluous to point out that they miss the
real poem. To exaggerate this part of the experience, and give it too
much importance on its own account, is a notable current tendency, and
for many people explains why they do not read poetry.
The active branch is what really matters; for from it all the energy
of the whole agitation comes. The thinking which goes on is somewhat
like the play of an ingenious and invaluable ‘governor’ run by but
controlling the main machine. Every experience is essentially some
interest or group of interests swinging back to rest.
To understand what an interest is we should picture the mind as a
system of very delicately poised balances, a system which so long as
we are in health is constantly growing. Every situation we come into
disturbs some of these balances to some degree. The ways in which they
swing back to a new equipoise are the impulses with which we respond
to the situation. And the chief balances in the system are our chief
interests.
Suppose that we carry a magnetic compass about in the neighbourhood
of powerful magnets. The needle waggles as we move and comes to rest
pointing in a new direction whenever we stand still in a new position.
Suppose that instead of a single compass we carry an arrangement of
many magnetic needles, large and small, swung so that they influence
one another, some able only to swing horizontally, others vertically,
others hung freely. As we move, the perturbations in this system will
be very complicated. But for every position in which we place it there
will be a final position of rest for all the needles into which they
will in the end settle down, a general poise for the whole system. But
even a slight displacement may set the whole assemblage of needles
busily readjusting themselves.
One further complication. Suppose that while all the needles influence
one another, some of them respond only to some of the outer magnets
among which the system is moving. The reader can easily draw a diagram
if his imagination needs a visual support.
The mind is not unlike such a system if we imagine it to be incredibly
complex. The needles are our interests, varying in their importance,
that is in the degree to which any movement they make involves
movement in the other needles. Each new disequilibrium, which a shift
of position, a fresh situation, entails, corresponds to a need; and
the wagglings which ensue as the system rearranges itself are our
responses, the impulses through which we seek to meet the need. Often
the new poise is not found until long after the original disturbance.
Thus states of strain can arise which last for years.
The child comes into the world as a comparatively simple arrangement.
Few things affect him, comparatively speaking, and his responses also
are few and simple, but he very quickly becomes more complicated. His
recurrent needs for food and for various attentions are constantly
setting all his needles swinging. Little by little separate needs
become departmentalized as it were, sub-systems are formed; hunger
causes one set of responses, the sight of his toys another, loud
noises yet another, and so on. But the sub-systems never become quite
independent. So he grows up, becoming susceptible to ever more numerous
and more delicate influences.
He grows more discriminating in some respects, he is thrown out of
equilibrium by slighter differences in his situation. In other respects
he becomes more stable. From time to time, through growth, fresh
interests develop, sex is the outstanding example. His needs increase,
he becomes capable of being upset by quite new causes, he becomes
responsive to quite new aspects of the situation.
This development takes a very indirect course. It would be still more
erratic if society did not mould and remould him at every stage,
reorganising him incompletely two or three times over before he grows
up. He reaches maturity in the form of a vast assemblage of major and
minor interests, partly a chaos, partly a system, with some tracts of
his personality fully developed and free to respond, others tangled and
jammed in all kinds of accidental ways. It is this incredibly complex
assemblage of interests to which the printed poem has to appeal.
Sometimes the poem is itself the influence which disturbs us, sometimes
it is merely the means by which an already existing disturbance can
right itself. More usually perhaps it is both at once.
We must picture then the stream of the poetic experience as the
swinging back into equilibrium of these disturbed interests. We are
reading the poem in the first place only because we are in some way
interested in doing so, only because some interest is attempting to
regain its poise thereby. And whatever happens as we read happens only
for a similar reason. We understand the words (the intellectual branch
of the stream goes on its way successfully) only because an interest
is reacting through that means, and all the rest of the experience is
equally but more evidently our adaptation working itself out.
The rest of the experience is made up of emotions and attitudes.
Emotions are what the reaction, with its reverberation in bodily
changes, feels like. Attitudes are the impulses towards one kind of
behaviour or another which are set ready by the response. They are, as
it were, its outward going part.[2] Sometimes, as here in _Westminster
Bridge_, they are very easily overlooked. But consider a simpler
case--a fit of laughter which it is absolutely essential to conceal,
in Church or during a solemn interview, for example. You contrive not
to laugh; but there is no doubt about the activity of the impulses in
their restricted form. The much more subtle and elaborate impulses
which a poem excites are not different in principle. They do not show
themselves as a rule, they do not come out into the open, largely
because they are so complex. When they have adjusted themselves to one
another and become organized into a coherent whole, the needs concerned
may be satisfied. _In a fully developed man a state of readiness
for action will take the place of action when the full appropriate
situation for action is not present._ The essential peculiarity of
poetry as of all the arts is that the full appropriate situation is
_not_ present. It is an _actor_ we are seeing upon the stage, not
Hamlet. So readiness for action takes the place of actual behaviour.
This is the main plan then of the experience. Signs on the retina,
taken up by sets of needs (remember how many other impressions all
day long remain entirely _unnoticed_ because no interest responds to
them); thence an elaborate agitation of impulses, one branch of which
is _thoughts of_ what the words mean, the other an emotional response
leading to the development of _attitudes_, preparations, that is, for
actions which may or may not take place; the two branches being in
intimate connection.
We must look now a little more closely at these connections. It may
seem odd that we do not more definitely make the thoughts the rulers
and causes of the rest of the response. To do just this has been in
fact the grand error of traditional psychology. Man prefers to stress
the features which distinguish him from monkey, and chief among these
are his intellectual capacities. Important though they are, he has
given them a rank to which they are not entitled. Intellect is an
adjunct to the interests, a means by which they adjust themselves more
successfully. Man is not in any sense primarily an intelligence; he is
a system of interests. Intelligence helps man but does not run him.
Partly through this natural mistake, and partly because intellectual
operations are so much easier to study, the whole traditional analysis
of the working of the mind has been turned upside down. It is largely
as a remedy from the difficulties which this mistake involves that
poetry may have so much importance in the future. But let us look again
more closely at the poetic experience.
In the first place, why is it essential in reading poetry to give the
words their full imagined sound and body? What is meant by saying that
the poet works with this sound and body? The answer is that even before
the words have been intellectually understood and the thoughts they
occasion formed and followed, the movement and sound of the words is
playing deeply and intimately upon the interests. How this happens is
a matter which has yet to be successfully investigated, but that it
happens no sensitive reader of poetry doubts. A good deal of poetry and
even some great poetry exists (_e.g._, some of Shakespeare’s Songs and,
in a different way, much of the best of Swinburne) in which the sense
of the words can be _almost_ entirely missed or neglected without loss.
Never perhaps entirely without effort however; though sometimes with
advantage. But the plain fact that the relative importance of grasping
the sense of the words may vary (compare Browning’s _Before_ with his
_After_) is enough for our purpose here.
In nearly all poetry the sound and feel of the words, what is often
called the _form_ of the poem in opposition to its _content_, get
to work first, and the sense in which the words are taken is subtly
influenced by this fact. Most words are ambiguous as regards their
plain sense, especially in poetry. We can take them as we please in
a variety of senses. The sense we are pleased to choose is the one
which most suits the impulses already stirred through the form of the
verse. The same thing can be noticed in conversation. Not the strict
logical sense of what is said, but the tone of voice and the occasion
are the primary factors by which we interpret. Science, it is worth
noting, endeavours with increasing success to bar out these factors.
We believe a scientist because he can substantiate his remarks, not
because he is eloquent or forcible in his enunciation. In fact, we
distrust him when he seems to be influencing us by his manner.
In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very
definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as
logically to bar out all possibilities but one. No. But because the
manner, the tone of voice, the cadence and the rhythm play upon our
interests and make _them_ pick out from among an indefinite number of
possibilities the precise particular thought which they need. This
is why poetical descriptions often seem so much more accurate than
prose descriptions. Language logically and scientifically used cannot
describe a landscape or a face. To do so it would need a prodigious
apparatus of names for shades and nuances, for precise particular
qualities. These names do not exist, so other means have to be used.
The poet, even when, like Ruskin or De Quincey, he writes in prose,
makes the reader pick out the precise particular sense required
from an indefinite number of possible senses which a word, phrase
or sentence may carry. The means by which he does this are many and
varied. Some of them have been mentioned above, but the way in which he
uses them is the poet’s own secret, something which cannot be taught.
He knows how to do it, but he does not himself know how it is done.
Misunderstanding and under-estimation of poetry is mainly due to
over-estimation of the thought in it. We can see still more clearly
that thought is not the prime factor if we consider for a moment not
the experience of the reader but that of the poet. Why does the poet
use these words and no others? Not because they stand for a series of
thoughts which in themselves are what he is concerned to communicate.
It is never what a poem _says_ which matters, but what it _is_. The
poet is not writing as a scientist. He uses these words because the
interests which the situation calls into play combine to bring them,
just in this form, into his consciousness _as a means of ordering,
controlling and consolidating_ the whole experience. The experience
itself, the tide of impulses sweeping through the mind, is the source
and the sanction of the words. They represent this experience itself,
not any set of perceptions or reflections, though often to a reader
who approaches the poem wrongly they will seem to be only a series of
remarks about other things. But to a suitable reader the words--if they
actually spring from experience and are not due to verbal habits, to
the desire to be effective, to factitious excogitation, to imitation,
to irrelevant contrivances, or to any other of the failings which
prevent most people from writing poetry--the words will reproduce in
his mind a similar play of interests putting him for the while into a
similar situation and leading to the same response.
Why this should happen is still somewhat of a mystery. An
extraordinarily intricate concourse of impulses brings the words
together. Then in another mind the affair in part reverses itself, the
words bring into being a similar concourse of impulses. The words
which seem to be the effect of the experience in the first instance,
seem to become the cause of a similar experience in the second. A very
odd thing to happen, not exactly paralleled outside communication. But
this description is not quite accurate. The words, as we have seen,
are not simply the effect in one case, nor the cause in the other. In
both cases they are the part of the experience which binds it together,
which gives it a definite structure and keeps it from being a mere
welter of disconnected impulses. They are _the key_, to borrow a useful
metaphor from McDougall, for this particular combination of impulses.
So regarded it is less strange that what the poet wrote should
reproduce his experience in the mind of the reader.
III. What is Valuable
Enough perhaps as to the kind of thing a poem is, as to the general
structure of these experiences. Let us now turn to the further
questions ‘Of what use is it?’ ‘Why and how is it valuable?’
The first point to be made is that poetic experiences are valuable
(when they are) in the same ways as any other experiences. They are to
be judged by the same standards. What are these?
Extraordinarily diverse views have been held upon this point. Very
naturally, since such very different ideas have been entertained
as to what kind of thing an experience is. For our opinions as to
the differences between good and bad experiences depend inevitably
upon what we take an experience to be. As fashions have changed
in psychology men’s ethical theories have followed suit. When a
created, simple and eternal soul was the pivotal point, Good was
conformity with the will of the creator, Evil was rebellion. When the
associationist psychologists substituted a swarm of sensations and
images for the soul, Good became pleasure and Evil became pain, and so
on. A long chapter of the history of opinions has still to be written
tracing these changes. Now that the mind is seen to be a hierarchy of
interests, what will for this account be the difference between Good
and Evil?
It is the difference between free and wasteful organization, between
fullness and narrowness of life. For if the mind is a system of
interests, and if an experience is their play, the worth of any
experience is a matter of the degree to which the mind, through this
experience attains a complete equilibrium.
This is a first approximation. It needs qualifying and expanding if
it is to become a satisfactory theory. Let us see how some of these
amendments would run.
Consider an hour of any person’s life. It holds out innumerable
possibilities. Which of these are realized depends upon two main
groups of factors:--the external situation in which he is living, his
surroundings, including the other people with whom he is in contact;
and, secondly, his psychological make-up. The first of these, the
external situation, is sometimes given too much importance. We have
only to notice what very different experiences different people undergo
when in closely similar situations to recognize this fact. A situation
which is dulness itself for one may be full of excitement for another.
What an individual responds to is not the whole situation but a
selection from it, and as a rule few people make the same selection.
What is selected is decided by the organization of the individual’s
interests.
Now let us simplify the case by supposing that nothing which happens
during this hour is going to have any further consequences either in
our hypothetical person’s life or in anyone else’s. He is going to
cease to exist when the clock strikes--but for our purposes he must be
imagined not to know this--and no one is to be a whit the better or
worse whatever he thinks, feels or does during the hour. What shall we
say it would be best for him, if he could, to do?
We need not bother to imagine the detail of the external situation
or the character of the man. We can answer our question in general
terms without doing so. The man has a certain definite instinctive
make-up--the result of his past history, including his heredity. There
will be many things which he cannot do which another man could, and
many things which he cannot do in this situation, whatever it is, which
he could do in other situations. But given this particular man in this
particular situation, our question is, which of the possibilities open
to him would be better than which others? How would we as friendly
observers like to see him living?
Setting pain aside, we may perhaps agree that torpor would be the
worst choice. Complete inertness, lifelessness, would be the sorriest
spectacle--anticipating too nearly and unnecessarily what is to happen
when the hour strikes. We can then perhaps agree, though here more
resistance from preconceived ideas may be encountered, that the best
choice would be the opposite of torpor, that is to say, the fullest,
keenest, most active and completest kind of life.
Such a life is one which brings into play as many as possible of the
_positive_ interests. We can leave out the negative interests. It would
be a pity for our friend to be frightened or disgusted even for a
minute of his precious hour.
But this is not all. It is not enough that many interests should be
stirred. There is a more important point to be noted.
The Gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.
The interests must come into play and remain in play with as little
conflict among themselves as possible. In other words, the experience
must be organized so as to give all the impulses of which it is
composed the greatest possible degree of freedom.[3]
It is in this respect that people differ most from one another. It
is this which separates the good life from the bad. Far more life
is wasted through muddled mental organization than through lack of
opportunity. Conflicts between different impulses are the greatest
evils which afflict mankind.
The best life then which we can wish for our friend will be one in
which as much as possible of himself is engaged (as many of his
impulses as possible). And this with as little conflict, as little
mutual interference between different sub-systems of his activities
as there can be. The more he lives and the less he thwarts himself
the better. That briefly is our answer as psychologists, as outside
observers abstractly describing the state of affairs. And if it is
asked, what does such life feel like, how is it to live through? the
answer is that it feels like and is the experience of poetry.
There are two ways in which conflict can be avoided or overcome. By
conquest and by conciliation. One or other of the contesting impulses
can be suppressed, or they can come to a mutual arrangement, they
can adjust themselves to one another. We owe to psycho-analysis--at
present still a rather undisciplined branch of psychology--a great
deal of striking evidence as to the extreme difficulty of suppressing
any vigorous impulse. When it seems to be suppressed it is often found
to be really as active as ever, but in some other form, generally
a troublesome one. Persistent mental imbalances are the source of
nearly all our troubles. For this reason, as well as for the simpler
reason that suppression is wasteful of life, conciliation is always
to be preferred to conquest. People who are always winning victories
over themselves might equally well be described as always enslaving
themselves. Their lives become unnecessarily narrow. The minds of many
saints have been like wells, they should have been like lakes or like
the sea.
Unfortunately, most of us, left to ourselves, have no option but
to go in for extensive attempts at self-conquest. It is our only
means of escape from chaos. Our impulses must have some order, some
organization, or we do not live ten minutes without disaster. In the
past, Tradition, a kind of Treaty of Versailles assigning frontiers
and spheres of influence to the different interests, and based chiefly
upon conquest, ordered our lives in a moderately satisfactory manner.
But Tradition is weakening. Moral authorities are not as well backed by
beliefs as they were; their sanctions are declining in force. We are in
need of something to take the place of the old order. Not in need of a
new balance of power, a new arrangement of conquests, but of a League
of Nations for the moral ordering of the impulses; a new order based on
conciliation, not on attempted suppression.
Only the rarest individuals hitherto have achieved this new order, and
never yet perhaps completely. But many have achieved it for a brief
while, for a particular phase of experience, and many have recorded it
for these phases.
Of these records poetry consists.
But before going on to this new point let us return for a moment to our
hypothetical friend who is enjoying his last hour, and suppose this
limitation removed. Instead of such an hour let us consider any hour,
one which has consequences for his future and for other people. Let us
consider any piece of any life. How far is our argument affected? Will
our standards of good and evil be altered?
Clearly the case now is, in certain respects, different; it is much
more complicated. We have to take these consequences into account. We
have to regard his experience not in itself alone, but as a piece of
his life and as a probable factor in other people’s situations. If we
are to approve of the experience, it must not only be full of life and
free from conflict, but it must be likely to lead to other experiences,
both his own and those of other people, also full of life and free from
conflict. And often, in actual fact, it has to be less full of life
and more restricted than it might be in order to ensure these results.
A momentary individual good has often to be sacrificed for the sake
of a later or a general good. Conflicts are often necessary in order
that they should not occur later. The mutual adjustment of conflicting
impulses may take time, and an acute struggle may be the only way in
which they learn to co-operate peacefully in the future.
But all these complications and qualifications do not disturb the
conclusion we arrived at through considering the simpler case. A good
experience is still one full of life, in the sense which we have
explained, or derivatively one conducive to experiences full of life.
An evil experience is one which is self-thwarting or conducive to
stultifying conflicts. So far then, all is sound and shipshape in the
argument, and we can go on to consider the poet.
IV. The Command of Life
The chief characteristic of poets is their amazing _command_ of words.
This is not a mere matter of vocabulary, though it is significant
that Shakespeare’s vocabulary is the richest and most varied that any
Englishman has ever used. It is not the quantity of words a writer
has at his disposal, but the way in which he disposes them that gives
him his rank as a poet. His sense of how they modify one another, how
their separate effects in the mind combine, how they fit into the whole
response, is what matters. As a rule the poet is not conscious of the
reasons why just these words and no others best serve. They fall into
their place without his conscious control, and a feeling of rightness,
of inevitability is commonly his sole conscious ground for his
certainty that he has ordered them aright. It would as a rule be idle
to ask him why he used a particular rhythm or a particular epithet. He
might give reasons, but they would probably be mere rationalizations
having nothing to do with the matter. For the choice of the rhythm or
the epithet was not an intellectual matter (though it may be capable of
an intellectual justification), but was due to an instinctive impulse
seeking to confirm itself, or to order itself with its fellows.
It is very important to realize how deep are the motives which govern
the poet’s use of words. No study of other poets which is not an
impassioned study will help him. He can learn much from other poets,
but only by letting them influence him deeply, not by any superficial
examination of their ‘style.’ For the motives which shape a poem spring
from the root of the mind. The poet’s style is the direct outcome of
the way in which his interests are organized. That amazing capacity of
his for ordering speech is only a part of a more amazing capacity for
ordering his experience.
This is the explanation of the fact that poetry cannot be written by
cunning and study, by craft and contrivance. To a superficial glance
the productions of the mere scholar, steeped in the poetry of the past
and animated by intense emulation and a passionate desire to place
himself among the poets will often look extraordinarily like poetry.
His words may seem as subtly and delicately ordered as words can be,
his epithets as happy, his transitions as daring, his simplicity as
perfect. By every intellectual test he may succeed. But unless the
ordering of the words sprang, not from knowledge of the technique of
poetry added to a desire to write some, but from an actual supreme
ordering of _experience_, a closer approach to his work will betray
it. Characteristically its rhythm will give it away. For rhythm is no
matter of tricks with syllables, but directly reflects personality.
It is not separable from the words to which it belongs. Moving rhythm
in poetry arises only from genuinely stirred impulses, and is a more
subtle index than any other to the order of the interests.
Poetry, in other words, cannot be imitated; it cannot be faked so
as to baffle the only test that ought ever to be applied. It is
unfortunately true that this test is often very difficult to apply.
And it is sometimes hard to know whether the test has or has not been
applied. For the test is this--that only genuine poetry will give to
the reader who approaches it in the proper manner a response which is
as passionate, noble and serene as the experience of the poet, the
master of speech, because he is the master of experience itself. But
it is easy to read carelessly and shallowly, and easy to mistake for
the response something which does not properly belong to it at all. By
careless reading we miss what is in the poem. And in some states of
mind, for example, when intoxicated, the silliest doggerel may seem
sublime. What happened was not due to the doggerel but to the drink.
With these general considerations in mind we may turn now from the
question--What can the dawning science of psychology tell us about
poetry?--to the allied questions--How is science in general, and the
new outlook upon the world which it induces, already affecting poetry,
and to what extent may science make obsolete the poetry of the past? To
answer these questions we need to sketch some of the changes which have
recently come about in our world-picture, and to consider anew what it
is that we demand from poetry.
V. The Neutralization of Nature
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.
VI. Poetry and Beliefs
The business of the poet, as we have seen, is to give order and
coherence, and so freedom, to a body of experience. To do so through
words which act as its skeleton, as a structure by which the impulses
which make up the experience are adjusted to one another, and act
together. The means by which words do this are many and varied. To work
them out is a problem for psychology. A beginning has been indicated
above, but only a beginning. What little can be done shows already that
most critical dogmas of the past are either false or nonsense. A little
knowledge is not here a danger, but clears the air in a remarkable way.
Roughly and inadequately, even in the light of our present knowledge,
we can say that words work in the poem in two main fashions. As sensory
stimuli and as (in the _widest_ sense) symbols. We must refrain from
considering the sensory side of the poem, remarking only that it is
_not_ in the least independent of the other side, and that it has for
definite reasons prior importance in most poetry. We must confine
ourselves to the other function of words in the poem, or rather,
omitting much that is of secondary relevance, to one form of that
function, let me call it _pseudo-statement_.
It will be admitted--by those who distinguish between scientific
statement, where truth is ultimately a matter of verification as this
is understood in the laboratory, and emotive utterance, where ‘truth’
is primarily acceptability _by_ some attitude, and more remotely is the
acceptability _of_ this attitude itself--that it is _not_ the poet’s
business to make true statements. Yet poetry has constantly the air of
making statements, and important ones; which is one reason why some
mathematicians cannot read it. They find the alleged statements to be
_false_. It will be agreed that their approach to poetry and their
expectations from it are mistaken. But what exactly is the other,
the right, the poetic, approach and how does it differ from the
mathematical?
The poetic approach evidently limits the framework of possible
consequences into which the pseudo-statement is taken. For the
scientific approach this framework is unlimited. Any and every
consequence is relevant. If any of the consequences of a statement
conflicts with acknowledged fact then so much the worse for the
statement. Not so with the pseudo-statement when poetically approached.
The problem is--just how does the limitation work? The usual account is
in terms of a supposed universe of discourse, a world of make-believe,
of imagination, of recognised fictions common to the poet and his
readers. A pseudo-statement which fits into this system of assumptions
would be regarded as ‘poetically true’; one which does not, as
‘poetically false.’ This attempt to treat ‘poetic truth’ on the model
of general ‘coherence theories’ is very natural for certain schools of
logicians; but is inadequate, on the wrong lines from the outset. To
mention two objections out of many; there is no means of discovering
what the ‘universe of discourse’ is on any occasion, and the kind of
coherence which must hold within it, supposing it to be discoverable,
is not an affair of logical relations. Attempt to define the system of
propositions into which
“O Rose, thou art sick!”
must fit, and the logical relations which must hold between them if it
is to be ‘poetically true’; the absurdity of the theory becomes evident.
We must look further. In the poetic approach the relevant consequences
are not logical or to be arrived at by a partial relaxation of logic.
Except occasionally and by accident logic does not enter at all. They
are the consequences which arise through our emotional organisation.
The acceptance which a pseudo-statement receives is entirely governed
by its effects upon our feelings and attitudes. Logic only comes in,
if at all, in subordination, as a servant to our emotional response.
It is an unruly servant, however, as poets and readers are constantly
discovering. A pseudo-statement is ‘true’ if it suits and serves
some attitude or links together attitudes which on other grounds are
desirable. This kind of truth is so opposed to scientific ‘truth’ that
it is a pity to use so similar a word, but at present it is difficult
to avoid the malpractice.[7]
This brief analysis may be sufficient to indicate the fundamental
disparity and opposition between pseudo-statements as they occur in
poetry and statements as they occur in science. A pseudo-statement is
a form of words which is justified entirely by its effect in releasing
or organizing our impulses and attitudes (due regard being had for the
better or worse organizations of these _inter se_); a statement, on the
other hand, is justified by its truth, _i.e._ its correspondence, in a
highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points.
Statements true and false alike do of course constantly touch off
attitudes and action. Our daily practical existence is largely
guided by them. On the whole true statements are of more service to
us than false ones. None the less we do not and, at present, cannot
order our emotions and attitudes by true statements alone. Nor is
there any probability that we ever shall contrive to do so. This
is one of the great new dangers to which civilisation is exposed.
Countless pseudo-statements--about God, about the universe, about human
nature, the relations of mind to mind, about the soul, its rank and
destiny--pseudo-statements which are pivotal points in the organization
of the mind, vital to its well-being, have suddenly become, for
sincere, honest and informal minds, impossible to believe. For
centuries they have been believed; now they are gone, irrecoverably;
and the knowledge which has killed them is not of a kind upon which an
equally fine organization of the mind can be based.
This is the contemporary situation. The remedy, since there is no
prospect of our gaining adequate knowledge, and since indeed it
is fairly clear that genuine knowledge cannot serve us here and
can only increase our practical control of Nature, is to cut our
pseudo-statements free from belief, and yet retain them, in this
released state, as the main instruments by which we order our attitudes
to one another and to the world. Not so desperate a remedy as may
appear, for poetry conclusively shows that even the most important
among our attitudes can be aroused and maintained without any belief
entering in at all. Those of Tragedy, for example. We need no
beliefs, and indeed we must have none, if we are to read _King Lear_.
Pseudo-statements to which we attach no belief and statements proper
such as science provides cannot conflict. It is only when we introduce
illicit beliefs into poetry that danger arises. To do so is from this
point of view a profanation of poetry.
Yet an important branch of criticism which has attracted the best
talents from prehistoric times until to-day consists of the endeavour
to persuade men that the functions of science and poetry are identical,
or that the one is a ‘higher form’ of the other, or that they conflict
and we must choose between them.
The root of this persistent endeavour has still to be mentioned; it
is the same as that from which the Magical View of the world arose.
If we give to a pseudo-statement the kind of unqualified acceptance
which belongs by right only to certified scientific statements, if
we can contrive to do this, the impulses and attitudes with which we
respond to it gain a notable stability and vigour. Briefly, if we can
contrive to believe poetry, then the world _seems_, while we do so,
to be transfigured. It used to be comparatively easy to do this, and
the habit has become well established. With the extension of science
and the neutralization of nature it has become difficult as well
as dangerous. Yet it is still alluring; it has many analogies with
drug-taking. Hence the endeavours of the critics referred to. Various
subterfuges have been devised along the lines of regarding Poetic Truth
as figurative, symbolic; or as more immediate, as a truth of Intuition,
not of reason; or as a higher form of the same truth as reason yields.
Such attempts to use poetry as a denial or as a corrective of science
are very common. One point can be made against them all: they are
never worked out in detail. There is no equivalent to Mill’s _Logic_
expounding any such view. The language in which they are framed is
usually a blend of obsolete psychology and emotive exclamations.
The long-established and much-encouraged habit of giving to emotive
utterances--whether pseudo-statements simple, or looser and larger
wholes taken as saying something figuratively--the kind of assent which
we give to established facts, has for most people debilitated a wide
range of their responses. A few scientists, caught young and brought
up in the laboratory, are free from it; but then, as a rule, they pay
no _serious_ attention to poetry. For most men the recognition of
the neutrality of nature brings about--through this habit--a divorce
from poetry. They are so used to having their responses propped up by
beliefs, however vague, that when these shadowy supports are removed
they are no longer able to respond. Their attitudes to so many
things have been forced in the past, over-encouraged. And when the
world-picture ceases to assist there is a collapse. Over whole tracts
of natural emotional response we are to-day like a bed of dahlias whose
sticks have been removed. And this effect of the neutralisation of
nature is only in its beginnings. Consider the probable effects upon
love-poetry in the near future of the kind of enquiry into basic human
constitution exemplified by psycho-analysis.
A sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the
groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a
thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed,
are the signs in consciousness of this necessary reorganization of our
lives.[8] Our attitudes and impulses are being compelled to become
self-supporting; they are being driven back upon their biological
justification, made once again sufficient to themselves. And the only
impulses which seem strong enough to continue unflagging are commonly
so crude that, to more finely developed individuals, they hardly seem
worth having. Such people cannot live by warmth, food, fighting, drink,
and sex alone. Those who are least affected by the change are those
who are emotionally least removed from the animals. As we shall see at
the close of this essay, even a considerable poet may attempt to find
relief by a reversion to primitive mentality.
It is important to diagnose the disease correctly and to put the
blame in the right quarter. Usually it is some alleged ‘materialism’
of science which is denounced. This mistake is due partly to clumsy
thinking, but chiefly to relics of the Magical View. For even if the
Universe were ‘spiritual’ all through (whatever that assertion might
mean; all such assertions are probably nonsense), that would not make
it any more accordant to human attitudes. It is not what the universe
is made of but how it works, the law it follows, which makes knowledge
of it incapable of spurring on our emotional responses, and further the
nature of knowledge itself makes it inadequate. The contact with things
which we therein establish is too sketchy and indirect to help us. We
are beginning to know too much about the bond which unites the mind
to its object in knowledge for that old dream of a perfect knowledge
which would guarantee perfect life to retain its sanction. What was
thought to be pure knowledge, we see now to have been shot through with
hope and desire with fear and wonder, and these intrusive elements
indeed gave it all its power to support our lives. In knowledge, in
the ‘How?’ of events, we can find hints by which to take advantage of
circumstances in our favour and avoid mischances. But we cannot get
from it a _raison d’être_ or a justification of more than a relatively
lowly kind of life.
The justification, or the reverse, of any attitude lies, not in
the object, but in itself, in its serviceableness to the whole
personality. Upon its place in the whole system of attitudes, which is
the personality, all its worth depends. This is true equally for the
subtle, finely compounded attitudes of the civilised individual as for
the simpler attitudes of the child.
In brief, experience is its own justification; and this fact must be
faced, although sometimes--by a lover, for example--it may be very
difficult to accept. Once it is faced, it is apparent that all the
attitudes to other human beings and to the world in all its aspects,
which have been serviceable to humanity, remain as they were, as
valuable as ever. Hesitation felt in admitting this is a measure of
the strength of the evil habit we have described. But many of these
attitudes, valuable as ever, are, now that they are being set free,
more difficult to maintain, because we still hunger after a basis in
belief.
VII. Some Contemporary Poets
It is time to turn to those living poets through study of whose work
these reflections have arisen. Mr. Hardy is for every reason the poet
with whom it is most natural to begin. Not only does his work span the
whole period in which what I have called the neutralisation of nature
was finally effected, but it has throughout definitely reflected that
change. Short essays in verse are fairly frequent among his _Collected
Poems_, essays almost always dealing with this very topic; but these,
however suggestive, are not the ground for singling him out as the
poet who has most fully and courageously accepted the contemporary
background; nor are the poems which are most definitely _about_
the neutrality of nature the ground for the assertion. There is an
opportunity for a misunderstanding at this point. The ground is the
tone, the handling and the rhythm of poems which treat other subjects,
for example _The Self Unseeing_, _The Voice_, _A Broken Appointment_,
and pre-eminently _After a Journey_. A poem does not necessarily accept
the situation because it gives it explicit recognition, but only
through the precise mutation of the attitudes of which it is composed.
Mr. Middleton Murry, against whose recent positions parts of this
essay may be suspected by the reader to be aimed, has best pointed
out, in his _Aspects of Literature_, how peculiarly “adequate to what
we know and have suffered” Mr. Hardy’s poetry is. “His reaction to
an episode has behind it and within it a reaction to the universe.”
This is not as I should put it were I making a statement; but read as
a pseudo-statement, emotively, it is excellent; it makes us remember
how we felt. Actually, it describes just what Hardy, at his best,
does not do. He makes no reaction to the universe, recognizing it as
something to which no reaction is more relevant than another. Mr. Murry
is again well inspired, this time both emotively and scientifically,
when he says: “Mr. Hardy stands high above all other modern poets
by the deliberate purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the
world’s slow stain has not touched him; from the first he held aloof
from the general conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are
professional optimists take a part.” These extracts (from a writer more
agonizingly aware than others that some strange change has befallen
man in this generation, though his diagnosis is, I believe, mistaken)
indicate very well Mr. Hardy’s place and rank in English poetry. He is
the poet who has most steadily refused to be comforted. The comfort
of forgetfulness, the comfort of beliefs, he has put both these away.
Hence his singular preoccupation with death; because it is in the
contemplation of death that the necessity for human attitudes, in the
face of an indifferent universe, to become self-supporting is felt most
poignantly. Only the greatest tragic poets have achieved an equally
self-reliant and immitigable acceptance.
From Mr. Hardy to Mr. De la Mare may seem a large transition, though
readers of Mr. De la Mare’s later work will agree that there are
interesting resemblances--in _Who’s That_ and in other poems in _The
Veil_ where Mr. De la Mare is notably less himself than when writing at
his best. In his best poetry, in _The Pigs and the Charcoal Burner_,
in _John Mouldy_, no intimation of the contemporary situation sounds.
He is writing of, and from, a world which knows nothing of these
difficulties, a world of pure phantasy for which the distinction
between knowledge and feeling has not yet dawned. When in other poems,
more reflective, in _The Tryst_, for example, Mr. De la Mare does seem
to be directly facing the indifference of the universe towards “poor
mortal longingness” a curious thing happens. His utterance, in spite
of his words, becomes not at all a recognition of this indifference,
but voices instead an impulse to turn away, to forget it, to seek
shelter in the warmth of his own familiar thickets of dream, not to
stay out in the wind. His rhythm, that indescribable personal note
which clings to all his best poetry, is a lulling rhythm, an anodyne,
an opiate, it gives sleep and visions, phantasmagoria; but it does
not give _vision_, it does not awaken. Even when he most appears to be
contemplating the fate of the modern, “whom the words of the wise have
made sad,” the drift of his verse is still “seeking after that sweet
golden clime” where the mental traveller’s journey _begins_.
There is one exception to this charge (for in a sense it is an adverse
criticism, though not one to be pressed except against a great poet),
there is one poem in which there is no such reluctance to bear the
blast--_The Mad Prince’s Song_ in _Peacock Pie_. But here the spirit of
the poem, the impulse which gives it life, comes from a poet who more
than most refused to take shelter; _The Mad Prince’s Song_ derives from
_Hamlet_.
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence present two further ways of dodging those
difficulties which come from being born into this generation rather
than into some earlier age. Mr. De la Mare takes shelter in the
dream-world of the child, Mr. Yeats retires into black velvet curtains
and the visions of the Hermetist, and Mr. Lawrence makes a magnificent
attempt to reconstruct in himself the mentality of the Bushman. There
are other modes of escape open to the poet. Mr. Blundell, to name one
other poet only, goes into the country, but few people follow him there
in his spirit, whereas Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence, whether they are
widely read or not, do represent tendencies among the defeated which
are only too easily observable.
Mr. Yeats’ work from the beginning was a repudiation of the most active
contemporary interests. But at first the poet of _The Wanderings
of Usheen_, _The Stolen Child_, and _Innisfree_ turned away from
contemporary civilization in favour of a world which he knew perfectly,
the world of folk-lore as it is accepted, neither with belief nor
disbelief, by the peasant. Folk-lore and the Irish landscape, its
winds, woods, waters, islets, and seagulls, and for a while an
unusually simple and direct kind of love poetry in which he became
something more than a minor poet, these were his refuge. Later, after
a drawn battle with the drama, he made a more violent repudiation,
not merely of current civilization but of life itself, in favour of a
supernatural world. But the world of the ‘eternal moods,’ of supernal
essences and immortal beings is not, like the Irish peasant stories
and the Irish landscape, part of his natural and familiar experience.
Now he turns to a world of symbolic phantasmagoria about which he is
desperately uncertain. He is uncertain because he has adopted as a
technique of inspiration the use of trance, of dissociated phases of
consciousness, and the revelations given in these dissociated states
are insufficiently connected with normal experience. This, in part,
explains the weakness of Mr. Yeats’ transcendental poetry. A deliberate
reversal of the natural relations of thought and feeling is the rest
of the explanation. Mr. Yeats takes certain feelings--feelings of
conviction attaching to certain visions--as evidence for the thoughts
which he supposes his visions to symbolize. To Mr. Yeats the value of
_The Phases of the Moon_ lies not in any attitudes which it arouses or
embodies but in the doctrine which for an initiate it promulgates.
The resort to trance, and the effort to discover a new world-picture to
replace that given by science are the two most significant points for
our purpose in Mr. Yeats’ work. A third might be the singularly bitter
contempt for the generality of mankind which occasionally appears.
The doctrinal problem arises again, but in a clearer form with Mr.
Lawrence. But here (Mr. Yeats’ promised treatise on the states of the
soul has not yet appeared) we have the advantage of an elaborate prose
exposition, _Phantasia of the Unconscious_, of the positions which
so many of the poems advocate. It is not unfair to put the matter in
this way, since there is little doubt possible that the bulk of Mr.
Lawrence’s published verse is prose, scientific prose too, jottings, in
fact, from a psychologist’s notebook, with a commentary interspersed.
Due allowance being made for the extreme psychological interest of
these observations, there remains the task of explaining how the poet
who wrote the _Ballad of Another Ophelia_ and _Aware_, and, above
all, _The White Peacock_, should have wandered, through his own zeal
misdirected, so far from the paths which once appeared to be his alone
to open.
Mr. Lawrence’s revolt against civilization seems to have been
originally spontaneous, an emotional revulsion free from _ad hoc_
beliefs. It sprang directly from experience. He came to abhor all
the attitudes men adopt, not through the direct prompting of their
instincts, but because of the supposed nature of the objects to
which they are directed. The conventions, the idealizations, which
come between man and man and between man and woman, which often
queer the pitch for the natural responses, seemed to him the source
of all evil. Part of his revolt was certainly justified. These
idealizations--representative examples are the dogma of the equality
of man and the doctrine that Love is primarily sympathy--are beliefs
illicitly interpolated in order to support and strengthen attitudes
in the manner discussed at length above. And Mr. Lawrence’s original
rejection of a morality not self-supporting but based upon beliefs,
makes his work an admirable illustration of my main thesis. But two
simple and avoidable mistakes deprived his revolt of the greater part
of its value. He overlooked the fact that such beliefs commonly arise
because the attitudes they support are already existent. He assumed
that a bad basis for an attitude meant a bad attitude. In general, it
does mean a forced attitude, but that is another matter. Secondly,
he tried to cure the disease by introducing other beliefs of his own
manufacture in place of the conventional beliefs and in support of very
different attitudes.
The genesis of these beliefs is extremely interesting as an
illustration of primitive mentality. Since the attitudes on which he
fell back are those of a very early stage of human development, it is
not surprising that the means by which he has supported them should
be of the same era, or that the world-picture which he has worked out
should be similar to that described in _The Golden Bough_. The mental
process at work is schematically as follows: First, undergo an intense
emotion, located with unusual definiteness in the body, which can be
described as “a feeling _as though_ the solar plexus were connected by
a current of dark passional energy with another person.” Those whose
emotions tend to be localised will be familiar with such feelings. The
second step is to say “I must trust my feelings.” The third is to call
the feeling an intuition. The last is to say “_I know_ that my solar
plexus is, etc.” By this means we arrive at indubitable knowledge that
the sun’s energy is recruited from the life on the earth and that the
astronomers are wrong in what they say about the moon, and so on.
The illicit steps in the argument are not quite so evident as they
appear to be in this analysis. To distinguish an intuition _of_
an emotion from an intuition _by_ it is not always easy, nor is a
description of an emotion always in practice distinguishable from an
emotion. Certainly we must trust our feelings--in the sense of acting
upon them. We have nothing else to trust. And to confuse this trusting
with believing an emotive description of them is a mistake which all
traditional codes of morality encourage us to commit.
The significance of such similar disasters in the work of poets so
unlike and yet so greatly gifted as Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence is
noteworthy. For each the traditional scaffolding of conventional
beliefs has proved unsatisfying, unworkable as a basis for their
attitudes. Each has sought, in very different directions it is true,
a new set of beliefs as a remedy. For neither has the world-picture
of science seemed a possible substitute. And neither seems to have
envisaged the possibility of a poetry which is independent of all
beliefs, probably because, however much they differ, both are very
serious poets. A great deal of poetry can, of course, be written for
which total independence of all beliefs is an easy matter. But it
is never poetry of the more important kind, because the temptation
to introduce beliefs is a sign and measure of the importance of
the attitudes involved. At present it is not primarily religious
beliefs, in the stricter sense of the word, which are most likely
to be concerned. Emphases alter surprisingly. University societies
founded fifteen years ago, for example, to discuss religion, are
usually found to be discussing sex to-day. And serious love poetry,
which is independent of beliefs of one kind or another, traditional or
eccentric, is extremely rare.
Yet the necessity for independence is increasing. This is not to say
that traditional poetry, into which beliefs readily enter, is becoming
obsolete; it is merely becoming more and more difficult to approach
without confusion; it demands a greater imaginative effort, a greater
purity in the reader.
We must distinguish here, however. There are many feelings and
attitudes which, though in the past supported by beliefs now untenable,
can survive their removal because they have other, more natural,
supports and spring directly from the necessities of existence. To
the extent to which they have been undistorted by the beliefs which
have gathered round them they will remain as before. But there are
other attitudes which are very largely the product of belief and have
no other support. These will lapse if the changes here forecasted
continue. With their disappearance some forms of poetry--much minor
devotional verse, for example--will become obsolete. And with the
unravelling of the intellect _versus_ emotion entanglement, there
will be cases where even literature to which immense value has been
assigned--the speculative portions of the work of Dostoevsky may be
instanced--will lose much of its interest, except for the history of
the mind. It was because he belonged to our age that Dostoevsky had to
wrestle so terribly in these toils. A poet to-day, whose integrity is
equal to that of the greater poets of the past, is inevitably plagued
by the problem of thought and feeling as poets have never been plagued
before.
A pioneer in modern research upon the origins of culture was asked
recently whether his work had any bearing upon religion. He replied
that it had, but that at present he was engaged merely in ‘getting the
guns into position.’ The same answer might be given with regard to
the probable consequences of recent progress in psychology, not only
for religion but for the whole fabric of our traditional beliefs about
ourselves. In many quarters there is a tendency to suppose that the
series of attacks upon received ideas which began, shall we say, with
Galileo and rose to a climax with Darwinism, has over-reached itself
with Einstein and Eddington, and that the battle is now due to die
down. This view seems to be too optimistic. The most dangerous of the
sciences is only now beginning to come into action. I am thinking less
of Psycho-analysis or of Behaviourism than of the whole subject which
includes them. It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which
the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts
of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this
should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be
expected. We shall then be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon
poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means
of overcoming chaos. But whether man is capable of the reorientation
required, whether he can loosen in time the entanglement with belief
which now takes from poetry half its power and would then take all, is
another question, and too large for the scope of this essay.
Footnotes
[1] The view of the mind-body problem assumed here is defended and
maintained with references to the contemporary authorities who hold it,
in _The Meaning of Psychology_ by C. K. Ogden, Chapter II. (London,
Kegan Paul; New York, Harpers; 1926.)
[2] For a further discussion of attitudes see the author’s _Principles
of Literary Criticism_, Chapter XV (International Library of
Psychology).
[3] See _The Foundations of Aesthetics_, by C. K. Ogden, James Wood and
the author, pp. 74 ff. for a description of such experience.
[4] _I.e._ thoughts which are both true and evidenced, in the narrower,
stricter senses. For a discussion of some relevant senses of ‘truth’
and ‘knowledge’ see _Principles of Literary Criticism_, Chapters xxxiii
and xxxiv.
[5] On this point the study of the child’s questions included in _The
Language and Thought of the Child_ by J. Piaget (Kegan Paul, 1926), is
illuminating.
[6] The remarks of Wittgenstein (_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_, 6.5,
6.52), which superficially resemble this, should be consulted, if only
to show how important the _context_ of a statement may be; for what is
said above should lead not towards but away from all forms of mysticism.
[7] For an account of the various senses of truth and of the ways in
which they may be distinguished in discussion cf. _The Meaning of
Meaning_, by C. K. Ogden and the author, Chapters VII and X.
[8] To those familiar with Mr. Eliot’s _The Waste Land_, my
indebtedness to it at this point will be evident. He seems to me
by this poem, to have performed two considerable services for this
generation. He has given a perfect emotive description of a state
of mind which is probably inevitable for a while to all meditative
people. Secondly, by effecting a complete severance between his poetry
and _all_ beliefs, and this without any weakening of the poetry, he
has realised what might otherwise have remained largely a speculative
possibility, and has shown the way to the only solution of these
difficulties. “In the destructive element immerse. That is the way.”
Transcriber’s Note
_Underscores_ represent italics in plain text.
This book was published as part of the series “Psyche Miniatures:
General Series #1”, from “Psyche: An Illustrated Quarterly Review of
General and Applied Psychology”. Related front matter and back matter,
which lists the series’ titles and contributors, is not included here.
Later reprints of this book improved on the typesetting or editing of
this edition. The following quirks are original to this edition and
not transcription errors: the use of both single and double quotation
marks; and sentences that seem to lack appropriate commas. Some commas
have been added when present in the 1926 American edition (W. W.
Norton); for example, “a new order based on conciliation[+,] not on
attempted suppression”.
The book cover image was made by the transcriber and is placed in the
public domain.
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