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Title: Anarchism is not enough
Author: Laura Riding
Release date: April 7, 2026 [eBook #78380]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Jonathan Cape, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78380
Credits: Paul Fatula; Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHISM IS NOT ENOUGH ***
_ANARCHISM_
is not enough
Laura Riding
JONATHAN CAPE
London
FIRST PUBLISHED MCMXXVIII
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME
CONTENTS
THE MYTH Page 9
LANGUAGE AND LAZINESS 13
THIS PHILOSOPHY 15
WHAT IS A POEM? 16
A COMPLICATED PROBLEM 19
ALL LITERATURE 20
MR. DOODLE-DOODLE-DOO 22
AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION 25
THE CORPUS 27
POETRY AND MUSIC 32
POETRY AND PAINTING 37
POETRY AND DREAMS 39
JOCASTA 41
HOW CAME IT ABOUT? 133
HUNGRY TO HEAR 136
IN A CAFÉ 138
FRAGMENT OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL 142
WILLIAM AND DAISY: FRAGMENT OF A FINISHED NOVEL 150
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK 152
THE DAMNED THING 187
LETTER OF ABDICATION 209
ANARCHISM IS NOT ENOUGH
THE MYTH
When the baby is born there is no place to put it: it is born, it will
in time die, therefore there is no sense in enlarging the world by so
many miles and minutes for its accommodation. A temporary scaffolding
is set up for it, an altar to ephemerality--a permanent altar to
ephemerality. This altar is the Myth. The object of the Myth is to
give happiness: to help the baby pretend that what is ephemeral is
permanent. It does not matter if in the course of time he discovers
that all is ephemeral: so long as he can go on pretending that it is
permanent he is happy.
As it is not one baby but all babies which are laid upon this altar, it
becomes the religious duty of each to keep on pretending for the sake
of all the others, not for himself. Gradually, when the baby grows and
learns why he has been placed on the altar, he finds that he is not
particularly interested in carrying on the pretence, that happiness and
unhappiness are merely an irregular succession and grouping of moments
in him between his birth and his death. Yet he continues to support
the Myth for others’ sake, and others continue to support it for his.
The stronger grows the inward conviction of the futility of the Myth,
the stronger grows the outward unity and form of the Myth. It becomes
the universal sense of duty, the ethics of abstract neighbourliness.
It is the repository for whatever one does without knowing why; it
makes itself the why. Once given this function through universal
misunderstanding, it persists in its reality with the perseverance of a
ghost and continues to demand sacrifices. It is indifferent what form
or system is given to it from this period to that, so long as it be
given _a_ form and _a_ system by which it may absorb and digest every
possible activity; and the grown-up babies satisfy it by presenting
their offerings as systematized parts of a systematized whole.
The Myth may collapse as a social whole; yet it continues by its own
memory of itself to impose itself as an æsthetic whole. Even in this
day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly
recognised, we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time
devoting pious ceremonies to the æsthetic vitality of the Myth, from a
haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated
belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art
of living. Plato’s censorship of poets in the interests of the young
sprang from a realization of the fact that poetry is in opposition to
the truth of the Myth: I do not think he objected to poetry for the
old, since they were nearly through with living.
Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, religion, philosophy, history
and science--these are essentially of the Myth. They have technique,
growth, tradition, universal significance (truth); and there is also
a poetry of the Myth, made by analogy into a mythological activity.
Mythological activities glorify the sense of duty, force on the
individual a mathematical exaggeration of his responsibilities.
Poetry (praise be to babyhood) is essentially not of the Myth. It is
all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not
living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense
of duty. It is what happens when the baby crawls off the altar and
is ‘Resolv’d to be a very contrary fellow’--resolved not to pretend,
learn to talk or versify. Whatever language it uses it makes up as it
goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to
start all over again. This is why it remains a baby and dies (praise be
to babyhood) a baby. In the art of not living one is not ephemerally
permanent but permanently ephemeral.
* * * * *
Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they
run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in
various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations,
which have all to do with making things already made, is the
making of people: it is called the art of friendship. So one finds
oneself surrounded with numbers of artificial selves contesting
the authenticity of the original self; which, forced to become a
competitive self, ceases to be the original self, is, like all the
others, a creation. The person, too, becomes a friend of himself. _He_
no longer exists.
* * * * *
Words have three historical levels. They may be true words, that is, of
an intrinsic sense; they may be logical words, that is, of an applied
sense; or they may be poetical words, of a misapplied sense, untrue and
illogical in themselves, but of supposed suggestive power. The most the
poet can now do is to take every word he uses through each of these
levels, giving it the combined depth of all three, forcing it beyond
itself to a death of sense where it is at least safe from the perjuries
either of society or poetry.
LANGUAGE AND LAZINESS
Language is a form of laziness; the word is a compromise between what
it is possible to express and what it is not possible to express.
That is, expression itself is a form of laziness. The cause of
expression is incomplete powers of understanding and communication:
unevenly distributed intelligence. Language does not attempt to affect
this distribution; it accepts the inequality and makes possible a
mathematical intercourse between the degrees of intelligence occurring
in an average range. The degrees of intelligence at each extreme are
thus naturally neglected: and yet they are obviously the most important.
Prose is the mathematics of expression. The word is a numerical
convenience in which the known and the unknown are brought together to
act as the meeting-place of the one who knows and the one who does not
know. The prose word accomplishes no redistribution of intelligence;
it merely declares the inequality, and so even as expression it has no
reality, it is an empty cipher.
Poetry is an attempt to make language do more than express; to make it
work; to redistribute intelligence by means of the word. If it succeeds
in this the problem of communication disappears. It does not treat
this problem as a matter of mathematical distribution of intelligence
between an abstract known and unknown represented in a concrete knower
and not-knower. The distribution must take place, if at all, within
the intelligence itself. Prose evades this problem by making slovenly
equations which always seem successful because, being inexact, they
conceal inexactness. Poetry always faces, and generally meets with,
failure. But even if it fails, it is at least at the heart of the
difficulty, which it treats not as a difficulty of minds but of mind.
THIS PHILOSOPHY
This philosophy, this merchant-mindedness: how much have we here?
what sum? And of what profit? Somewhere, in the factories of reality,
all this has been produced which now floods the market of wisdom,
awaiting its price-ticket. What is science? yard-measure and scale to
philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable,
ill-fed, underpaid, ununionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful
for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.
* * * * *
Only what is comic is perfect: it is outside of reality, which is
a self-defeating, serious striving to be outside of reality, to be
perfect. Reality cannot escape from reality because it is made of
belief, and capable only of belief. Perfection is what is unbelievable,
the joke.
WHAT IS A POEM?
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common
experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in
this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being
overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism
began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the
end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader.
The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental
to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was
replaced by science; inspiration by psychology. In the first the poet
flattered himself and was flattered by others because he had singular
reactions to experience; in the second the object of flattery makes
himself expert in the art of flattery.
What is a poem? A poem is nothing. By persistence the poem can be made
something; but then it is something, not a poem. Why is it nothing?
Because it cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read (what can be
read is prose). It is not an effect (common or uncommon) of experience;
it is the result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience--it is
a vacuum and therefore nothing. It cannot be looked at, heard, touched
or read because it is a vacuum. Since it is a vacuum it is nothing for
which the poet can flatter himself or receive flattery. Since it is a
vacuum it cannot be reproduced in an audience. A vacuum is unalterably
and untransferably a vacuum--the only thing that can happen to it is
destruction. If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the
result would be the destruction of the audience.
The confusion between the poem as effect and the poem as vacuum is
easily explained. It is obvious that all is either effect or it is
nothing. What the old romanticism meant by an uncommon effect was a
something that was not an effect, an over-and-above of experience.
Although it was really not an effect, it was classified as an effect
because it was impossible to imagine something that was not an effect.
It did not occur to anyone to imagine nothing, the vacuum; or, if it
did, only with abhorrence. The new romanticism remedied this inaccuracy
by classifying the poem as the cause of an effect--as both cause and
effect. But as both cause and effect the poem counts itself out of
experience: proves itself to be nothing masquerading as something. As
something it is all that the detractors of poetry say it is; it is
false experience. As nothing--well, as nothing it is everything in an
existence where everything, being effect of effect and without cause,
is nothing.
Whenever this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides
to destroy it, to convert it into something. The conversion of nothing
into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse
of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to
use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing
experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since
it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.
* * * * *
The only productive design is designed waste. Designed creation results
in nothing but the destruction of the designer: it is impossible to
add to what is; all is and is made. Energy that attempts to make in
the sense of making a numerical increase in the sum of made things
is spitefully returned to itself unused. It is a would-be-happy-ness
ending in unanticipated and disordered unhappiness. Energy that is
aware of the impossibility of positive construction devotes itself to
an ordered using-up and waste of itself: to an anticipated unhappiness
which, because it has design, foreknowledge, is the nearest approach
to happiness. Undesigned unhappiness and designed happiness both mean
anarchism. _Anarchism is not enough._
A COMPLICATED PROBLEM
A complicated problem is only further complicated by being simplified.
A state of confusion is never made comprehensible by being given a
plot. Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them. The truth
is always laid out in an infinite number of circles tending to become,
but never becoming, concentric--except occasionally in poetry.
ALL LITERATURE
All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express
themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the
old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally
precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents. How not
to write literature, how not to be precocious: cultivate inattention,
do not learn how to express yourself, make no distinction between
thoughts and emotions, since precocity comes of making one vie with
the other, mistrust whatever seems superior and be partial to whatever
seems inferior--whatever is not literature. And then, if you must
write yourself, write _writing-matter_, not _reading-matter_. People
will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To
avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know. Write to
discover to yourself what you know. People will think you brilliant
if you seem to be enjoying yourself, since they are not enjoying
themselves. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid pretending to be
enjoying yourself. Make it clear that you know that they know that
nothing is really enjoyable except pretending to be enjoying yourself.
* * * * *
People may treat themselves as extraneous phenomena or as fundamental
phenomena--it does not matter which. It does not matter, so long as
they behave consistently as one or the other. What discredits character
is not self-importance or self-unimportance, but the adjustment of
personal importance according to expediency.
MR. DOODLE-DOODLE-DOO
Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo, the great mathematician and lexicographer, then
put aside his work and said: ‘_adultery_ and _adulteration_ can wait
until I return.’
For Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Do was at one thing or the other by turns, and
this particular morning he felt his mathematical genius complaining: it
was undoubtedly true that it was a long time since he had been out to
get Numbers. So, leaving _adultery_ and _adulteration_ to take care of
themselves, he walked out into the Square, and from the Square into the
Gardens; and in the Gardens he sat down on a bench near the rockery and
began to think with the mathematical half of his brain.
‘Let me see. I left off with _honey_ last time. Now the problem will
be to show that honey as a purely mathematical symbol is equivalent
to honey as a philological integer. If I can do this I have once more
proved that 2 × 2 = 4 is the equivalent of “two times two is four.” For
it’s not enough to show a thing is true: you must also show that true
is true. By being a mathematical lexicographer and a lexicographical
mathematician, I am therefore able to check the truth with the truth.
My last words are never “that’s true” but “that’s correct,” which
explains how I can be a philosopher and a gentleman at the same time.’
With this Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo crowed three times: once for
lexicography (Doodle), once for mathematics (Doodle), and once for
himself (Doo), wherein the truth was checked by itself and found
correct. The immediate matter in hand, however, was honey. So he left
off crowing and proceeded with his calculations, which went so quickly
that it is very difficult to record them. But they were something like
this:--
H O N E Y = HONE + Y
G O N E + Y = GONEY (sailors’ term for albatross)
L O N E + Y = LONE(L)Y
B O N E + Y = BONEY
O N E + Y + M = MONEY
BONEY GONEY HONEY LONE(L)Y MONEY
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
At this point he stopped following him. But that his researches must
have reached some happy conclusion was obvious from the enthusiasm with
which he later returned to his lexicography. His calculations then ran
something like this:--
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
A D U L T [ E R Y
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
A D U L T [ E R A T I O N
∴ H O N E Y E R Y ∵ H O N E Y E R A T I O N
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
But H O N E Y = S W E E T
5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2 1
∴ S W E E T E R Y ∵ S W E E T E R A T I O N
Which went far enough to persuade him that in lexicography he was, if
anything, even more skilled than in mathematics.
AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION
The important (but infrequently drawn) distinction between what is
gentlemanly and what is dull in poetry. Most people read poetry
because it makes them feel upper-class, and most poetry is written
by people who feel upper-class; at least by people who take pleasure
in describing themselves as upper-class; for instance, by men who
make themselves feel upper-class by holding gentlemanly feelings
toward woman, and by women who make themselves feel upper-class by
acknowledging these feelings. This poetry is idealistic poetry: it
dramatizes a non-existent emotional life and seems real because it is
not real. It also seems ‘interesting’ because it is not real.
Practical poetry is written by people who do not feel upper-class:
who do not feel anything. It describes themselves, but not as
upper-class, not, in fact, as anything. It is real and therefore not
dramatic and therefore seems unreal. It therefore seems (and is) dull.
The only reason that people ever read dull poetry (such as some of
Shakespeare’s) is that they mistake it for gentlemanly poetry (such
as all of Browning’s). For few people are really interested in anyone
else’s description of himself except as it makes them feel upper-class.
They mistake it for gentlemanly poetry because of their inability to
distinguish between the interestingness of dull poetry and the dullness
of ‘interesting’ poetry.
THE CORPUS
The first condition was chaos. The logical consequence of chaos was
order. In so far as it derived from chaos it was non-conscious, but
in so far as it was order, it had an increasing tendency to become
conscious. It therefore may be said to have had a mind of which it
was unconscious and of which it remained unconscious in its various
evolutionary forms until the mind developed to a point where it in turn
separated from order and invented the self. The occasion of the self
was a stage in the most anarchic evolutionary form, man, coeval with
the general transformation of chaos into a universe. A consciousness
of consciousness arose and at the same time divided between order, in
which mind was the spirit of cohesion, and the individual, in whom
mind was the spirit of separation. In the ensuing opposition between
these two, order yielded to the individual by allowing him to call it
a universe, but triumphed over him since, by naming it, the individual
made the universe his society and therefore his religion. Order was the
natural enemy of the individual mind. To conciliate it order appealed
to the individual mind for sanction. This sanction, the original
social contract, was not between man and man, but between man and the
universe as men, or society. Although the sanction was given on the
basis of natural instinct, or the non-conscious identity of man and the
universe, society has always claimed authority over conscious thought
and purpose. In incorporating the man it attempts to incorporate the
mind and in turn to give the mind its sanction through the sanction
which it first had from the man: it constitutes itself the parent past
and the mind present memory of it.
The social corpus is tyrannically founded on the principle of origin.
It admits nothing new: all is revision, memory, confirmation. The
individual cosmos must submit itself to the generalized cosmos
of history, it must become part of its growing encyclopædia of
authorities. Such a generalized cosmos, however, must have been
formulated more by the desire of people to define themselves as a
group than to account for the origin of their personal existence.
Origin, indeed, is properly the preoccupation of the individual and
not a communal interest. The group is only interested in the formal
publishing of individuals for the purpose of establishing their social
solidarity. Art, for example, is record not creation. The question
of origin is only emphasized in so far as it proves the individual a
member of the group, as having a common pedigree with the other members
of the group. Thus God, the branding-iron of the group idea, does not
appear in societies where as yet there is imperfect differentiation
between the individual and the type; where as yet there is no need
for branding. Once the distinction between the group mind and the
individual mind could be made the group mind really ceased to exist.
The distinction, however, could only be made by minds complete in
themselves, and as such minds have always been extremely rare, the
fiction of a group mind has been maintained to impose the will of the
weak-minded upon the strong-minded, the myth of common origin being
used as the charter of the majority. The tyranny by which this majority
can enforce its will may be either democratic or oligarchic. The only
difference is that in the first case, provided that the democracy
is a true democracy (which it very rarely is), the group mind is so
efficient that it acts despotically as one man; in the second case the
group mind is less efficient and, by a process of blind selection, the
most characteristic of the weak-minded become the perverse instruments
of unity.
Both the individual mind and the group mind are engaged in a pursuit
which may be described as mind-making or, simply, truth. The object of
group truth is group-confirmation and perpetuation; while individual
truth has no object other than discovering itself and involves neither
proofs nor priests. In order, however, to win any acceptance it must
translate itself into group truth, it must accommodate itself to
the fact-curriculum of the group. But not only is such truth forced
to submit to group terminology and order, but the group conscience
demands that the individual mind serve it by working with the purposes
of the group. The group, indeed, tries to preclude all idiosyncratic
thought-activity and to use what intelligence it can control against
it. This civic intelligence is found simplified in the catechism
instructing children ‘to order themselves lowly and reverently before
their betters and to do their duty in that state of life unto which it
has pleased God to call them.’
The confirmation of the candidate as a member of the group establishes
the superiority of group opinion over individual opinion and the
authority of the group to define this relationship as one governed by
civic duties. It is the nature of these duties which determines the
categories into which civic intelligence falls. The group can never
be anything more than a superstition, but the categories assemble
all available material into a textual Corpus. There being no real
functional group surviving, this Corpus of group texts is used as the
rallying point of the group, the counterpart of the primitive clan
totem, the outward and visible sign of a long-extinct grace.
The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus
limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These
demands become the only ‘inspiration’ countenanced, and theoretically
all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly
plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human
society. The occurrence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its
possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of
our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of humane
intelligibility.
* * * * *
We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the
circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of
criticism.
POETRY AND MUSIC
There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each
other by making critical comparisons with each other: there is a
literary criticism of music in which words like ‘wit’ and ‘rhetoric’
excuse musical flabbiness, and a musical criticism of poetry in which
words like ‘symphonic’ and ‘overtone’ excuse poetic flabbiness. This
mutual tenderness leads to false creative as well as false critical
analogies between poetry and music; to the deliberate effort to use the
creative method of one art in the other.
I am not distressed by the poeticization of music because I do not
much care what happens to music; it is a nervous and ostentatious
performance, and little damage remains to be done to it. I am, on the
other hand, distressed by the musicification of poetry because poetry
is perhaps the only human pursuit left still capable of developing
antisocially. Musicified or pictorialized it is the propagandist tribal
expression of a society without any real tribal sense. We get a ‘pure’
poetry, metaphysically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet
for a civilized tribal sense and for poetry as an art intellectually
coördinating group sympathies: and we get a sort of jazz poetry,
politically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a primitive
tribal sense and for poetry as an art emotionally coördinating group
sympathies.
Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social
utility of creative acts. Poetry I consider to be an art only when the
poet consciously attempts to capture social prestige: when it is an art
of public flattery. In this sense Beaumont and Fletcher were greater
artists than Shakespeare--better musicians. Shakespeare alternated
between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of
poetic remorse.
To explain more precisely what I mean by this distinction between what
I believe to be poetry and what I believe to be art I shall set down a
number of contrasts between poetry and music.
1. All real musicians are physically misshapen as a result of platform
cozening of their audience. They need never have stood upon a platform:
there is a kind of ingratiating ‘come, come, dear puss’ in the musical
brain that distorts the face and puckers up the limbs. All real
poets are physically upright and even beautiful from indifference to
community hearings.
2. The end of a poem is the poem. The poem is the only admissible test
of the poem; the reader gets poetry, not flattery. The end of a musical
work is an ear, criticism, that is, flattery.
3. A musical work has a composer; it is an invention with
professionally available material and properties. A poem is made out
of nothing by a nobody--made out of a socially non-existent element in
language. If this element were socially existent in language it would
be isolated, professionalized, handed over to a trained craft. Rhyme
and rhythm are not professional properties; they are fundamentally
idiosyncratic, unavailable, unsystematizable; any formalization of
them is an attempted imitation of music by poets jealous of the public
success of music.
4. Music is an instrument for arousing emotions; it varies only
according to the emotions it is intended to arouse and according to the
precision with which these emotions are anticipated in the invention
of the music. Emotions represent persons; not persons in particular
but persons in general. Music is directed toward the greatest number
of persons musically conceivable. It is a mass-marshalling of the
senses by means of sound. Poetry is not an instrument and is not
written with the intention of arousing emotions--unless it is of a
hybrid musico-poetical breed. The end of poetry is not to create a
physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind. It appeals
to an energy in which no distinction exists between physical and
mental conditions. It does not massage, soothe, excite or entertain
this energy in any way. It _is_ this energy in a form of extraordinary
strength and intactness. Poetry is therefore not concentrated on an
audience but on itself and only produces satisfaction in the sense that
wherever this energy exists in a sufficient degree of strength and
intactness it will be encouraged by poetry in further concentration on
itself. Poetry appeals only to poetry and begets nothing but poetry.
Music appeals to the intellectual disorganization and weakness of
people in numbers and begets, by flattering this weakness (which is
sentimentality), gratifying after-effects of destructive sociality.
The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory
of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence
on itself; indeed, it has no end. It isolates energies in themselves
rather than socially dissolving one in another.
5. Music provides the hearer with an ideal experience, a prepared
episode. Poetry is not idealistic; it is not experience in this episode
or programme sense. There is an entertaining short-story variety in
music; a repellent, austere monotony in poetry. Poetry brings all
possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness
beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. Poetry is defeat, the
end which is not an end but a stopping-short because it is impossible
to go further; it makes mad; it is the absolutism of dissatisfaction.
Music brings not the consciousness but the _material_ of experience
to a certain degree, always to different degrees. It makes pleasantly
happy or unhappy. It is the vulgarity of satisfaction.
6. Music disintegrates and therefore seems active, fruitful, extensive,
enlarging. Poetry isolates all loose independencies and then integrates
them into one close independency which, when complete, has nothing to
do but confront itself. Poetry therefore seems idle, sterile, narrow,
destroying. And it is. This is what recommends it.
POETRY AND PAINTING
Painters no longer paint with paint except in the sense that
poets write with ink. Paint is now only a more expensive, elegant
ink. What do painters paint with, then? They paint with poetry. A
picture is a poem in which the sense has been absorbed by the medium
of communication of sense. It is not an intelligible series of
hieroglyphics, but the poem itself forced into a kind of outrageous,
unnatural visibility: as if suddenly the thing mind were caught in
the hand and made to appear painfully and horribly as a creature. The
development of painting is toward this poetic quality; the better (the
more literal, the less realistic) it gets, the more horrible. So much
for the so-called abstractness of painting: the sense is made identical
with the medium by forcibly marrying it to the medium. Medium and sense
are a legally fictitious One in which the medium, the masculine factor,
forces the sense, the feminine factor, to bear his name and do honour
to his bed and table. _She_ is all meek, hopeless amicability, _he_ is
all blustering, good-humoured cynicism.
This poetic progress of painting influences the pictorial progress of
poetry. There is a great response in modern poetry to the demand by
painters that it should be more poetic. See for yourself how many of
the newest poems have not their names lettered in aluminium on their
doors, with a knocker designed by the latest French abstract sculptor
(master also of golf), humanly visible furniture within (all primary
colours), and nobody home.
POETRY AND DREAMS
I do not believe there is any more relation between poem-making and
dream-making than between poem-making and child-making. The making
of poems, dreams and children is difficult to explain because they
all somehow happen and go on until the poem comes to an end and the
sleeper wakes up and the child comes out into the air. As for children,
there are so many other ways of looking at the matter that poetry is
generally not asked to provide a creative parallel. As for dreams,
they are the dregs of the mind, anxious to elevate themselves by
flattering comparisons. As for poems, they are frequently (more often
than not) concocted in the dregs of the mind and therefore happy in an
understanding of mutual support between themselves and dreams.
The only real resemblance between poetry and dreams is that they are
both on the other side of waking--on opposite sides. Waking is the
mind in its mediocrity. Mediocrity is of such large extent that it
pushes off into obscurity the mental degree _beyond_ mediocrity, in
a direction _away from_ sleep. The mental degree _before_ mediocrity,
_toward_ sleep, is the dream. So the stage before the lowest degree
of mediocrity and the stage beyond the highest degree of mediocrity
are bracketed together by mediocrity because they are both outside of
mediocrity--the mind at its canniest intelligence and the mind at its
canniest imbecility.
JOCASTA
§1
The pathetic differences between wrong and right are well illustrated
in the persons of Otto Spengler and Wyndham Lewis. Herr Spengler is a
pessimist who has succeeded in cheering himself up with a romantic view
of Decline. Mr. Lewis is an optimist because he is right, forced into
pessimism by the general prevalence of wrong. He sees wrong (rightly)
as Time, Romance, Advertisement (forced optimism), Righteousness,
Action, Popular Art (Time, Romance, Advertisement, Righteousness,
Action, united in an inferiority complex). Since he is right his
right quarrels with the various manifestations of wrong he is able to
distinguish: the more he is able to distinguish the more corroborations
he has of his rightness. Herr Spengler, being wrong, has this advantage
therefore over Mr. Lewis: whereas Mr. Lewis’s success must be confined
to seeing wrong in the most unorganized (that is, various) manner
possible, _his_ success depends on his being wrong in the most
organized manner possible--the more organized he seems, the more right
he seems. Unfortunately this situation brings about a competition
between Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis: Mr. Lewis feels obliged to
organize his unorganized view of wrong, which cancels the potency of
his rightness, which is only valid so long as it is unorganized (that
is, commentarial instead of systematic). So he becomes a colleague of
Herr Spengler in righteousness, the advocate of a vocabulary. We find
him, as he himself admits, trying to give ‘compendious’ names to what
is wrong: which places him immediately in Herr Spengler’s class.[1]
To be right is to be incorruptibly individual. To be wrong is to be
righteously collective. Herr Spengler is a collectivist: he believes in
the absorption of the unreal (right) individual in a collective reality
(History or Romance)--by which the individual becomes functionally (as
opposed to morphologically) really-real. Mr. Lewis is an individualist
in so far as he is opposed to organized functional reality. But
he is unable to face the final conclusion of individualism: that
the individual is morphologically as well as functionally unreal,
and that herein alone (in this double withdrawal from both nature
and human society, or history) can he be right. How does Mr. Lewis
come to believe in the morphological reality of the individual? By
devoting himself so violently to revealing the sham of historical
action in art--the unreality of functional reality--that he creates by
implication a real which, since it cannot exist in historical romance
(society), which is all sham, must exist in non-historical romance
(nature). Further, both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis think through the
same machinery--the machinery of knowledge. Indeed it appears as if
they thought because they possessed this machinery and had to use it:
this is the constant impression made by Herr Spengler, the frequent
impression made by Mr. Lewis. I do not think that Mr. Lewis really
thinks because of and by means of knowledge. I am convinced that he
thinks. But I see also that he is unable to face uncompromisingly the
problem of individualism. He is not content with being right; he is
stung by his irritation with what is wrong into the desire to be real
as well as right. He therefore organizes the same material that Herr
Spengler organizes--to prove that it is sham, as Herr Spengler to
prove that it is real. He even uses the same false organizing system
as Herr Spengler--analogy. Herr Spengler, by proving the analogical
consistency of his views, merely proves that wrong is wrong. Mr. Lewis,
by overstudying the analogical consistency of wrong, establishes his
right by the same system that Herr Spengler uses in establishing his
wrong. He is making of his right a competitive Romance to argue with
Herr Spengler’s Romance. With both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis I feel
in the presence of realists. Herr Spengler, I feel, is happy in being a
realist, Mr. Lewis, I feel, is not. He is not, I think, because he is
fundamentally right, but afraid of facing the unreality of rightness.
It is difficult to explain this because it is a difficult situation;
and I wish if possible to avoid compendious names. It would perhaps be
simplest to say that Mr. Lewis is timid (as he has himself privately
admitted).
Mr. Lewis attacks the principle which is to Herr Spengler the right of
his wrong. He attacks the reality of the collective-real. But in doing
so he opposes to it an individual-real. The collective-real is man in
touch with man. The individual-real is man in touch with the natural in
him, in touch with nature. Neither Herr Spengler nor Mr. Lewis dares
face the individual-unreal: both believe in unity and integration, Herr
Spengler in the unity and integration of history, Mr. Lewis in the
unity and integration of natural as opposed to historical existence. ‘I
am for the physical world,’ Mr. Lewis says. One of the reasons he is
for the physical world is, apparently, that the historical world, in
keeping up with itself, not only worships the fetich of Romance, but
the fetich of childishness as well. In pointing this out Mr. Lewis is
both wise and courageous; but he reveals at the same time an important
fetich of the individual-real, adultishness. Nor, maddened by the
vulgar success of the historical world with itself, can he see that the
fetich of childishness in only a half-clue to the story of Gertrude
Stein, that Miss Stein has one foot in the collective real and one foot
in the individual-unreal--which is more than can be said of Mr. Lewis,
who has both feet planted in the individual-real.[2]
I must next give an illustration of the individual-real in contemporary
literature. This will perhaps not please Wyndham Lewis and will
certainly not please its author, Virginia Woolf. I can only say
that I do not mean to attack either of them but merely to explain
the individual-real. And Mrs. Woolf’s most recent book, _To the
Lighthouse_, seems to me a perfect example of the individual-real.
In the first place, it is individual: not in the sense that it
is personal, warm, alive to itself, indifferent to effect or
appreciation, vividly unreal, but in the sense that it individualizes
the simple reality of nature, gives it distinction--shade, tone,
personal subtlety. In the second place it is real--meticulously,
mathematically like life: not historical time-life, which is an easy
approximation, but natural flesh-life, which must be laboriously,
exquisitely, irritatingly, painfully rendered. To do this language
must be strained, supersensitized, loaded with comparisons, suggestive
images, emotional analogies: used, that is, in a poetic way to write
something that is not poetry--used to argue, prove, prick the cuticle
of sense, so to speak, in a way that is extravagant, unpleasant,
insincere (since it purports to be pleasant). The method, in fact, has
no creative justification: it merely drives home the individual-real,
which is physical emphasis of self-individual because it is physically
self, real because as physical it shares in the simple reality of
nature. All this delicacy of style, it appears, is the expression of
an academic but nevertheless vulgar indelicacy of thought, a sort
of Royal Academy nudeness, a squeamish, fine-writing lifting of the
curtains of privacy. In the third place, it (the individual-real as
illustrated in this novel) is adultish--advanced but conservative: it
does not belong to childish, democratic mass-art, but neither does it
belong to the individual, non-physical, non-collective unreal. It is
over-earnest constrained, suppressedly hysterical, unhappy, could give
no one pleasure. Pleasure is doing as one pleases. In works like this
neither the author, who is obsessed by the necessity of emphasizing the
individual-real, nor the reader, who is forced to follow the author
painfully (word for word) in this obsession, may do as he pleases.
There is only one novel-writer who really did as he pleased, let his
characters do as they pleased and his reader to do as he pleased, and
that was Defoe. He could do this because he was, as Pope said, ‘the
unabashed Defoe,’ and he was unabashed because he was unreal, vividly
unreal--personal, warm, indifferent to effect (consistency). Mrs.
Woolf defends herself from any such analysis of her work as I have
made here by declaring that there is no such thing as a novel. If _To
The Lighthouse_ is not to be treated as a novel, then it must, by its
language-habits, be treated as a poem. Analyse it then as a poem:
what then? It proves itself to be merely a novel; and an insincere
novel--the use of the material of the collective-real to insinuate
dogmatically the individual-real. Defoe used the material of the
collective-real as it could only be used sincerely--to insinuate the
individual-unreal: and so Defoe, if you like, did turn the novel into
poetry.
I once discussed this point with E. M. Forster and we found that we
had each read _Roxana_ in entirely opposite senses. Mr. Forster was
certain that Defoe followed Roxana in every word he wrote of her, and
that Roxana likewise followed Defoe, that there was no do-as-you-please
break between her and Defoe or between her and the reader or between
Defoe and the reader; that all was one intense, physically compact
and consistent exposition of the individual-real. I pointed out the
striking division in, for example, Roxana’s long feminist declamation
against marriage to her Dutch lover--a division in which all the
_dramatis personæ_, including author and reader, are released to accept
the declamation with whatever bias they please. In this division I
find Defoe’s sincerity. Mr. Forster, on the other hand, understands
the declamation as a remarkably unified, _innocent_, three-dimensional
slice of that individual-real which is the story. If I thought that
Defoe had written that passage innocently, with realistic consistency,
I should catalogue him as a fine writer and skilful hypocrite. But
I am persuaded he was neither of these. I am sure that the feminist
recital was wilfully unreal, inconsistent, many-dimensional; that it
was delicate common sense for the Dutch lover, frank but sentimental
expediency for Roxana, sound doctrine for Defoe and undisguised
storifying for the reader present in the story; and that none of these
was deceived in his bias, but could if he wished change it for any
other without damaging the consistency of the piece, since there was
none. _The Tempest_ has the same sort of inconsistency as a Defoe
novel; it is the most unreal of the plays and to me preferable to
the more realistic plays. Others are more poetic, as Mrs. Woolf’s
_To The Lighthouse_ is more poetic than _Roxana_. But they do not
contain so many poems, as there is no passage in _To The Lighthouse_
with the dimensions (the contradictions) of Roxana’s recital to her
Dutch lover. In _The Tempest_ there is not only a continuous chain
of such inconsistencies (poems); the characters themselves have the
same many-dimensional inconsistency--the unreal Caliban, the unreal
Prospero, interchangeable in their inconsistency.
Before leaving this question and returning to Herr Spengler, whose
wrong has not in my opinion been sufficiently disorganized, I must
come back to the suffocating, nearly sickening physical quality
of what I call the individual-real--not a strong, fresh, casual
frankness of flesh, but a self-scented, sensuous, unbearably curious
self-smelling of flesh. The collective-real is crude, symbolic, sham;
the individual-real is exquisite, more than symbolic--literally,
intrinsically metaphorical. I have in mind, in connection with _To The
Lighthouse_, a book of E. M. Forster’s, _A Room With a View_. Before
reading this book I had met Mr. Forster and found him charming; the
book was recommended to me by my friends as a charming book. I read it.
I could not deny that it was charming. Yet it was to me unpleasantly
painful to read. It was too charming. I do not mean to be flippant,
or to disgust, or to alter my original conviction of Mr. Forster’s
personal charm, which I have had an opportunity of confirming since
reading this book. But the truth is that it affected me in the same
way as would the sight of a tenderly and exquisitely ripe pimple. I
longed to squeeze it and have done with it. At the time I could only
reproach myself with this rather shameful morbidity and admit that my
reaction seemed preposterous. It was a simple, exquisitely written
story about simple, unexciting people; and the unpleasant excitement it
gave me was unnatural. Since then I have come to be able to identify
and understand a little the individual-real, and it is now perfectly
clear to me why Mr. Forster’s book affected me in that way, although
then I could only feel a vague physical reaction to its metaphorical
realism. That I recognized it as an essay in metaphorical realism is
proved by the persistent image of the pimple with which the book came
to be associated in my mind. And indeed, if I had thought a little more
closely about metaphorical realism at the time, I might have arrived
very soon at the same conclusion that I have here arrived at, _via_
Otto Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, and so forth.
In the ordinary time-world or art-world of the collective-real,
symbolism, however romantically it may be used, never denies that it
is symbolism. Its very effectiveness depends on its being recognized
as such. Further, since symbolism is here collective rather than
individual, since the symbol, that is, is _chosen_ to collectivize
individual emotions which would otherwise have separate and presumably
weaker communication with the thing for which the symbol stands, it is
clear that the symbolic method of the collective-real is selective:
it implies a graded choice of the things which it seems necessary and
important to symbolize. This method, whose psychology Herr Spengler
attempts to discover, is all that Mr. Lewis says it is (it is really
the symbolic method of the time-world that he attacks). In the
literature and art of the collective-real it is easy to recognize
because they are frankly symbolical: it is part of their technique to
insist on the symbolic quality of the symbol. This means that symbolic
art is generally bad art, full of double meanings, vulgar obviousness,
facile concessions to sentimentality, flattery of the mass-emotions
which confirm the relation of the symbol with the thing it represents.
Yet there is a proficiency, a vulgar good in this bad art that gives
great and pure pleasure--great because it has the strength of what
is purposively, defiantly bad, pure because it makes no attempt to
conceal its badness. And there is one further virtue in the symbolism
of the collective-real, that, being a selective symbolism, it does not
symbolize everything--if it symbolized everything it would destroy the
time-world, the organ of communication and author of symbols. Instead,
it lets pass much which it realizes would be proof against symbolism
and thus threaten its prestige: it admits that there is much that is
unreal and, in so far as is consistent with its authority, leaves it
alone. Poetry, therefore, in the world of the collective-real, is given
a little chance.
Symbolism, in the nature-world of the individual-real, denies
itself to be symbolism. It uses all the tricks of the symbolism of
the collective-real, but to insist that it is individually, not
collectively real, that it is, therefore, not symbolic but literal,
not ‘artistic’ but natural. It is not selective, since if it were it
would admit itself to be symbolical, but makes everything it touches
equally significant, physical, real. Its technique is to insist on
the authentic quality of the symbol. This means that it is only a
more ambitious, expert, clever symbolism than the symbolism of the
collective-real. It is literally instead of suggestively symbolic. It
is morbidly physical instead of merely morbidly sentimental. It is
difficult (not by nature but by art), adult, aristocratic, _better_.
The difference between the collective-real and the individual-real
as revealed by their respective methods of symbolism proves itself
to be no more than a snobbish difference of degree: the art of the
individual-real is self-appointed good art. And as such it is
strained, unhappy-hypocritical, slave to an ideal of superiority that
I can only properly describe as the ideal of slickness. There is no
opposition here of right to wrong, only a more academic, individual
wrong (or real) than even the best democratic, collective wrong. The
right (the unreal) remains (as it should) categorically non-existent.[3]
I recall with pleasure an outrageous example of the vulgarity,
sentimentality, proficient badness of collective-real literature; a
novel by Rebecca West. It is a long time since I read it, and what
I can reproduce of it is from memory. I remember in particular one
passage, in which it was told how delightful it was to hold an egg in
the little hollow in the front of the neck, and in which baked potatoes
were charmingly mixed up with cirrus clouds. It was all so frankly
false, so enchantingly bad, so vulgarly poetical without the least
claim to being poetic, that it was impossible not to enjoy it and not
to find it good: one was being sold nothing that was not obvious.
After Rebecca West put Katherine Mansfield, a cross between the
collective-real and the individual-real, a perplexed effort, a vapour.
Then put the development of the individual-real, culminating in the
art of Virginia Woolf, in which nothing is thrown out since it admits
no unreal, in which poetry has no chance because the individual-real
itself is so poetic, in which one is sold poetry without being aware of
it; this super-symbolical, unsufferably slick alchemy that takes poetry
out of the unreal and turns it into the dainty extra-pink blood by
which reality is suffused with reality:
‘She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed
to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone
could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence
that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without
vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like
that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to
things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed
one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one;
felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady
light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her
needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from
the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.’
I submit that this is _more wrong_ than Rebecca West’s writing
because it is better, slicker. It bends the bow of taste (to use the
manner of Mrs. Woolf) back into a contorted, disdainful, monotonous,
sensuously bulging circle. The collective-real, when a revolution
takes place in it (when it is threatened by the unreal and makes a
violent gesture of self-assertion), acknowledges the shadow that
has passed over it, accepts the consequences of pledging itself to
be with time: shortens its skirts, chops an inch off its hair, puts
a cheerful face on its modernity--its progressive retreat from the
unreal. The individual-real, on the other hand, secure in Nature’s
fortress, insists that no shadow of the unreal can fall upon it. It is
everything--real because it is individualistic, unreal because it is
symbolical: it cannot come to harm. If it is threatened, it lengthens
its skirts, swishes grandly along the ground, grows its fingernails,
scratches exquisitely the plaster wall that surrounds it, sharpens its
pencil till it has nerves and writes just a little more finely than is
possible. And whatever it touches turns to spun-silk under it. It is
the delamarish memory-fairy.
Yet certainly there is much that cannot, except in the fairy-tale
of memory (the individual-real) be turned into spun-silk. To make
everything real, no matter how unreal, how personal it may have been
in its occurrence, is to symbolize it for the democratic mass. Thus
psycho-analysis is not unacceptable to the individual-real, thus in
individual-real literature we find grating public exhibitions of
individuality. Any personal incident may be stroked, coaxed, maddened
by fine torture into symbolic existence. For example: when I was
fourteen I used to read the _New York Times_ every afternoon for an
hour (for a pittance) to an old man whose eyesight was poor, a veteran
of the Civil War. He had a most eccentric mispronunciation, which I
had to adopt in reading to him. It was very difficult, as on the other
side, at school, I was being trained in pronunciation. I concentrated
on mispronunciation, and one day, when I had just about become
expert in it, I knocked at his door to find that he had died. There
I was, with all that mispronunciation on my hands; and to a certain
extent it is still on my hands. Now, if I were a psycho-analytic
individual-realist, I should symbolically refine this. I should have
a mispronunciation complex, I should say that life was like that and
associate it with other incidents in which life was like that, I
should have a mental ejaculation every time I mispronounced, and so
on. As it is, it is merely an incident--what I may call a statistical
incident. It happened, I occasionally mispronounce, it is all very
personal, unreal, illogical, unsymbolical and poetic to me. I have
never told it, poetically, as a good story to illustrate this or that
or to mean this or that.[4] And in treating it in this way I am sure
I am closer to the incident as it happened and as it affected me,
though I am not closer to what is called the reality of the incident.
This is perhaps trivial and even irrelevant to the argument. Yet it is
to me an exposition in life of the always threatening danger of the
individual-real in literature and art.
§2
I have already said that I considered Herr Spengler wrong and Mr.
Lewis right. To say that Herr Spengler is wrong is to say that he is
wrong. To say that Mr. Lewis is right is to imply, because I place
his right side by side with Herr Spengler’s wrong, that I regret
the argumentative rightness of his right: I not only object to
Herr Spengler’s systematic wrongness because it is wrong, but also
because it is systematic. Herr Spengler perceives a conspiracy and
is delighted, Mr. Lewis perceives a conspiracy and is infuriated.
Therefore, though I admire Mr. Lewis because he is right, I restrict my
admiration in so far as he is systematic: the obsession with conspiracy
is no more wrong in Herr Spengler than in Mr. Lewis. I regret to see
Mr. Lewis decorating his right with the trappings of argument: I
regret to see him dramatizing his right realistically to impress the
same audience as Herr Spengler does--emphasizing the individual-real
as Spengler does the collective-real. I should like to see Mr. Lewis
being right, being unreal, being himself, rather than sending out his
right to instruct the democratic mass on the same stage on to which
Herr Spengler sends out his wrong. It is none of my business, of
course, what Mr. Lewis does with his right; but in admiring Mr. Lewis
and not admiring Herr Spengler it is only fair to point out that the
former as well as the latter is guilty of realistic projections.
By projections I mean saying more, thinking more, knowing more,
observing more, organizing more than is self. I mean creating the real.
In Herr Spengler’s writing I find nothing unreal; I find no self. In
Mr. Lewis’s writing I find a considerable unreal projecting itself
realistically, organizing itself against, for example, James Joyce. I
do not speak merely of attacking James Joyce or Sherwood Anderson or
D. H. Lawrence. I speak of attacking by advocating a system to take
the place of the system which certain aspects of James Joyce’s work,
say, represent to Mr. Lewis. I think this system should indeed be
attacked in so far as it is a system and in so far as is necessary for
a preservation of integrity. I do not think it should be replaced. I
want the time-world removed and in its place to see--nothing. I do not
want to see the unreal--Mr. Lewis’s, mine, anyone’s--become more than
itself, become either intellectual (Spengler) or physical (Lewis).
I want it to remain inhuman and obscure. Both Herr Spengler and Mr.
Lewis make it, the one in his wrongness, the other in his rightness,
human and glaring. To me the secularistic subjective softness of
the first is no more aggressively realistic than the secularistic
‘objective hardness’ of the second. For all Mr. Lewis’s unreal, the
question remains to him ‘whether we should set out to transcend our
human condition or whether we should translate into human terms the
whole of our datum.’ I agree with Mr. Lewis in discarding the first
alternative, but I submit that the second contains in it two other
alternatives and that in choosing the _wrong one_ of these (as he does
by creating the original pair of alternatives) Mr. Lewis leans towards
rather than away from transcendentalism. For what he calls the datum is
nothing but the unreal; to call it the datum and, further, to suggest
the necessity of its translation from the unreal into the real, the
personal (inhuman) into the human (physically collective) is only to
oppose one kind of transcendentalism to another--the individual-real
to the collective-real. In this he is identifying himself with critics
who, like I. A. R. Richards, wish to find a place for literature and
art ‘in the system of human endeavours,’ to prove the unreal to be but
‘a finer organization of ordinary experiences’; that is, in order to
combat the gross romanticism and rhodomontade of democratic realism,
he turns merely to a more classical, aristocratic realism.[5] He
thus reduces the difference between himself and Herr Spengler to a
difference in taste rather than in principle; the distinction between
right and wrong, unreal and real, which Mr. Lewis might be one of the
few people able to maintain, becomes, as has already been pointed out,
merely the distinction between good and bad, between two types of the
real or between degrees in the real.
Man, as he becomes more man, becomes less nature. He becomes unreal. He
loses homogeneity as a species. He lives unto himself not as a species
but as an individual. He is lost as far as nature is concerned, but as
he is separated from nature, this does not matter. He is in himself, he
is unreal, he is secure. This sense of unreality, however, varies in
individuals: it is weakest in the weakest individuals. These weakest
individuals, missing the physical homogeneity which reality in nature
would give man, construct by analogy an ideal homogeneity, a history,
a reality of time. ‘The means whereby to identify living forms,’
Spengler says, ‘is Analogy.’ As systematic analogy with nature becomes
more and more difficult, the basis of analogy, parallelism with
nature, is removed; but the system of analogy remains. A transference
is made from what Herr Spengler calls morphological equivalence to
functional equivalence. Instead of being nature-like (like the species
_man_ in nature) he becomes man-like (like the species man in man).
The individual is like himself collectively, really, not like himself
individually, unreally. It is now possible perhaps to discuss more
clearly the significance of the terms I have been using: pessimism,
optimism; collective-real, individual-real; unreal. Herr Spengler, I
should say, is pessimistic at the sight of the disintegration of man
as a natural species; he consoles himself with a vision of man as a
consistent analogous rather than homologous social mass. He has, we
might say, a melancholy, mystical vision of an eternal structure of
decay, whose processes may be collectively appreciated and participated
in. His vision is the collective-real, by which he manages to transcend
the unreal. Mr. Lewis, I should say, is fundamentally optimistic at
the sight of the disintegration of man as a natural species. He is
not distressed, I believe, by the fact that there is a problem of
individualism. He would face it cheerfully if he were not so annoyed
by Herr Spengler’s gloomy evasion of it--by the whole time-philosophy
for which Spengler is but one of many spokesmen. But he is distracted
from his pursuit of the problem of individualism into the unreal, where
is to be found its only satisfactory conclusion, by his annoyance
with evasions of it like Herr Spengler’s or Dr. Whitehead’s. And in
his annoyance he remains permanently distracted; he succeeds in doing
no more than substituting for it another kind of evasion. I do not
say that Mr. Lewis is an official spokesman of the individual-real
in the way in which Herr Spengler is an official spokesman for the
collective-real. But in opposing him without fully acknowledging the
unreal he seems to me to be identifying himself with a brand of realism
that is in its way as obnoxious as collective realism.
Let me elaborate what I consider to be the viewpoint of the
individual-realists. They perceive the disintegration of man as a
species and resent the philosophical substitute which the collective
realists, with the help of history, make for the natural species--this
analogical instead of homological species. They recognize that however
removed man may now be from nature, analogies of the individual with
natural history are less false than analogies of the individual with
human history. Analogies of the individual with nature will become
less and less exact as man becomes more and more removed from nature.
But it is at any rate true that these analogies will hold as long as
it will be possible to make them. Analogies of the individual with
history will, on the other hand, become more and more exact, since they
are invented rather than discovered analogies, analogies maintained
by a system of representational cohesion. Historical analogy thus
stands for the tyranny of democracy, while physical analogy stands
for a Toryish anarchy--the direct communication of a few individuals
with the physical world without the intervention of the symbolic
species.[6] I think that anarchism is very nice; but I do not think
that anarchism is enough. I agree that morphological analogy is more
literal than functional analogy; but as morphological analogy is bound
to become less and less exact as the individual’s memory of himself as
a member of a species becomes more and more shady, it seems to me idle
to maintain it at all (except humorously); especially idle to maintain
it, this individual-real, categorically against the collective-real,
and in doing so to lose sight of the only quality in which the
individual is secure, in a certain personal unreality not affected by
analogy of any kind. I am not much concerned about the philosophical
invalidity of the individual-real; I am ready to admit that it is
philosophically a more tenable position than the collective-real.
Philosophical positions have all to do with versions of the real, and
have varying degrees of tenability: but if a philosophical position
have the maximum degree of intelligibility it does not alter the fact
that any philosophical position is irrelevant to the individual and
relevant only to a symbolic mass of individuals. The only position
relevant to the individual is the unreal, and it is relevant because it
is not a position but the individual himself. The individual-real is
more indulgent of the individual-unreal than any other philosophical
position; but this is a disadvantage rather than advantage to the
unreal, since it actually means an encroachment upon, a parody of
the unreal by the individual-real. It is about this encroachment and
parody as it takes place in literature that I am really concerned.
To put it simply, the unreal is to me poetry. The individual-real is
a sensuous enactment of the unreal, opposing a sort of personally
cultivated physical collectivity to the metaphysical mass-cultivated
collectivity of the collective-real. So the individual-real is a
plagiarizing of the unreal which makes the opposition between itself
and the collective-real seem that of poetic to realistic instead of
(as it really is) that of superior to inferior realistic; the real,
personally guaranteed real-stuff to a philosophical, mass-magicked
real-stuff. The result in literature is a realistic poeticizing of
prose (Virginia Woolf or any ‘good’ writer) that competes with poetry,
forcing it to make itself more poetic if it would count at all. Thus
both the ‘best’ prose and the ‘best’ poetry are the most ‘poetic’;
and make the unreal, mere poetry, look obscure and shabby. And what
have we, of all this effort? Sitwellian connoisseurship in beauty and
fashion, adult Eliotry proving how individually realistic the childish,
mass-magicked real-stuff can be if sufficiently documented, ambitious
personal absolutes proving how real their unreal is, Steinian and
Einsteinian intercourse between history and science, Joycian release
of man of time in man of nature (collective-real in individual-real),
cultured primitivism, cultured individualism, vulgar (revolutionary)
collectivism, fastidious (anarchic) collectivism--it is all one:
nostalgic, lascivious, masculine, Oedipean embrace of the real
mother-body by the unreal son-mind.[7]
§3
In showing how the distinction between the collective-real and
the individual-real meant really no more than a difference of
degree--between degrees of good, for example--I might have carried the
argument further. I might have shown that in thus revealing themselves
as merely differences of degree, they reduced all oppositions that
might be made between them to differences of degree. Take the
opposition of _intellectual_, of the time-world (collective-real),
to _physical_, of the selves-world (individual-real): _intellectual_
proves itself to mean based on an emotionally maintained unity;
_physical_ proves itself to mean based on a unity maintained by reason.
The opposition then of _intellectual_ to _physical_ (of Herr Spengler,
say, to Mr. Lewis) or of intuition to intelligence (of John Middleton
Murry, say, to T. S. Eliot) is a restatement of the more hackneyed
opposition of _emotional_ to _intellectual_; which in turn proves
itself to be not an opposition at all but an expression of degrees of
historical advancement.
Thus to Herr Spengler ‘Soul,’ the felt self, is an eternal, romantic
youthfulness in man; which expresses itself by comparing itself
(analogy) continually with the world, the not-self, the unfelt self;
which is the permanently aged, self-apprehending, being self of nature.
Herr Spengler does not see that once having made this opposition he
has placed himself in the position of choosing between them, that one
or the other must represent the illusion of one or the other. Failing
to do this, by maintaining a communicative opposition between them, he
shows that both are illusions (mutually, one of the other). To compare
mathematics and logic is to show wherein both are false, by reason of
their resemblance to each other. If the likeness were true, it would be
a complete likeness, it would be identity, and one or the other must
disappear; and it follows that the one in whose terms the likeness is
stated is the most false, the most illusory. The likeness is maintained
by the self’s fear of self, the fear of personal loneliness. The
mathematical unity of the world sets an example for the historical
unity of the Soul, the time-child of the world; a community self, a
Culture, is invented to keep the self company. All the values by which
this self is organized are derivative values. ‘Logic is a kind of
mathematic.’ Language is an expression of functional relationships,
it is not just language, the tongue of a self; it must co-ordinate,
_express_ the members of the community self rather than _say_ each
self; it must be comprehensible, that is, it must show likeness--if
it does not show likeness it is attacked as obscure. A painter or a
composer or a sculptor is one who demonstrates, through his medium,
this communicative opposition between the world of reality and the
world of self. The poet is one who, by personal duplicity, takes it
upon himself to prove that the opposition is so and not so; his poetry
is a demonstration of the righteousness of duplicity. ‘Nature is to
be handled scientifically, History poetically.’ Self is poetic self.
Nature, mathematical life, is the become, the eternally grown-up;
History, logical life, is the becoming, the eternally childish.
The time-advocate, whom I shall call the philosopher, does not see, or
is afraid to see, that the become and the becoming are both mutually
illusory Worlds of reality: that they are self-created refutations
of individuality to which the individual succumbs from imperfection.
He forgets, that is, that the individual is an _unbecoming_ and that
the categories ‘becoming’ and ‘become’ are really a derivation from
him, a historical reconstruction. Unbecoming is the movement away
from reality, the becoming unreal. What is called the become is
therefore really the starting point of the unbecoming. What is called
the becoming is therefore really a hypothetical opposition to the
unbecoming. The become and the becoming are both oppositions to the
unbecoming; the become from which the becoming is derived is a static
order organized against the unbecoming, the become is the material of
disintegration. The becoming is an attempt to check the disintegration
of the become from real to unreal by reversing its direction, turning
it from real to more real, making Nature suggest History. This is done
by reading into Nature a necessity and inventing for the species man, a
digression from Nature, an analogical Darwinistic Nature. The necessity
of Nature is then called Causality, the necessity of History, Destiny.
The philosopher, then, is the formal opponent of the unreal. To him
the individual is a piece, Nature is a whole, and the individual
cannot match the wholeness, the real of Nature, except by sharing
in a community self, the collective-real. To one who recognizes the
reality of the unreal, each individual is a positive unit produced
by the disintegration of the reality of Nature. Nature is a process;
and the pieces of this process are the wholes, not Nature. To the
philosopher thought is a reintegration of the scattered pieces into
a symbolic whole, which may then be related to the literal whole of
Nature; it also brings about a close interrelation of these pieces
among themselves, a functional conformity. To a believer in the unreal,
thought confirms disintegration. It is not a collective system. It is
each self.
This opposition of the philosopher to the individual-unreal remains
merely a philosophical opposition. For it is the nature of the
believer in the unreal to be without a system--a system implies
collective association (it is even impossible to give him a label,
like ‘philosopher’); and the philosopher could only be opposed by a
system. Indeed so thoroughly ‘unselfish’ is the character of the unreal
self that its just conclusion is a sort of social disappearance. This
is practically impossible because to the unreal self is attached a
physical memory of the process by which the self was made, a birthmark
of piecemealness opposing to the complete unreal self a reconstructed,
ideal whole of origin. The unreal self is forced to indulge this. Sex,
for instance, is an indulgence by the unreal self of romantic physical
nostalgia. To the unreal self this indulgence is incidental, to the
philosopher it is fundamental. Herr Spengler’s whole inspiration is
nostalgic. (So is T. S. Eliot’s. So is Mr. C. B. Cochran’s--every
‘Cochran’s Revue’ is a variation on the theme of the integration
of historical pageantry, an epistemological medley of primitivism,
Shakespeareanism, Charlestonianism, etc.)
The philosopher has, however, his formal opponent. His formal opponent
is one who resents the gross personification of man as the ideal
individual of the species; to whom Spenglerish dualism is only ‘bad
philosophy’ (Mr. Lewis); to whom good philosophy is a severe monism,
a literal, aware dwelling in the mathematical (being) self of Nature.
Instead of History we have Criticism: the formal opponent of the
philosopher is the Critic. And, once more, the difference between them
shows itself to be only a difference of degree; criticism defines
itself as ‘better,’ more intellectual philosophy than ‘intellectual,’
‘bad’ philosophy. The critic (this new, anti-philosophical type that I
am speaking of) dismisses the childish, historical self as a travesty
of the adult self of physical reality; as that sick, inner-eyeish,
Strindbergian ‘subjective’ self, which has poisoned instead of
nourished itself on reality, that the psychologist, physician
of reality, attempts to redeem from the subconscious (run-down,
pathological reality). For the philosophical system of logic the critic
substitutes the mathematical system of reason. The world of Self is not
to be deduced from the world of Nature; there is but one world, and
the self is in this, a like fact with other facts, not a subjective
fact in a shadowy world of analogy. What Mr. Lewis calls the ‘success
of reason’ would permanently establish self as objective fact, as the
individual-real. The language of the individual-real neither expresses
the members of a community-self nor isolates each self. It expresses
the extrinsic value of the self for a system in which there are only
extrinsic values; as the language of the collective-real expresses its
intrinsic value for a system in which there are only intrinsic values,
which are made valid, however, by means of oppositional relation to a
system of extrinsic values. So that for the individual-realist, the
self is also poetic self; rational instead of intuitive, ‘physical’
instead of ‘intellectual’; a poetic detail of real reality rather than
a real detail of poetic reality.
The critic, then, like the philosopher, is an opponent of the unreal.
The unreal self is intrinsic self, intrinsic without respect to a
system of extrinsic values; it is without value. It is more than
anarchistic; it does not treat individualistically with values; it
supersedes them. The unreal self is not poetic self, it is self.
It is not a detail of co-ordinated reality.[8] It is an absolute,
disconnected, hopeless whole. To the philosopher thought is memory of
Mother-Nature. To the critic thought is thoughts--diverse, objective,
related facts of reality. There is no antithesis between the position
of the philosopher and that of the critic: the philosopher invents
instruments for observing and measuring reality from afar and has
dream-embraces of reality: the critic says: ‘Sentimental stuff and
nonsense! I am _in_ reality.’ The critic, that is, is a little more
sentimental, ambitious, intellectual, poetic, snobbish than the
philosopher. To both of them thought means connection with reality. To
both of them poetry means eloquent consciousness of life. To the unreal
self, to whom they are both brother-opponents, thought is separation
from reality, and poetry is the consciousness (the perhaps ineloquent
consciousness) of what is not life, of what is self. A tree (even
this is doubtful, for it is a late, nearly human form) is not born;
it lives. What is born ceases with birth to live; it is self, unreal
self. For this reason it is impossible to call the unreal self poetic
self: ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry’ are words drunk with reality, they have
indeed become by popular use rhetorical substitutes for ‘real’ and
‘reality.’ By reality I mean organized, ‘universal’ reality. It would
be possible to speak of the unreal self as the real self, the self of
separate reality, were it not for the community sense that belongs to
philosophical or critical reality. I might have said, instead of unreal
self, dissociated self. The problem of the right word is more difficult
in the case of ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry.’ I can point out that the real
self is poetic, and, in opposition to both real and poetic, put the
unreal self. It is painful, however, to be forced to leave ‘poetry’
to the real self and to call the poetry of the unreal self unreality.
Poetry is a stolen word, and in using it one must remain conscious of
its perverted sense in the service of realism, or one suddenly finds
oneself discussing not poetry but realism; and this is equally painful.
But if poetry is a stolen word, so is reality: reality is stolen from
the self, which is thus in its integrity forced to call itself unreal.
Poetry may perhaps for the moment be saved for the poet and for the
unreal self if the collective-real, the individual-real, philosophy,
criticism, are denominated ‘literature.’ Literature then clearly
represents the symbolical, the rational, the romantic, the classical,
the collective, the individualistic reality of man. Further, if we
make it clear to ourselves that all literature is poetic, then we are
separating poetry from literature and drawing a sharp line between what
is poetic and what is poetry. Further still, we are discovering that
literature is everything but the unreal self, it is the society of
reality; it is History, it is Nature, it is Philosophy, it is Reason,
it is Criticism, it is Art. Most of all perhaps literature is Art, the
seizure and confirmation of reality by the senses, the literalizing of
the world of reality. The more ‘abstract’ Art is (the less symbolical)
the more real it is. Poetry is thus seen to be neither literature nor
Art. Literature is the ladder of reality: the historian yields to the
scientist, the scientist to the philosopher, the philosopher to the
critic, the high-priest of Reason, of which ‘great works of art’ are
the visible signs: for Reason is Reality.[9]
§4
This has been, so far, the elaboration of a point of view. From here
on will be found various applications of this point of view. Generally
in expositive writing there is no distinction made between what is
organically elaborative and what is incidentally applicative: all is
elaborative and therefore over-elaborative. The argument continues to
elaborate itself even though it has come to an end; it incorporates
the application of the point of view in the development of the point
of view; it does not distinguish between argument and comment. I
wish to distinguish carefully here between argument and comment. A
certain very small amount of illustration and instancing is necessary
to focus an argument properly: the smaller the better, since most
specific reference and substantiation is a concession to the audience,
which generally cannot think purely, that is, without the machinery
of learning. Once the argument is focused, it should not develop
further. It should repeat itself, like an acid test, in each fresh
application. All philosophical or critical systems are the absorption
of an original point of view by the facts to which it applies itself:
the force of the point of view is lost, it becomes a convenience by
which facts organize themselves and eventually dominate the point of
view. All philosophical or critical systems are no more than learning,
a synthesis of instances, and therefore develop generalizations that
mean nothing without instances. I have no philosophical or critical
system to advance; I am interested in generalizations that mean
something without instances, that are unreal, since they mean something
by themselves. Generalizations of this sort, when applied to instances,
should not be absorbed by them. The argument should dismiss instances
with comment on instances, remain meaning in itself. If it does this
then it is capable of maintaining an opposition between right and
wrong. If it does not, it only becomes a better wrong than the wrong it
attacks. It becomes real.
By this I do not mean that I am a subjective critic. A subjective
critic is one who converts his point of view into a system, makes
it real: his point of view must be continually fed by works of art,
otherwise it ceases. I propose here a point of view that is completely
unto itself, that is unreal, that is independent of instances. When
it meets instances it comments on them by repeating itself. Nor is it
subjective, since subjectivity implies an objective world of experience
from which it must perpetually derive itself. I speak of a point of
view which is self and only self, of an unreality which is every
one’s to the extent to which he is able to extricate himself from
quantitative reality and be, instead of a purse-proud something, a
proud and purseless nothing. What is this I am describing?--the poetic
(a stolen word) self.
1
Mr. Herbert Read (_Reason and Romanticism_).
‘That the critical spirit, expressed in reason, will ever evolve a
synthesis capable of fulfilling the functions of religion is evidently
impossible. Reason and emotion only unite in very rare and special
perceptions; such perceptions are not capable of generalization....
Emotions are too diffuse, too widely distributed, ever to be unified
in reason, which is an evolved possession, never perfect at all,
and only approaching perfection in the rarest individuals.’ The
impossible, Mr. Read admits, is attainable in the rare ‘universal
mind.’ Universal in the strict critical sense proves itself to mean
‘broad’ in the eighteenth-century sense--aristocratic. So Goethe
(both for Herr Spengler and Mr. Read) is the ideal universal type; so
is Leibnitz, so is Diderot. Mr. Read confirms my description of the
philosophico-critical system in his definition of universality as ‘a
capacity _to receive_ all knowledge and events with equanimity and
unprejudiced percipience; and to build up a positive attitude on this
clear and perceptual basis.’[10] From here we are gently conducted
to the proposition that ‘poetry is, in short, delectation.’ Poetry
is, in short, a game-like, sporting, snobbish exercise of reason, the
most ambitious display of knowledge possible: ‘and the greater our
knowledge, the more surcharged it is with the perception of values, the
deeper will be the delight aroused in us.’ What is reason? Reason is
socialized reality, ‘the sum total of awareness, ordained and ordered
to some specific end or object of attention.’
Mr. Read on metaphysical poetry: metaphysical poetry is ‘emotional
apprehension of thought.’ This means, we discover, individual mind
systematically apprehending reality: ‘... we find in Donne a mind
poised at the exact turn of the course of philosophy drawing his
inspiration right back from scholastic sources, and yet at the same
time eagerly surveying the new future promised by the science of
Copernicus and Galileo. Chapman, on the other hand, is in a remarkable
degree the forerunner of humanist philosophy--of Hume and Spinoza in
particular. He is aware, above all things, of “the constant and sacred
harmony of life.”’ In this way criticism classifies poetry according
to the poet’s intelligence of reality--that is, according to his
conventionality, his politeness; whereas that Donne wrote poetry at all
was because he was able to separate himself rudely from the reality of
which he was in a class sense a privileged agent.[11]
On Dante and Guido Cavalcanti: ‘Or, more exactly, all experience,
whether intellectual or sensual or instinctive, was regarded as equally
and contemporaneously the subject-matter of their poetry. The result
was a desirable continuity or coherence; imagination, contemplation,
and sensibility becoming fused within the perfect limits of a human
mind.’ Mr. Read then quotes from William Walrond Jackson, D.D.,
‘Introduction’ to his translation of the _Convivio_ (Oxford, 1909),
p. 18: ‘The poet was inspired by an overmastering desire to link the
present with the past and with the future, to blend all knowledge
into one coherent system, and to bring the experiences of life into
one harmonious whole....’ Plainly, this donnish, publicly fostered
service of the poet to reason would be absorbed, if he were a poet at
all, in his essential, enduring unreality by the time his work reached
the criticism of four hundred years later. Instead criticism keeps
artificially alive the derived reality of the work, submerging in it
what intrinsic unreality it may have had. ‘The true metaphysical poet
is conscious of no such dualism: his thought is in its very process
poetical.’ Poetry is reason. ‘Leibnitz has defined an intelligent
author as one who includes the most of reality in the least possible
compass.’ And further ... ‘the poet is in a very real sense the
product of his age--witness especially Dante’ (‘age’ meaning ‘the
most of reality in the least possible compass’). These two statements
comment sufficiently on themselves. What recommendation has Mr. Read
for the modern poet? He looks ‘to the modern physicists, whose work
would seem to provide a whole system of thought and imagery ready for
fertilization in the mind of the poet.’ This again, is its own best
comment on itself.
2
Mr. Lewis is merely a pamphleteer of anarchism, T. S. Eliot is a
serious moralist, bent on professing rather than on attacking. We
therefore look to Mr. Lewis for explanatory rhetoric and to Mr. Eliot
for explanatory ritual: in many respects his modest behaviour is more
illuminating than all Mr. Lewis’s language. After years of hard and
brilliant service as a poetical yogi Mr. Eliot suddenly discovered
that he had all the time been acting on behalf of the universe of
man, of human nature, instead of in behalf of the universe of reason,
of natural nature. So he replaced religiousness by priggishness; he
went from a popular, mystical cult to an exclusive Thomist club; from
large, symbolical (ironic) outer circle abstractions to small specific
(concrete) inner circle abstractions.
Instead of attacking the time-mob, like Mr. Lewis, he withdrew
himself from it and left it to carry on the orthodox, unanimous
flux so obnoxious to Mr. Lewis, yet so necessary to both Mr. Lewis’
and Mr. Eliot’s anarchism: the basis of anarchistic individuality
is not authentically individualistic, but snobbish. Mr. Lewis’s
incentives to anarchism are political--‘for the sake of the ride’;
Mr. Eliot’s are moral, that is, self-protective--the ride was for the
sake of running away. He ran away from the collective-real to the
individual-real (the _Criterion_ furnishes us with a progressive record
of Mr. Eliot’s movements). Like Mr. Lewis he opposed aristocratic
orthodoxy (anarchism) to democratic orthodoxy (co-operation); he
deserted the collective dogma of periods for the collective dogma
of individuals. ‘For those of us who are higher than the mob, and
lower than the man of inspiration, there is always _doubt_; and in
doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living
at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have
believed something’ (from the _Enemy_, January, 1927). Mr. Lewis
advocates grandiloquently but vaguely aristocratic orthodoxy in
general; Mr. Eliot is dryly and specifically in pursuit of _the_ or
at least _an_ aristocratic orthodoxy. The difference is that between
irritated rightness and alarmed priggishness. Mr. Lewis is merely led
astray by his extravagant though praiseworthy fury with democratic
orthodoxy; his worshipful enthusiasm for the classical man of quiet
is not dogma but pique against the modern romantic man of action
(time-flux, space-motion). Mr. Eliot upholds the man of quiet from
dogma. He is a minority-representative, as the man of the time-flux is
a majority-representative. Mr. Eliot’s position demonstrates clearly
the relation of the individual-real to the collective-real: it is a
priggish, self-protective minority-attitude to the same material which
is the substance of the dogma of the collective-real. But he objects
to ‘mentalism’ not only, I should say, because it generally means
mob-mentalism, but equally because it may mean unreal, unorthodox
individuality; his anarchism is timidity fallen between two stools.
Mr. Lewis, however, objects to mentalism, I feel, chiefly because it
generally means demogogic mob-mentalism. ‘By this proposed transfer
from the beautiful _objective, material_, world of common sense, over
to the “organic” world of chronological mentalism, you lose not
only the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you
commonly apprehend; you lose also the clearness of outline of your own
individuality which apprehends them.’ I do not think Mr. Eliot would
have been capable of saying ‘your own individuality’; I do not indeed
believe that Mr. Lewis is naturally an individual-realist, but that he
has been unfortunately stung into a pose.[12]
Aristocratic (as opposed to democratic) orthodoxy is not, as I have
already indicated, a pose with Mr. Eliot. I said he had _an_ orthodoxy.
It would be helpful to an understanding of the problem to discover what
the nature of an aristocratic orthodoxy may be. In Mr. Eliot’s case,
this is all too obviously: a humble, up-to-date respect for the best,
internationally sifted great names. A practical-minded Toryism, which
says, in gently criticizing Mr. Anthony M. Ludovici’s more journalistic
Toryism (The _Monthly Criterion_, July, 1927): ‘Mr. Ludovici is engaged
in forming what might be called a myth or idea for the Tory Party. Such
a myth or idea has much to commend it; and I sympathize with so many
of his views that I may declare at once what seems to me the great
weakness of his construction: he isolates politics from economics, and
he isolates it from religion.’ What Mr. Eliot’s attitude to economics
is it is difficult to determine; I should say from various evidences
that economics to him did not mean a human problem but an academic
tradition worthy of study. Mr. Eliot has, from time to time, spoken
more specifically on religion. In the review from which I have just
quoted, Mr. Eliot further says: ‘Toryism is essentially Anglican;
Roman Catholicism, which in our time draws its greatest support
from America, is more in harmony with Republicanism. The problem of
Toryism should be rather to make the Church of Laud survive in an age
of universal suffrage....’ Further, he ardently seconds Mr. Ludovici
in his recommendation that the Conservative Party should encourage
_thought_, ‘the activity of men of thought who are not and who do
not desire to be parliamentarians.’ In such quiet language does Mr.
Eliot phrase his gospel of timid, aristocratic mentalism--a kind of
politico-literary extract of Anglo-Catholicism, if we may judge by
signs. His demands are familiar to every properly brought-up British
schoolboy: that the Church must have more power, that the Kingship must
be strengthened, and that Aristotle must be studied, supplemented by
an Anglican reading of St. Thomas if the lad is to enter literature.
Yes, literature. I had nearly forgotten that Mr. Eliot began his
Progress as a Poet. But Mr. Eliot, finding himself higher than the mob
and lower than the man of inspiration, is modest; he does not ask to
be considered, or consider himself, as a poet. Unless we are deceived
by his modesty, he would be content to be Bishop or to be Professor
Saintsbury.
3
Mr. Roger Fry in _Transformations_ concerns himself with the
distinction between pure and impure art--‘a distinction which Mr.
Richards has the good fortune to be able to ignore.’ Mr. Richards,
we learn from his _Principles of Literary Criticism_ (published in
1925, the first text-book of psychologico-literary criticism) is
interested in value rather than in purity. Criticism is to him a minute
and comprehensive gradation of what T. E. Hulme called the world of
religious and ethical values; purity, a social rather than æsthetic
attribute; a moral term, by which a work is described as a public act
of its author. To Mr. Fry a work is not conduct, it is a thing; its
purity as a thing depends on its dissociation from authorship. It is
impossible not to prefer Mr. Fry’s criterion to Mr. Richards’; the
former is plainly trying to discover the laws of goodness in works, the
latter, the laws of goodness in humanity. The works we have with us;
humanity, the idea of species, must be philosophically evoked.
But what is the nature of the work as thing? According to Mr. Fry its
nature would seem to be reality. It is created by a sharp separation
of the author’s personality from the material with which he works, so
that his work, when complete, is to be classified with nature, the
world of mathematical reality, rather than with man, to whom reality
is a sentimental objectification of his subjectivity. I should say
that Mr. Fry’s criticism made possible a clearer sense of a work’s
_self_ than Mr. Richards’, but that it created a misunderstanding of
the nature of this self by identifying purity with reality. In Mr.
Fry’s criticism the homologue of a work would be a thing. But what is
a thing and how is it pure? Pure means being whole, single in element,
nothing but self, thoroughly new and fresh. Impure means being more
and less than whole, complex in element, not possessing thoroughly new
and fresh selfhood. The ‘things’ of what is called reality are mere
interpretative morsels, tainted with pedigree. To me the thingishness
in a work depends on no real homologue; the work is a thing of its own
kind, without homologue. The material with which an author works is
not reality but what he is able to disentangle from reality: in other
words I think the identity is rather of purity and unreality. An author
must first of all have a sure apprehension of what is self in him, what
is new, fresh, not history, synthesis, reality. In every person there
is the possibility of a small, pure, new, unreal portion which is,
without reference to personality in the popular, social sense, self. I
use ‘self’ in no romantic connotation, but only because it is the most
vivid word I can find for this particular purefaction. When this self
has been _isolated_ from all that is impression and impurity of contact
in an individual, then a ‘thing,’ a work, occurs, it is discharged from
the individual, it is self; not _his_ self, but self. If it is not
discharged, it is immediately reabsorbed in that composite accident of
reality by which he is known to others as a person. Thus many people
without creative ability--the ability to discharge self--must feel for
one passing moment that isolated purity in themselves which might,
if they were able to sustain it a little longer, turn into ‘things.’
In those who can from time to time discharge self, the power is not
constant: if it were, ‘creation’ would cease--creation is intermittent
recurrence and repossession of this power--and there would be death,
bright death.
The power, then, is not synthetic, is not to compose things, but to
isolate them; it is an analytic power. Mr. Fry describes the reaction
to works of art as a reaction to a relation. This could only refer to
works which were compositions, attempts to create, by a synthetic,
material (non-personal) action of the senses, real things; for relation
can only result from synthesis. A work-thing of this kind is a pattern
of reality, an arrangement of elements; and pattern is accident. The
author of a synthetic work can choose the elements of which it is to
be composed, but they work themselves out: the so-called necessity
of reality is really _accident_. The reaction therefore to the kind
of work Mr. Fry speaks of, a ‘real’ work, is a reaction to accident:
the critic, himself presumably a pattern of reality, experiences a
shock from meeting another pattern which is commandingly different
and hypnotizes him into a rearrangement of the elements of which he
is composed--‘the esthetic emotion’ is here a sensual recombination
of personality. For this reason I consider such esthetic emotion
false and escapist. The experience, on the other hand, of a critic
confronted with an ‘unreal’ work, would, I believe, be this: if it
were a thing of pure, isolated self, he could not perceive it except
with what was pure, isolated self in him. He would be forced for the
moment to discard what was real in him; he might, by means of the
thing, succeed in discharging self: the operation of the thing on him
would have an analytic effect separating in him the pure from the
impure, protecting him for the moment from the ‘esthetic emotion’ with
which in fact he generally reacts to everything. When Mr. Fry says
‘In literature there is no immediate sensual pleasure,’ he is really
commenting on the analytic, unreal quality of the word as opposed to
the synthetic (sense-combining), real quality of the instrumentalities
of the material arts. Word-works in which there is an immediate sensual
pleasure are ones which have been artified, realized. Words in their
pure use, which I assume to be their poetic use, are denials rather
than affirmations of reality. The word _hat_, say, does not create a
real hat: it isolates some element in the real hat which is not hat,
which is unreal, the hat’s self.
But my description of this unreality would at first seem to correspond
with the unreal world of poetry described by A. C. Bradley. Mr. Fry
quotes Dr. Bradley: ‘For its (poetry’s) nature is not to be a part, nor
yet a copy, of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase),
but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous.’ The
key-word in this definition is _world_: Dr. Bradley is not writing
about unreal self but about romantic humanity. Poetry represents to him
the world of fancy; and by fancy he means ethical, realistic fancy--the
real world of man as opposed to the real world of mathematical nature.
Nor is this a true opposition: it is impossible to overlook the
significance of the term _world_--we have here all over again the
ambitious, analogical Soul-World of Herr Spengler.
Mr. Fry is at pains to point out the alien, psychological, literary
element in various plastic works, in determining what is ‘pure’ art.
The very term ‘art’ forces him to confine his definition to the purely
real. So that he can do no more than make a sharp distinction between
the art of the real world and the art of the unreal (psychological,
literary) world. We are to conclude that in its way the art of the
unreal world (literature) is pure: what is impure is a mixing of these
two worlds. Mr. Fry is only annoyed by literary art, not by artistic
literature.
But the unreal, literary, psychologically organized self-world is the
collective-real: its existence depends on a belief in reality, though
in reality as a myth. Nor is the self of Mr. Fry’s real world any
less ‘psychological’: but merely a more anarchistic, individualistic
associate of reality, reality hence as reason rather than myth, or,
as Mr. Lewis might put it, as God Himself rather than religion. And
so the issue between realism and idealism is no more than a quarrel
over methods of affirming reality: rationalistic instinct as against
emotionalistic intellect, short-way-round as against long-way-round,
anarchistic as against communistic psychology. Realism is the method
of artistic art, idealism, of literary art. Art is the use of self to
make syntheses--things _like_ ‘real’ things: all controversy about
art-methods narrows itself down to a disagreement over what real things
are _like_.[13]
The controversy, that is, is not over principles but over style; and
style is, ultimately, not so much the manner of a work as the manner
in which it is talked about. The end of most criticism is not to
determine what a work must be but to fix the language of criticism; and
it follows that most works are therefore without the quality of self:
they are made merely to fit the language of criticism popular at the
time or that happens to have made an impression on the author.
Criticism has to do with what is already done, with what has already
happened: it is a cataloguing of reality, and reality is the past. A
work that invites criticism is an exercise in history, whether its
author has the man-history point of view or the nature-history point
of view; it is the creation of old stuff. Most works are old stuff,
differing only in style; in how they innovate old stuff; in their
critical language: they agree in principle, that only old stuff is
possible--reality, synthesis, pattern, recombination.
Mr. Read blames Mr. George Moore for using the word ‘objective’
to describe what he means by ‘pure poetry’--‘objective,’ Mr. Read
complains, is a psychological term. It is not one of the what Mr. Read
calls ‘universal terms.’ A universal term should convey ‘an inner
conviction of necessity.’ What Mr. Read is really complaining of is
the unsystematic use of a psychological term. Criticism should use the
same language about art as it does about reality; it should unite
philosophy and art in Reason. Reason is personal, direct, conscious
traffic in reality. It is enlightened magic (‘an inner conviction
of necessity’). Primitive man, being more instinctively aware of
reality, did not need to have his magic (his art) enlightened. The
primitive artist was a seer, the civilized artist is a visionary: to
Mr. Read reason is the ability to have correct visions of reality.
It is interesting to find that Mr. Lewis uses the same language of
criticism. The artist is to him a wide-awake dreamer; ‘Don Quixote, or
the Widow Wadman, is as _real_, to put it no higher than that, as most
people ostensibly alive and walking the earth to-day’; ‘For me art is
the civilized _substitute_ for magic.’ To both Mr. Read and Mr. Lewis
purity means that magical intelligence, that inspired (rather than
primitive, stupid ‘objective’) literalness which may be philosophically
defined as the individual-real. Both, moreover, object to art that is
magical in the primitive sense as to an anachronism; it is fabricated
sensationism, it is the collective-real, it is ideological rather
than natural symbolism.[14] They are interested in getting man into
proper focus in reality, and in his usefulness as an instrument of
measurement: they are interested, that is, in psychology, in the
language of criticism, the mathematics of synthesis.
Mr. Richards, too, is primarily interested in the language of
criticism. He condemns Beauty-and-Truth terminology--the criticism
that treats civilized art as unintelligent magic, in fact. He not only
recognizes Reason as man’s participation in the patterns of reality;
he insists on Reason as social duty; criticism is to him morality. The
mathematics of synthesis by which reality may be accurately apprehended
are to be developed by turning the human world into a world of values:
making conduct (communication, relation) achieve significant pattern.
Conduct is then the training of the community as a whole in traffic in
reality, with the artist as band-master--‘the arts are the supreme form
of communicative activity.’ Value (the graded necessity of reality) is
to be discovered by a ‘systematization of impulses.’ We have here that
intelligent, superior, adult instinct which Mr. Lewis believes should
supply the civilized substitute for magic--the instinct equally of the
collective-real, with only a difference of degree in sophistication,
manners. Instinct in the collective-real is always either unconsciously
or consciously flamboyant, grossly poetic; in the individual-real
always consciously reserved, meticulously poetic (art, Mr. Richards
says, deals with ‘minute particulars’). But it is always the same
instinct, the nostalgic desire to reconstitute an illusory whole that
has no integrity but the integrity of accident.
Respect for this accidental quality of reality (necessity) may be
expressed either by the enthusiasm of what Mr. Lewis calls the
Revolutionary Simpleton, who is always religiously anticipating
accident, or by what I should like to call Mr. Richards’ Moral
Simpleton, who observes a reverent plasticity in the development
(accidental rearrangement) of custom. And I should like to add Mr.
Lewis’s own hero, the Individualistic Simpleton, who is to be forced
‘to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day.’ Why? To
become unreal? No, to become more real, to be made into ‘much better
people.’ But if they were much better people already (if a kind of
criticism of reality prevailed which satisfied Mr. Lewis), then Mr.
Lewis, however free he might permit himself to be, would certainly not
worry them with individualism.[15] He wants them free now only as a
protest, an act of spiteful superiority against the collective-real.
The individual-real is not concerned with self but with exposing the
stupidity, the hypocrisy of the fanatic mob. Instead of freeing the
self to self, it frees it to Reason, to prove merely that intelligent
civilized individuals can be in closer touch with reality than a
stupid civilized mob: that they can know more, conform more perfectly
to customs of more perfect taste, control what is unreal self in
them more systematically, respond more respectfully, regularly
(classical-poetically) to the stimuli of accidental reality. That they
can behave, that is, by finding a civilized substitute for magic, like
a perfect primitive mob of philosophy-fed art students.
4
Mr. Richards quotes Dr. Bradley’s definition of poetry as an
illustration of the sort of criticism to which he is opposed. In
principle, however, I do not think they are opposed. Dr. Bradley’s
‘world by itself’ is fundamentally allied with Mr. Richards’ world of
values: the difference is that Dr. Bradley’s world--not ‘a copy of the
real world,’ not bound up with human affairs--gets its revelations
of reality through the imagination, that is, dreaming, while Mr.
Richards’ world gets its revelations of reality through waking. Both
worlds are trying to prove how real they are, the one lying down, the
other standing up. They are the same world in different attitudes,
the æsthetic attitude and the moral attitude. The protagonist of the
first says, ‘I cannot do two things at once--apprehend reality and
make money or eat my supper at the same time, I must set aside a part
of the day sacred to reality, in which I do nothing else, sleep over
it, as it were.’ The protagonist of the second says: ‘Pshaw, affected
sensitiveness. I can sharpen knives, shave, cook, travel, marry, go
to church and apprehend reality at the same time: in fact, whatever I
do is all the better done for this, and I apprehend reality all the
better for what I do.’ Whether a person apprehends reality from the
moral or from the æsthetic point of view is all a matter of energy:
what seems easy to one person may seem difficult to another, and
_vice versa_. Thus, to Mr. Richards, the moral theory of art ‘has the
most great minds behind it,’ ‘the most prominent of these great minds
being Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth
Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater.’ Which leads us
to believe that as a ‘moral’ critic Mr. Richards is something of an
æsthetician.
5
Modern criticism has supplemented itself with psychology, or rather
with its literary version, psycho-analysis. If criticism is primarily
interested in the language in which reality is discussed, then
it must have a partner to deal with the rough physical side of
reality--a field worker in reality. Criticism confines itself to taste;
psycho-analysis to substantiating taste with practical data.
‘We are our bodies,’ Mr. Richards says: that is, we should try to be
our bodies, to exist psycho-analytically, to provide criticism with
data. The view that we are our bodies, Mr. Richards says, should
not be described as Materialism--‘it might equally well be called
_Idealism_.’ All criticism, he means to say, is an appreciation of
reality; criticisms differ in method, never in principle. With the
help of psycho-analysis we pay reality the compliment of saying ‘we
are our bodies’; and reality, with the help of criticism, returns the
compliment, permitting us to say ‘our bodies are us.’
As bodies we are acted upon by reality; this is the psycho-analytic
half of the trick. The action of reality on us produces effects which
reveal the nature of this reality which acts on us; a description of
this nature is the critical half of the trick. It is not suggested
that as bodies we may act on reality, for this would reveal the fact
that bodies were not like reality a solid lump, but separate and
independently acting; it would indicate a break-up of reality, open up
the problem of the unreal, and O! What a mess we should be in then. Let
us have order while we can.
‘To know anything,’ Mr. Richards says, ‘is to be influenced by it.’
This makes things still more simple and comfortable: we do not have to
worry about anything which is not _here_, which does not affect us,
which is not reality. We are what we know, and what we know is also
what we know. The echo of matter in mind proves that there is matter,
and also that mind is matter. The mind need have no fear of becoming
lost in itself so long as it continues to know, to be affected. It
need not be afraid to produce art so long as art remains a knowing
of reality; knowing of reality is reality: as echo of sound is also
sound. Mr. Read quotes sympathetically Professor Sonnenschein’s
learned expression of this echo-theory as applied to poetry: ‘Rhythm
is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on
the mind of the observer the impression of proportion between the
duration of several events or groups of events of which the sequence
is composed.’ ‘A good artist,’ Mr. Read says, ‘is firstly a good
critic.’ He predisposes his mind materially to apprehend reality, to
receive echoes: ‘The work of art emerges within a radiation of critical
perceptions.’
If every one began systematically treating himself as mind, we should
all quickly become separate individuals and know ourselves, and the
symbols we used would not be echoes of reality but themselves, and
then indeed we should be in deep water. To prevent this possibility
psycho-analysis is called on to supplement ‘the narrowness of
criticism’ (Mr. Read’s phrase). Criticism is presumably narrow because
it deals with forms, while psycho-analysis can roll up its sleeves,
poke around in the stuff from which the symbol is derived, and ‘help
us test its social validity’ (Mr. Read)--‘social’ meaning pro-matter,
anti-mind: mind can only be pro-matter when it is collective mind.
Psycho-analysis divides people into two types--introverted and
extraverted. Introversion represents error in man, a straying away from
reality into self, a going of the mind into mind. Both psycho-analysis
and criticism agree that this process cannot, or rather _should not_
produce art. Both processes, _or their possibility_, exist in each
individual (psycho-analysis is forced to admit that introversion always
exists; extraversion exists if the individual is ‘successful’). They
may, it is held, be combined in _phantasy_, and phantasy produces
‘living reality,’ art. But what is this phantasy but the whole
introversive world of man behaving extraversively--the collective-real?
Unless it is introversion actually transformed in the individual into
extraversion, individual mind into matter of ‘more than individual
use’ (as Mr. Read defines creative phantasies)--the individual real?
The opposition between collective-real and individual-real disappears
in the general agreement between all parties that, by no matter what
method, introversion must be extraverted. Likewise the opposition
between romanticism and classicism: romanticism is acceptable if it has
an extraverted, classical touch; classicism is not necessarily damaged
by an introverted, romantic touch, so long as it does not lose complete
hold of extraversion.
Extraversion, it is clear, is intelligent body-being. What
introversion is it seems difficult to say, since it is always defined
by defamatory comparison with extraversion. ‘Jung,’ Mr. Read says,
‘further differentiates _active_ and _passive_ phantasy--the latter
a morbid state which we do not need to stop to consider here.’
Complete introversion is presumably not intelligent mind-being, but
a pathological condition. Individual mind-being is not intelligent,
pathological, because it does not make for unanimity. And both
psycho-analysis and criticism want some unanimous, collective mind in
contemporary man like the collective mind in primitive man, with the
distinction--made in consideration of the grown-up, individualized
character of modern man--that this must be an intelligent collective
mind, inspired with Reason, a refined version of brutish objectivity.
‘We need some unanimity,’ Mr. Read says, ‘to focus the vague desires
that exist in the collective mind.’
But what is the collective mind? A herd of deer clinging together
may be said to have unanimity, but it can scarcely be said to have
a mind: it has unanimity because to the extent to which it clings
together it _is_ brutish, natural reality. And the same is true of
primitive man up to the point where individual works of art occur;
at this point the hold on reality has been lost, unanimity can only
be maintained by force, and by the force of a few masterful but
pathological, introversive, mind-being individuals. Collective mind is
a contradiction in terms: what is meant is intelligent (self-enslaving)
collective matter.
And here psycho-analysis is more consistent than criticism because
it is frankly interested in extraversion rather than in extraversive
works: it would not seriously worry psycho-analysis if works and their
authors were discontinued: it would still have Case B, in which Mr. X
and Miss Y.... Criticism, on the other hand, cannot get along without
famous works by famous authors, which are, moreover, a continual
source of discord since they are all introversive in origin and cannot
be allowed to take their place in literature until they have been
rigorously extraversified.
6
Psychoanalytic criticism makes the emotion with which a work is
experienced merely a more complicated, appreciative kind of sensation.
In sensation the cause of sensation, a real object (experience),
attacks the individual; he is helpless _not_ to respond, he can only
classify his response according to whether he does or does not enjoy
it. Every sensory experience is a destruction of his originality. The
work of art presented to him on this response-basis is a deliberately
aggressive real object intended to usurp his originality in a more
constructive way than ordinary sensation. Even the freedom of
classifying sensation according to its enjoyableness is denied him: a
forced classification is contained in the object-work, representing
not a principle of personal preference, but of social preference,
expressing the criticism, or Reason, of the time. The ordinary object
has generally only an immediate, disorganized sensory effect; the
object-work reaches back into the whole past of the individual,
re-adapting it to itself by means of memory. All image-making involved
in so-called appreciative, reactive experience is a perversion of
originality, of the independent power of acting upon initiative, to
the derived power of acting upon incentive: the critical bias, first
interpreting works as object-works, then inspiring works to be
object-works means ‘imitation’.
So little does pure, original action seem possible or desirable that
we have no word for an impulse contrary in its nature to the nature of
reaction, for dissociative rather than associative conduct--disaction.
To the psycho-analyst all activity is interpretable only as reaction
to sensation; to the professional critic (Mr. Richards, for example)
all critical conduct is imaginary re-activity: we have the individual’s
originality not momentarily eclipsed, but actually engaged in
destroying itself, enriching sensation with the complicated depth of
personality.
Art so conceived thus becomes a skilful thwarting of originality.
The immediate shock to the consciousness which a work brings, which
might be expected to encourage an independence in the consciousness,
a dissociation from reality (influences) and a development of its
differences from reality, is utilized to possess the consciousness for
reality, to force it to organize itself according to its resemblances
(responses) to the particular object-work by which it is attacked.
Art is an exaggeration of the hostile operation of reality on the
individual consciousness, an exaggeration proportioned to overcome
the originality which offers a casual, disorganized resistance to
ordinary objects. Between object and object there is a complete
hypnotic interaction by which reality is maintained and which exists
only partially between man and object because man is possessed of
originality. The object-work is therefore an object especially designed
to correct this originality in man by ensnaring him in a more than
ordinarily intense field of hypnotic action.
A poem, then, in the critical scheme, is only a work in the sense that
it achieves a value equal to an exceptionally ‘good’ experience; it is
an especially high-class object, one that makes use of all man’s powers
for reconstructing reality: a model object, as the poet is supposed to
be a model man. But man’s powers for reconstructing reality are really
a misuse of his powers for constructing himself out of the wreckage
which is reality. The only true entity possible to man is an analytic
entity: the synthetic entities of art are all parodies of self. An
original poem is only seemingly synthetic; the words of which it is
made are both the instrument of the analysis and the substance of the
pure self of the poem which emerges from the analysis. Every poem of
this kind is an instance of fulfilled originality, a model, to the
reader, of constructive dissociation: an incentive not to response
but to initiative. Poetry is properly an art of individualization as
opposed to the other arts, which are arts of communication. To compare
a poem with a picture or with a piece of music or sculpture, is to
treat analytic entities and synthetic entities as if they were objects
of similar reality. Synthetic entities are imitative, communicative,
provocative of association: their keynote is organized social sanity.
Analytic entities are original, dissociative, and provocative of
dissociation: their keynote is organized personal insanity. This
is why, in hurried scientific fear, the shamen of psycho-analysis
and criticism explain as pure introversion only obviously morbid
conditions, making out art to be, wherever possible, redeemed
introversion. If criticism of this sort persists there is no doubt that
art will in time produce only synthetic entities: that is, poetry will
disappear. Indeed it may be the prevalence of such criticism that is
responsible for the present situation of poetry; why, in Mr. Read’s
words, there is ‘no adequate literary equivalent in England for the
impressive organization and intellectual content of the modern movement
in painting.’ For poems as synthetic entities must obviously always run
a very poor second to pictures.
7
As to the problem of rhythm and the point of view I have been applying.
Rhythm in the decorative poetic sense in which it is generally used
is, I believe, a strictly prose property. Prose is an inclusive medium,
its merit depends on its fullness. The more rich in illustration,
detail, rhythmic intricacies it is, the better prose it is, the more
effective as an instrument of synthesis. It is poetry, on the other
hand, which is properly harsh, bare, matter-of-fact. Punctuation, the
notation of rhythm, is essentially a prose development, a means of
managing the intricate language-flow. Prose is the social, civilized
instrument of communication. The restraints put on it are like the
complicated conventions that govern an apparently free-and-easy but
actually rigidly prescribed drawing-room atmosphere.
The purpose of poetry is to destroy all that prose formally represents.
It is an exclusive medium, and its merit depends on the economy with
which it can remove the social rhythmic clutter of communicative
language. The savage _tom-tom_ is poetry of a brutally specialized
kind used to eliminate everything in the listeners but the purpose
with which it has been argumentatively overloaded. Non-purposive
poetry has all the eliminating force of the _tom-tom_ without the
grotesque effects of special pleading. A suppression of all associative
obligations that might hinder analysis takes place in the poet: by
this narrowness he is free as by the synthetic broadness of prose
the prose-writer is bound. And it is this narrowness that is the only
rhythm proper to poetry. Metre is an attempt to soften the economy
and narrowness requisite in poetry; and it is likely to cause, and in
the main has caused, only a more fancy, mannered prose than prose; to
misrepresent the nature of restraint and limitation in poetry. The end
of poetry is to leave everything as pure and bare as possible after
its operation. It is therefore important that its tools of destruction
should be as frugal, economical as possible. When the destruction
or analysis is accomplished they shall have to account for their
necessity; they are the survivors, the result as well as the means of
the elimination. They are the pure residue, and the meaning if there
is any; and they vary in each poem only according to the amount of
destruction they have done and the clutter with which they began. The
greater the clutter attacked and the smaller, the purer, the residue to
which it is reduced (the more destructive the tools), the better the
poem.
Rhythm in poetry is therefore a deadly hammer, hammer away in
which each word demonstrates its necessity and in which each word
is accented. In prose there is accenting, then a long period of
relaxation, the harshness of the important words is absorbed in the
unimportant words: it is rhythmic. Prose is skilful manipulation
of the whole standing vocabulary, and a great deal of poetry merely
competes with prose in vocabularistic manipulation. Poetry is a
selection of a few words from this inert mass, which justify, quicken
themselves, in its destruction. The abruptness of poetry, commonly
softened into prosaic musicalness, is due to the implied omission at
every point of rhythmic prose language. Poetry is narrow (like the poem
on the page), broken, quick; prose is broad, rhythmic, slow. Poetry is
personal, prosaic. Prose is social, dressed out in verbal amenities,
poetic.
8
As to the application of the kind of point of view that I have outlined
to an individual’s relations with his fellows and, beyond that, to
the relations of a poem with reality. As to fellows: the unsocial,
ascetic concentration of self on self, the analytic intensification
of personality to a state of unreality, makes personality a pure,
not diffuse, a restrained and completely private activity. Where
personality was of this nature, all synthetic, public, real life
would be impersonal and formal--it would have manners for the sake of
communicative ease, not for the sake of concealing or discovering,
or suppressing or standardizing personality. Real life, I mean, as
an abstract, general life would be happier so than as a concrete
synthesis of personalities. It would not be a source of physical
nourishment for personality. The unreal person would not feed on or be
absorbed in the pattern; he would sharpen and try his asceticism in
it. A view of this kind, making society an artificial pattern based
on accident instead of a ‘real’ pattern based on necessity, is the
only possible clue to the reconciliation of freedom and formality.
To attempt to discover and form personality in the social pattern
is to make social life dull, vulgar and aggressive, and life with
self, dull, morbid and trivial. To treat social life as an impersonal
pattern is to give it the theatrical vitality of humour and to make
life with self strong and serious. The social problem is for each
individual how to reach the proper degree of humorous formality in
his communicative language, his clothes, his home; not how to acquire
a vicarious personal life which has no content but a gross synthetic
personality-desire. Social life (life with others) as opposed to
personal life (life with self) should be as dancing opposed to
walking--formal meaningless gesture as opposed to eccentric significant
character. Certain strictly social arts such as music would become
immediately tolerable and desirable if treated as arts of gesture
rather than of character.
Now as to poems and reality. A poem is an advanced degree of self, as
reality is an advanced degree of social life. The poem dances the
dance of reality, but with such perfect artificiality that the dance,
from very perfection, cancels itself and leaves, as far as reality is
concerned, Nothing. But as far as the poem is concerned, Nothing is
a dancer walking the ruins; character, by the ascetic nature of its
energy, surviving gesture. This asceticism is the creative formality of
the poem. Its critical formality is its original deadly participation
in the dance. Where we find no critical formality the poem represents
diffusion of self in the literary, synthetic self of reality;
wantonness of gesture; sentimental corruption of character; tedious
extension of reality beyond decent limits of sociality; instead of the
dance, an orgy of improprieties. Where we find only critical formality,
there is the same moral laxity, but concealed under a squeamish
disciplinary veneer; the difference between ‘romantic’ and ‘classical,’
merely.
9
Mr. Lewis’s ambitious offensive against wrongness makes a nice point
of conclusion, as it made a nice starting-point, for this exercise.
Most of Mr. Lewis’s confusions are due to his attempt to correlate his
political system with his taste. His political system is consistent
with itself; we agree with it unreservedly or we agree with it not at
all. His taste is inconsistent with itself wherever it has been made
to conform with his political system: it becomes a nagging, expedient
right, lacking the proper indifference of taste and the proper
consistency of a political attitude. It is therefore obviously futile
to treat with Mr. Lewis on matters of taste; while, on the other hand,
it may be helpful to consider certain clear features of his political
system.
(_a_) To the popularist progress is socially continuous; culture
is the large-scale, accumulative participation of everyman in
progress; conduct is behaviourism, perfect social automatism.
To the individualist progress is political rather than
social--aristocratically hereditary through that bluest blood, Reason;
culture is eclectic, conduct is anarchistic, the perfection of the
individualism of the few who are in this system responsible for the
social conformity of the rest. They differ in their opinion of the size
of a potent political group: the former believes that the entire social
group may form the political group, the latter that the political group
is an independent minority representative of the social group. But both
support the idea of a progressive tradition; to the one it is mystical
and collective, to the other rationally and personally maintained.
And to both the idea of a non-social self outside the tradition and
without reference to a cultural line of succession (a self, rather,
‘beginning again and again and again’) would be equally foreign and
repulsive. Mr. Lewis’s concrete, ‘stable’ person is only an upper-class
version of the hysterical, hypnotic, mass social self--more realistic,
steady, decorous, common-sensible. The suppression of individual will
by mass-will of which Mr. Lewis complains refers only to checks on
political opportunism: what he is really interested in is power not
individuality. He appreciates the fact that sociality means loss of
personal consciousness. His solution is that the few strong individuals
who object to loss of consciousness should benefit by an anarchistic
dispensation that leaves them their consciousness intact in order that
they may politically administer sociality to the unconscious.
(_b_) Mr. Lewis’s individualistic compromises come from his
unwillingness to face the dualistic character of the individual--his
real, social effect, his unreal, more-than-anarchistic self-subtraction
from the social group for purposes of identity. For various reasons
Mr. Lewis has not been able to shake himself free of the academic,
philosophical force of the language that he uses; the problem is in
any case too fine for his rough argumentative methods. He would have
first to overcome his prejudice against dualistic concepts arising
from their shady association with romantic ventures in philosophy, a
task of patience not in harmony with his temperament. In any case,
his political sense is too strong, too orthodox, to permit of his
admitting that the identity of the individual may be established
outside the social group. We may find the clue to his dogmatism in this
respect in the accent of philosophical awe with which he pronounces
‘reality.’ Reality’s the thing; the individual is only (in a few
individuals specializing in individualism) an honourable second. Even
unreality may not be a thing by itself: it is (and this seems to be
Mr. Lewis’s general conclusion) the queer slant at which reality is
seen. To say that reality is unreal, from Mr. Lewis’s viewpoint, is
like saying that sugar is sweet: the queer slant is in reality, not in
the individual, as the sweetness is in the sugar, not in the tongue.
‘Unreal’ is in this usage merely a more philosophic-sounding word
than ‘pretty,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘mysterious’ or ‘queer.’ ‘The reality,’
Mr. Lewis complains, ‘has definitely installed itself inside the
contemporary mind’--it has become what I have called the fairy-tale
of the collective-real. Mr. Lewis, that is, is more interested in the
prestige of reality than in the general integrity of the individual
mind. His implication being that if the contemporary mind had
definitely installed itself in ‘the reality’ all would be well. We
should have a social group psycho-physically imbedded in reality, the
individual consciousness being in this case the fairy-tale--with a
few independent individual consciousnesses wagging themselves wisely
and anarchistically in political appreciation of the situation.
Farther than this Mr. Lewis is unable to go. He contents himself
with establishing the concreteness, the social security of the
wiseacres. His brand of individualism depends on the social setting for
authentication; he does not dare to separate the fact of individuality
from the fact of sociality and reveal how they maintain themselves
in one person through a contradiction, not through ‘reason.’ The
contradiction is difficult to grasp, as is the dualism from which it
proceeds, and difficult to persevere in clearly and equitably once it
is grasped; demanding infinite precision and much active distress and
conferring few brilliant occasions on those who do grasp it. And Mr.
Lewis’s brand of individualism is more immediately ambitious, more
impatient, more realistic. He does not trust himself to wait upon
successes or brilliant occasions. He skilfully glozes over the fine
distinctions, makes politic compromises with the reality sufficient
to assure the more astute members of the social group of a few ready
individualistic privileges, and sneers down with aristocratic scorn the
political idealism of the mob. He is willing to go all the way back to
wipe out the effects of historical romancing; he is unwilling to come
all the way forward again and risk doing the job thoroughly (the job,
that is, of thinking through to the fine distinctions), as it might be
now done. And so he remains, for all his intellectual swagger, a mere
reactionary and anarchist. Another hero who, having fought just hard
enough to permit him to celebrate a triumph, but not hard enough to
force a conclusive battle, has claimed his laurels in Rome and retired
to live upon them; the fine distinctions still untaken. ‘For the former
generals, as soon as they believed their exploits had entitled them
to the honour of triumphal distinctions, always abandoned the enemy.
Insomuch that there were already in Rome three statues adorned with
laurel; but still Tacfarinas was ravaging Africa....’
(_c_) Mr. Lewis’s world of reality is what we see plus what we know:
what we know is the queer slant in what we see, not the queer slant
in us. Our knowledge is the poetic touch in reality. The world of
reality for the collective-real is what we see, alone; the fact
itself of reality is poetic. But the differences are fundamentally
slight. Knowing is the individualistic comprehension of seeing;
conscious, literal perception versus crude, mystical mass-sensation;
private ownership of reality versus the vulgar, public, figurative
participation in reality of the impoverished working-class mob--that
is, anarchistic, personal seizure of reality made possible by the
philosophical vagueness of the mob. (For example, Mr. Lewis could
not argue his position either with success or impunity in Russia.) I
repeat, then, that the differences between the collective-real and the
individual-real are fundamentally slight. Both defer to the snobbism
of reality: it is reality and not the individual that matters. And
both are poetic, a sentimental fusion of two contradictory categories,
a wilful blurring by the intelligence of the dualism upon which it is
based. Both, for example, have difficulty in defining ‘the object,’ due
to their unwillingness to admit this duality; so that the same fusion
and blurring that takes place in the individual takes place in the
object as well. The romantic inwardness of the one inflates its faults
and delusions to a degree of obviousness that invites and facilitates
attack. The common-sense outwardness of the other is more aggressive,
but more discreet, hiding under its well-bred anarchism and upper-class
self-deprecation an enormous greed of possession. The one is childishly
content with a fairy-tale of possession; the other insists haughtily
upon a true story. But for both the problem, whether as seeing or
seeing and knowing, is essentially the same: to have or not to have. As
for being, it is not a proper poetic, not a proper philosophical and
therefore not a proper political question, and therefore out of order.
(_d_) The evasion of both of these two systems of the dualism that
I have attempted to suggest without romantic prejudice is reflected
in their respective treatment of time and space. Recognizing the
antinomy of time and space, they dismiss the possibility of enforcing
it practically as too frightening: if what is is made to be what is,
then we have nothing but what is; we cannot fool ourselves; therefore
evasion and philosophy. The antinomian pie is cut. Mr. Lewis’s side
takes space; the other side takes time; and both sides now devote their
energies to proving that each has the better piece. And certainly
both have very good pieces. In space occurs a disintegration that
may prove space, through its particulars; in time, an assemblage of
particulars that need not however develop particularity, but merely
prove time, through the standardizing of its particulars. Good pieces.
But only pieces. Space suffering from excessive definiteness; time
from excessive indefiniteness. Each trying to pretend it is the whole
pie, but each remaining just a self-infatuated piece. Space-synthesis,
time-synthesis--philosophical impostures with different political
methods, one conservative, old-fashioned, the other revolutionary,
modernist. Time a sort of negative space, space a sort of positive
time. Space-ist philosophy belied by its individualism, time-ist
philosophy by its generalism. To the time-men the wholeness, the
reality, is administered by a democratic Self; a Self not sufficiently
self-ish, nothing-ish, unreal, small, instantly conceived, to be
real in a time-scheme; therefore mystical, poetic. To the space-men,
the wholeness, the reality, is administrated by an anarchistic,
aristocratic God; a God too personal, too concretely particular, too
specially knowable, too real, in fact, to be real in a space-scheme;
therefore rationalistic, poetic. The time-men re-inforce the democratic
Self with Everybody. The space-men re-inforce God with Art, which is
a few superior minds capable of animating the material world ‘with
some degree of mental existence.’ For by itself--and this is Mr.
Lewis’s astounding conclusion--the material world is unreal. And we,
too, are unreal--we should regard ourselves, he thinks, as surface
creatures. But his conclusion is less astounding if we understand it
as the debater’s final shock that clinches the argument: the material
world is unreal and we too are unreal _if_ we do not believe in
reality. If we believe in reality ‘God becomes the supreme symbol of
our separation and of our limited transcendence.’ God is the queer
slant which through faith (the proper geometric point of view) may be
conceived as ultimately (that is, in the absolute sense) straight. And
faith is reason. In the time-scheme the democratic Self is the queer
slant; it is a sceptical, an ultimate queer slant. And scepticism
is romanticism: vague, insincere, sweeping transcendence of the
material world. Mr. Lewis, then, is not, as it at first seemed, against
transcendence, but only against temporal transcendence. He does not
object to evasion and philosophy, but rather wishes them to be more
zealous, individualistic, spatial; more evasive and philosophical; to
be Art. The temporal what-may-be comes too carelessly close to the
what-is. Art, backed up by God, begs the question more efficiently;
anarchistic but timid instead of socialistic but bold. It now only
remains to be decided whether Mr. Lewis’s stand-by is Art or God; and
since God was a late-comer in his scheme we can decide in favour of
Art--and Mr. Lewis.
(_e_) But Art. Art is artists. And what is artists? Artists is a few
superior minds. Artist is short for artists. Mr. Lewis is not short
for artists but long for himself. As between artists and himself, Mr.
Lewis decides in favour of himself; it is therefore still easier for
us to decide in favour of Mr. Lewis. Against artists. What is artists?
For example, Mr. E. M. Forster is artists, as is to be seen in his book
_Aspects of the Novel_. The novel is a ‘spongy tract.’ It is ‘bounded
by two chains of mountains ... Poetry and History....’ The novel tells
a story. The characters are either flat or round. The ‘element of
surprise’ ... is of great importance in a plot. Then Fantasy. (Here
compare Mr. Lewis’s treatment of _Ulysses_ with Mr. Forster’s and you
will understand perhaps why Mr. Lewis is not artists.) Then prophecy:
‘In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more
than themselves; infinity attends them; though they remain individuals
they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply
to them the saying of St. Catherine of Sienna, that God is in the
soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is
in the sea.’ D. H. Lawrence is ‘the only prophetic novelist writing
to-day ... the only living novelist in whom the song predominates,
who has the rapt bardic quality, and whom it is idle to criticize.’
(Compare Mr. Lewis’s criticism of Lawrence with Mr. Forster’s, and you
will understand further why Mr. Lewis is not artists.) Then Pattern
and Rhythm. _Thais_ is the shape of an hour-glass. _Roman Pictures_,
by Percy Lubbock, is shaped like a grand chain. Also Henry James. But
a pattern must not be too rigid. If it is, ‘beauty has arrived, but
in too tyrannous a guise.’ For ‘the novel is not capable of as much
artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of
its material hinder it.... Still, this is not the end of our quest.
We will not give up the hope of beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced
into fiction by some other method than pattern? Let us edge rather
nervously towards the idea of “rhythm.”’ We then learn that ‘rhythm
is sometimes quite easy.’ And so to bed and pleasant dreams about the
development of the novel mixed up with the development of humanity
(‘the interminable tape-worm,’ as Mr. Forster had called it earlier
in the day when it was ‘wriggling on the forceps’). No, Mr. Lewis is
not artists. He is not an aristocrat, but a distracted and disaffected
rough-neck. He has no more real connection with aspects of the novel
than Nietzsche with any of the numerous ‘æsthetic revivals’ of his
time. Like Nietzsche his politics and philosophy are æsthetic only in
the sense that they are personal. His few ‘superior minds’ are himself.
If he had made this clear in the very beginning he would have saved
himself and those who have been good enough to follow him a great deal
of unnecessary distraction. Politeness, God, reality--these are all
Mr. Lewis in kid gloves embracing himself. His rightness consists in
his embracing himself, his wrongness in his wearing kid gloves. For
anarchism is not enough. It is obviously not enough for Mr. Lewis.
The kid gloves which enabled him to rush into society confused the
dualism on which selfhood certainly depends. When he takes them off
(as it is probable he will in time, for he does not seem happy in
them) and shakes himself by the bare hand, his enthusiasm over his
own unreal individuality will have a bare-handed social concomitant
more like Bolshevism than anarchism. Or rather, Mr. Lewis will find
that not even Bolshevism is enough. What is enough? Nothing is enough.
And until Mr. Lewis finds this out he will go on celebrating more and
more ferociously his ferocious pangs of hunger, seconded by dozens of
famished æsthetic revivalists.
HOW CAME IT ABOUT?
How came it about that Mrs. Paradise the dressmaker is here to dress
me, and Mr. Babcock the bootmaker to boot me and a whole science of
service to serve me, and that I am precisely here to be served? Do not
speak to me of economics: that is merely a question of how we arrange
matters between us. And do not speak to me of genesis: I am discussing
the question of Mrs. Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and the others
as immediate causes of one another, I am not discussing creation.
Personally, I do not believe in creation. Creation is stealing one
thing to turn it into another. What I _am_ discussing is existence,
uncorrupted by art--how came it about, and so forth. Do not speak to me
of love: Mrs. Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and all the others
do not like each other, in fact, we dislike each other because each of
us is most certainly the cause of the other. I am the reason for Mrs.
Paradise’s making frocks and Mrs. Paradise is the reason for my wearing
frocks. If it were not for each other we should be occupied only with
ourselves; we should not exist. How then came we to exist? I ask
this question. Mrs. Paradise asks this question. I am Mrs. Paradise’s
answer. Mrs. Paradise is my answer. As for Mr. Babcock, he has hair on
his nose and I never look at him. As for all the others, I must put up
a notice asking them to ring the bell gently.
* * * * *
There is a woman in this city who loathes me. There are people
everywhere who loathe me. I could name them; if they were in a book I
could turn to the exact page. People who loathe me do so for one of
two reasons: because I have frightened them because I have loathed
them (that is, made my death-face at them, which I shall not describe
as it might in this way lose some of its virtue) or because they are
interested in me and there seems no practical way of (or excuse for)
satisfying their interest. As to love, that is another matter--it has
nothing to do with either interest or fear. Love is simply a matter of
history, beginning like cancer from small incidents. There is nothing
further to be said about it.
But as to loathing: I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this
loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I
sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as
poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it
is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.
To continue about this woman. What is to her irritation is to me
myself. She has therefore a very direct sense of me, as I have a very
direct sense of her, from being a kind of focus of her nervous system.
There is no sentiment, no irony between us, nothing but feeling: it is
an utterly serious relationship.
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, the excrement is his own.
I forget in what context these words were used by Donne--but they
express very accurately how organic I feel this relationship to be. The
tie between us is as positive as the tie between twins is negative.
I think of her often. She is a painter--not a very good painter. I
understand this too: it is difficult to explain, but quite clear to
myself that one of the reasons I am attached to her is that she is
not a good painter. Also her clothes, which do not fit her well: this
again makes me even more attached to her. If she knew this she would be
exasperated against me all the more, and I should like it; not because
I want to annoy her but because this would make our relationship still
more intense. It would be terrible to me if we ever became friends;
like a divorce.
HUNGRY TO HEAR
Hungry to hear (like Jew-faces, kind but anticipating pain) they sit,
their ears raw. The conversation remains genteel, of motor cars: her
brother bought a car, he was having a six months’ vacation from an
Indian post, he should have known better than to buy an American car,
the value depreciates so, and _she_ (his sister) should not have lent
it to _her_ (her friend) even though it wasn’t her fault that the car
only did fifteen miles to the gallon after she returned it. A clear
situation like this, in which life is easy to understand, is cruel
to them. It leaves no scratches in the mind around which opinions,
sympathies, silly repetitions can fester and breed dreams and other
remote infections--too remote always to give serious pain. They long
to be fumbled, to have confusion and uncertainty make a confused and
uncertain end of them. There they sit, having pins-and-needles of
obscurity which they mistake for sensation. They open their newspapers:
‘I suppose it is foolish to spend all this time reading newspapers?
They are lying and dishonest and devoted to keeping a certain portion
of the population in ignorance and intellectual slavery? Or is it
foolish to take it so seriously? I shall go on reading them out of
sophistication?...’ Oh, go to hell.
IN A CAFÉ
This is the second time I have seen that girl here. What makes me
suspicious is that her manner has not changed. From her ears I should
say she is Polish. If this is so, is it not dangerous to drink coffee
here? Does anyone else think of this, I wonder? Yet why should I be
suspicious? And why should her manner not remain unchanged? She has
probably been cold, unhappy, unsuccessful or simply not alive ever
since I saw her last. Quite honestly I wish her success. The man who is
making sketches from pictures in the Art Magazine may find her little
Polish ears not repulsive. For good luck I turn away and do not look
at her again. I, who am neither sluttish nor genteel, like this place
because it has brown curtains of a shade I do not like. Everything,
even my position, which is not against the wall, is unsatisfactory and
pleasing: the men coming too hurriedly, the women too comfortably from
the lavatories, which are in an unnecessarily prominent position--all
this is disgusting; it puts me in a sordid good-humour. This attitude
I find to be the only way in which I can defy my own intelligence.
Otherwise I should become barbaric and be a modern artist and
intelligently mind everything, or I should become civilized and be a
Christian Scientist and intelligently mind nothing. Plainly the only
problem is to avoid that love of lost identity which drives so many
clever people to hold difficult points of view--by _difficult_ I mean
big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality.
I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my
point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number
of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the
fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold
themselves away when I do not wish to think. If I fold them away now,
then I am sitting here all this time (without ordering a second cup)
because other people go on sitting here, not because I am thinking.
It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain a person
instead of becoming a point of view, I have no contact with horror. If
I become a point of view, I become a force and am brought into direct
contact with horror, another force. As well set one plague of cats
loose upon another and expect peace of it. As a force I have power, as
a person virtue. All forces eventually commit suicide with their power,
while virtue in a person merely gives him a small though constant pain
from being continuously touched, looked at, mentally handled; a pain by
which he learns to recognize himself. Poems, being more like persons,
probably only squirm every time they are read and wrap themselves round
more tightly. Pictures and pieces of music, being more like forces, are
soon worn out by the power that holds them together. To me pictures and
music are always like stories told backwards: or like this I read in
the newspaper: ‘Up to the last she retained all her faculties and was
able to sign cheques.’
It is surely time for me to go and yet I do not in the least feel like
going. I have been through certain intimacies and small talk with
everything here, when I go out I shall have to begin all over again in
the street, in addition to wondering how many people are being run over
behind me; when I get home I shall turn on the light and say to myself
how glad I am it is winter, with no moths to kill. And I shall look
behind the curtain where my clothes hang and think that I have done
this ever since the homicidal red-haired boy confided his fear to me
and I was sorry for him and went to his room and did it for him. And my
first look round will be a Wuthering-Heights look; after that I shall
settle down to work and forget about myself.
I am well aware that we form, all together, one monster. But I refuse
to giggle and I refuse to be frightened and I refuse to be fierce. Nor
will I feed or be fed on. I will simply think of other things. I will
go now. Let them stare. I am well though eccentrically dressed.
FRAGMENT OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL
What could I do but treat my secret as if it did not exist, that is,
as my mother did hers until she confided it to me? which was not
confiding, but a necessary explanation of the curious gift or curse
(you will decide which for yourself before many pages) that I had
from her (the flesh only knows how) when she put me into this world
fifty-four years ago in a carved bed made of an old sea-chest that she
had of her father (together with many other things) who was a Dutch Jew
of a family that had fled from Spain and made its fortune as merchants
and traders and in African mines and which disinherited him when he ran
away to sea from school and saw things in China which neither white man
nor Jew might see without death, but which long afterwards recalled him
when he was in America and too proud to accept the portion denied him
in his youth, which my mother never forgave him but continually during
her lifetime besought me to apply for in my own person, which was
pleasing and persuasive.
My mother, I say, broke her secret to no one, excepting me, and this
was not breaking it, since I had the same secret, and I broke my secret
to no one, which was either wise or foolish (I can’t say which) but not
wicked, for had I wished it was a thing that could go against no one
but myself (as you shall see). How my mother had it, she did not know,
although she was of the opinion that she caught it from a travelling
bookseller who secretly sold romances to the pupils of the French
convent in New Orleans where her father kept her--over the garden
wall. It could not be the books, she said, for they were as innocent
as the Bible, with no more rapes and indeed fewer mysteries. The
contamination, if it was such, must have been from his eyes, if at all,
which were long-lasting ones, she remembering them many days after each
visit and for a long time seeing through them, as it were. She knew
nothing about him but that he was Mexican, of a poor breed but of such
charm (he dressed in the Mexican manner) that she would have run away
with him had not her strange possession come over her at about this
time and changed the whole course of her life.
‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, when she told me this, ‘he used a charm against
you. It is known there are certain herbs to be found in Mexico which
may be used to cunning ends.’
‘That may indeed be so,’ my mother said, ‘for I remember he once gave
me a fine gold chain to wear on which was suspended an image of a pale
blue stone, and I could never make out what it represented, as it was
all twisted and seemed a different thing each time I looked at it, now
like a snake, now like a clenched hand or like a troll’s face.’
‘Surely,’ I cried, ‘it was this charm that brought the thing upon us.’
For I thought, if it was a charm that brought this thing on my mother,
it might be a charm that would take this thing from me; and for this
reason I have ever been one easily affected by superstitions of all
kinds and ready to put my faith in what is but circus farce to others,
a weakness that has been as great a source of misfortune to me as my
possession.
‘It might indeed have been so,’ replied my mother, ‘but I cannot be
sure. At about the same time Sister Mathilde began praying for me, as
if God had sent her against this journeyman for my sake. She prayed in
my room and soon she slept in my bed the better to protect me, and I
began strongly to dislike it for she sweated powerfully and loved me
more tenderly than is good for girlish sleep. Wherever I was between
these two I shall never know. If one was of God and the other of the
Devil, then there is a third power which exists to save the human soul
from both, I hesitate to say with what intentions or effects. For as I
was one morning sitting on my pot and enjoying innocent conversation
with myself, suddenly I looked up, feeling myself not alone. Think
how my modesty fainted to behold the room full of people all looking
intently (and kindly) at me. I covered my face with my hands. I dared
not rise.
‘“Never mind, child,” said a shrill voice at my ear that sounded like
an aunt’s, “it will soon be happily over.”
‘“Happily over!” I tried to shriek but could not, trying to rise and
button myself.
‘“Leave your dress alone, chicken, you could not look better,” said
another voice at my nose, a third cousin’s by its sound. Nor could I
have--I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror just then, and I was a
bride! This is how I found myself married to Mr. Pink, whose calling
was jobs for which no name could be found, and could ask no questions
for shame, since the last I knew of myself was on a chamber-pot, but
only pretend to be possessed, as seemed reasonable in the principal
party of the event, of full knowledge of what was going on about me.’
This martyr’s discretion in my mother has ever been a noble example to
me in my own endurance of that cruel idiosyncrasy which she, to her
everlasting grief, passed on to me. ‘Never lose self-possession,’ she
continually besought me, ‘or contradict circumstances, which cannot
lie and which know you better than yourself.’ Dearest Mother! Shall
I blame her for that inheritance she gave me against her heart and
will and by which I had the blessing of her eternal (so long as she
lived) solicitude? Not to mention (petty recompense and enjoyment) the
liberty she gave me beyond all reasonable expectation I could have had
of remorseful indulgence from her, which included the privacy of her
papers which I could not read since she wrote always in bed and upon
brown paper, from sombreness of spirit, and the treasures her father
gave her out of spite to her mother, for bearing him a black child by
perfidy of blood or whoring, it exasperated him not to know which, and
of which, though all were mine from childhood, I loved and attached
to me but one shabby trifle, a totem six inches long that did me for
a doll while I remained a child and for a child when I became a woman
and dared not breed, confide, form honourable attachments or soften my
heart save to that which, being wooden, could not soften its heart to
me.
My mother, as I said, having once grasped her unspeakable peril,
resolved to protect herself with the means at hand, that is, to remain
Mrs. Pink, if she could, until she found herself something else. And
to further her security in this she formed a second painful resolve,
never while she could help it to leave her bed, thinking that she might
thus restrain her visitations or at least govern the place in which
they seized her. Alas! restrain them she could not, and alas! a bed (as
she learned too late) was more ungovernable than a chamber-pot, for in
this bed she got me, in a cruel lapse when Mr. Pink her husband was in
the Argentine collecting the names of common tropical plants for the
Secretary of State known in private life as a gifted maker of South
American tales, and when she must undoubtedly have been visited by
hundreds of Mr. Pink’s friends and relatives, Mr. Pink, who understood
my mother’s infirmity and never blamed it except as such, insisting
that it was his uncle the Chicago photographer who had nearly an
artist’s appreciation of the human form, of which my mother being half
Jew and perhaps a dash negro, was an exotic and irresistible example.
This unavoidable slip, of which I was a living and growing reminder,
never prejudiced Mr. Pink my mother’s husband against me, but on the
contrary seemed to stimulate his curiosity in me. He was a thin man,
but I think of a passionate imagination, and I wanted nothing. Nor was
he quite certain that it was his uncle the Chicago photographer, but in
the wistful hope that it might have been Prince Moredje, the famous
Balkan adventurer whom he used to decorate official banquets of which
he was responsible for the seating plan, he provided me with a riding
master though we lived in an unimproved flat in the rear and bought me
when I was quite young a green plumed hat from an auctioneer friend
of his who specialized in theatrical costumes. Himself he dressed
shabbily, as his profession required. I never knew him otherwise than
in his black and white checked suit and red tie, and it was one of the
sorrows of his life that he could not wear black, for he was a quiet
man, since his greatest attraction to his clients was that he was not
genteel, by which he seemed more efficient, mysterious, quaint and
criminal. My mother required very little beyond bed shawls, of which
she kept two, one for company and one for private, the company one
being pure white, that she might be thought of by visitors as a pale
object martyred to her bed and so not excite experiences; I have this
very shawl to thank for myself, which she was wearing when her sense
was suddenly transported in time and she found herself with me in her
womb and could make no denial or protest, and her white shawl on her
shoulders though in private, that is, alone with her husband Mr. Pink
who had just let himself in at the door from the Argentine, whence he
had come in all haste to embrace her, having been made anxious by
certain reports which his friends and relatives maliciously wrote
him of my mother. Her private shawl, a red cashmere, she consoled
herself in; she only wore it when she felt safe. In this shawl too
she consented to rise for her needs and melancholies. How often have
I come upon her standing in her shirt at the window, only half of her
decently covered, the rest of her naked and unhappy--a pair of pretty
buttocks that she could scarcely trust as far as the door and ready
to betray her at the least winking of her eye and plant her where she
must acknowledge her position by that she sat in it with them. It was
to our further mortification that our sad affliction only came over
my mother and me when we were sitting, an attitude that by its ease
soothes suspicion, and that we have never come to ourselves except in
this attitude, which may try dignity painfully, as I have reason to
know. ‘To find one’s feet’--how well, alas, do _I_ know the tragic
significance of that phrase....
WILLIAM AND DAISY: FRAGMENT OF A FINISHED NOVEL
William and Daisy lived in Cemetery Street. They had no connection
with each other except that they were not attracted by life or death;
so they lived in Cemetery Street. William was pessimistic because he
disliked life a little more than death, Daisy was optimistic because
she disliked death a little more than life. William had two memories:
one, that he had been familiar with harlots; two, that he had been
familiar with famous writers. These two memories mixed and he could
make nothing of them. Daisy had two memories: one, that she had once
been a harlot; two, that she had in her time known several famous
writers. These two memories mixed and she could make nothing of them.
They could make nothing of their memories except that they both felt
dignified and did not wish to end their days in a workhouse. So they
lived in Cemetery Street.
Every night Daisy went for a walk down Cemetery Street and said ‘What
a lovely night,’ and passed William on her walk and said ‘What a
coincidence’; and every night William, too, said ‘What a lovely night’
and ‘What a coincidence.’ They began to know each other’s thoughts and
were more bored with each other than ever.
They had their shoes mended by the same shoemaker. Each knew the
shoemaker had taken a girl to live with him behind the shop and then
thrown her into the street when his wife had learned about it. Yet each
continued to think him a nice man because they could not be bothered
to think him a mean man. They became more and more absolute in their
thoughts and habits until ...
I do not know what happened to them, nor do they.
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK
§1
An anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous
publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover,
it imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the
time, and this made the responsibility for its authorship all the
more impossible to place. For none of the known writers could in the
circumstances look guilty. But every one else did, so this made the
responsibility for its authorship all the more difficult to place.
The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-looking persons.
But as every one except the known writers was under suspicion the
department of censorship gave orders that the known authors should be
put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and that
every one else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. ‘Did
you write it?’ every one was questioned at every street corner. And as
the answer was always ‘No’, the questioned person was always remanded
as a suspect.
The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were
these. One--it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all
the known authors of the time and was therefore understood by the
authorities to be a political (or moral) satire. Two--it had no title
and was therefore feared by the authorities to be dealing under the
cover of obscurity with dangerous subjects. Three--its publisher could
not be traced and it was therefore believed by the authorities to have
been printed uncommercially. Four--it had no author and was therefore
suspected by the authorities of having been written by a dangerous
person. Five (and last)--it advertised itself as a book for children,
and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been written
with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew,
the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book
grew: for the only way that its authorship could be discovered was by
increasing the number of people suspected, and this could only be done
by increasing the number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to
arrive at the author by separating those who had read the book from
those who had not read it, and singling out from among the latter him
or her who pretended to know least about it.
All the stories in the book were about people who did not like the
world and who would have been glad to be somewhere else. Some were
irreligious, some were ungrateful, some were scornful, some were openly
rebellious, some were secretly rebellious, some were merely ironical,
some were merely bored. Many were too good, many were too bad. All were
disobedient, and all wanted to go away. Wanting to go away to somewhere
else did not mean wanting to go away to somewhere else with the rest
of the entire population of the world. It meant in all the stories
wanting to go away alone. All the stories in the book were about people
who wanted to go away to somewhere where they would be, no matter how
many other people they found there, the only one. All the people in the
book thought the world fit only for light, heat, moisture, electricity,
plants, the lower animals, and perhaps for occasional parties,
excursions, commemoration days, Sunday afternoons, exhibitions,
spectacles, concerts, sight-seeing and conversation. But none of them
thought it fit for higher creatures to live in permanently, because all
who were in it, they said, were the only one, and were thus objects of
hate, ridicule or mock-adoration for one another, being each by his
mind freakish and uncommon but by his brain natural and common.
Such was the philosophical import of this book. But its philosophical
import was got only if the reader had a taste for, a passion for,
a suspicion of, an obsession with, or instructions to look for
philosophical imports. Or if he shrank from stories. What was plain and
comprehensible before all philosophical imports was just stories. The
four upon which most suspicion was fixed were _The Flying Attic_, _The
Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_, _The Woman Who Loved an Engine_, and
_The Woman Who Was Bewitched By a Parallel_.
It was impossible to say particularly which story was written in the
style of which author. The effect of imitation that the book gave
was rather a mixed one; that is, it was generally and throughout a
witty, energetic, beautiful, simple, earnest, intricate, entertaining,
ironic, stern, fantastic, eloquent, modest, outspoken, matter-of-fact
and so-forth book, so that generally speaking it could not be read
but as a conglomerate imitation of the noted literary manners of the
time, of the well-known author who wrote so wittily, of the well-known
author who wrote so energetically, of the well-known author who wrote
so beautifully, of the well-known author who wrote so simply, of the
well-known author who wrote so earnestly, of the well-known author
who wrote so intricately, of the well-known author who wrote so
entertainingly, of the well-known author who wrote so ironically, of
the well-known author who wrote so sternly, of the well-known author
who wrote so fantastically, of the well-known author who wrote so
eloquently, of the well-known author who wrote so modestly, of the
well-known author who wrote so outspokenly, of the well-known author
who wrote so matter-of-factly, and of the well-known author who wrote
and-so-forthly.
It is not the object of this account, whose purpose is chiefly
historical, to transcribe in detail all or even many of the stories
of which the book was composed, or to analyse, criticize, praise or
condemn the few that shall be reproduced (in whatever way seems most
economical) here. It is rather intended to give an honest, accurate,
elementary notion of the book from which the reader may form a
scholarly opinion of its character that shall be in restrained harmony
with his own. Several of the stories (those cited above, for example)
will be elaborately summarized, according to the degree of eccentricity
they possess in comparison with other stories which fall more naturally
into a group-significance or classification. Some will appear only in
a table of constructional correspondences; others as interesting or
corroborative or contradictory points of reference: still others as
problems of too fine difficulty for the moment, here put aside and
marked out for the future specialist.
§2
_The Flying Attic_ is the first of the miscellaneously significant or
dangerous stories. The central character is a cook who had never in
her life been guest to anyone and who had never in her life ascended
above the kitchen floor of any house. No description of the character’s
appearance, age or parentage is given, so that the atmosphere of
the story, intentionally or unintentionally, is one of allegory, or
morality, or symbolism--as you like. This creature, the story tells
us, conceived the fantastic ambition of living permanently in a guest
attic, descending only at the new moon, and then to find herself each
time in a different house, each time guest to a different host or
hostess.
The realization of this ambition is made technically possible by the
dismissal of the cook for serving a custard made from a manufactured
pink powder, instead of from original ingredients. No complaint seems
to have been made against the excellence of taste or quality of the
custard. Its very excellence in fact is what arouses suspicion. And so
after coffee the cook is dismissed. The family chats, finally goes to
bed. Then the cook steals out of the kitchen and up to the attic, at
the moment unoccupied but in a state of preparation for a guest who
is expected to arrive the following day. The cook draws the curtains,
lights a candle, gets into bed. The beams are made of old ship’s
timber; the sharp-ribbed roof suggests an inverted ship’s bottom. The
candlelight, the drawn curtains, the architectural irregularities of
the attic, the distorted, ship-like sense of motion faintly conveyed
by the crazy contour of the attic in candlelight to the mind of the
cook now floating in the unreality of the fulfilment of an impossible
ambition--all these factors contribute to what must count--in the story
at any rate--for a genuine disturbance of forces: the attic moves, the
cook’s mind swoons with pleasure, day and night the curtains remain
drawn (otherwise the problem of _locale_ would seriously interfere with
the narrative device), she passes her time in a passive delirium of
satisfaction, and at the morning of new moon punctually descends. The
first and last descents will be given in detail, the intervening ones
only listed.
First descent: as the breakfast bogy, in the costume of a German
peasant--green jacket, flat, ribboned hat; into the house of a country
lady, mother of three young children, recently widowed. Cook unlatches
the attic door and walks slowly downstairs--a heavy male step. Cultured
and terrified children’s voices are heard as the steps pass the night
nursery: ‘Oh mother, the breakfast bogy--we are afraid to get up.’
‘Nonsense, children,’ the mother calls back, ‘come down immediately.’
The steps continue, Cook enters the dining-room, sits down at the table
in the chief chair as master of the house. The mother enters from the
kitchen with large porridge basin, sees Cook, screams. Children come
running down. ‘The breakfast bogy, the breakfast bogy!’ they cry.
‘We told you so, Mother.’ Cook says: ‘I am master here now. We will
all have breakfast together and you will pay me every respect. After
breakfast I shall go away and not return till luncheon. The same for
tea and dinner. You must guess what I like to eat and after each meal
thank me for the food. And you must kiss me good night. That is all.’
It is to be noted that whenever the central character of any of these
tales gives an order, it is always obeyed without question, however
wicked, unreasonable or fantastic it may be. Thus in _The Dishonest
Scales_ the grocer-woman not only cheats her customers in the weight of
what they buy (though the scales whenever tested seem to record quite
honestly), but after taking their money she says firmly ‘Now that is
all,’ and sends them away unprotesting without their purchases.
After breakfast Cook retires to the attic and appears again at
luncheon. All this happens in the most orderly manner imaginable.
The widow even smiles prettily to Cook after luncheon and ‘hopes the
gentleman finds all satisfactory.’ Cook here nods stiffly. There is no
clue given as to what either Cook or the family do during the intervals
between meals. Only one rather shocking mischance occurs: the oldest
of the children, a boy, spies upon the cook between tea and dinner and
is snatched angrily into the attic. At dinner only two children appear,
and Cook announces quietly: ‘Your oldest child attempted to spy upon
me, so I turned him into an eiderdown to keep me warm.’ To which the
widow replies ‘It serves him right,’ and goes on eating. After dinner
Cook is kissed good night affectionately by the widow and her two
remaining children, goes up to the attic, fastens the door, gets into
bed and tucks herself round with her new eiderdown.
Second descent: Cook comes down into a prison tower as a captive queen,
murders her warder, takes upstairs with her her warder’s poodle, the
pillow she stabbed him on, and his wife’s lace cap, saying: ‘All this
will contribute to the comfort of my old age.’
Third descent: Cook comes down into a full-rigged ship about to sink
in a storm off the Gold Coast, rescues the captain, a villainous
but hearty old man, and carries him off to her attic with great
satisfaction.
Fourth descent: Cook comes down into a great kitchen as a cook and
carries the whole kitchen up with her in one armful.
Fifth descent: Cook comes down into a library as a respectable young
working man inquiring from the lady librarian for a book on how to mend
leaking roofs. The lady librarian strongly resembling Cook in her
youth, the young working man is smitten with a great fancy for her,
marries her, takes her up to the attic, where she becomes cook to Cook.
Sixth descent: Cook opens her attic door to walk out as herself for
a breath of fresh air, steps upon nothing and begins to fall. While
falling she looks up, sees her attic far above her, flying off at great
speed toward the east, where it is growing dark. ‘However will I get
back to it?’ she thinks mournfully to herself. At this point there
is a long passage describing intimately all of her anxieties in her
fall, such as what will happen to her poodle, who will smooth out her
eiderdown, what will her captain have for dinner all by himself, down
to the last, which is, what shall she give them for a pudding to-night?
She decides, since it is so late already (it is now quite dark in the
east and her attic has completely disappeared) to give them a custard
made from a manufactured pink powder, which will take only a moment
to stir up and only fifteen minutes on the window-sill to cool. It
would be impossible without exact quotation from the original (which
is outside the modest scope of the present volume) to reproduce the
delicate transition that takes place just here from one level of the
episode to the next (from the higher to the lower, or the fantastic
to the factual, I might say). Suffice it for our purposes that there
occurs at this point a shock, the contact on the one hand of Cook’s
feet with the ground, on the other of Cook’s right ear with church
clock just striking seven. ‘And there will be a guest to-night,’ she
exclaims to herself, tasting and stirring, chopping and sprinkling. At
last dinner is served, eaten, over. ‘Dear kind Cook,’ Mistress says
to her before retiring, ‘aren’t you going upstairs to-night?’ ‘My
goodness, is it so late?’ replies Cook. ‘I was just cooling myself a
bit’--for Cook was standing on the kitchen doorstep gazing east. So she
goes upstairs to her attic and fastens the door behind her. Upon which
unsatisfactory note this story concludes, leaving the reader uneasy and
somewhat cheated of that general resolution of himself in the story
which it is his right to expect from every upright invention--an effect
all the more disquieting in that it seemed everywhere in this work
arrived at rather by art than by accident or inferiority of execution.
§3
It would be well at this point to uncover a little of the philosophical
skeleton of this book for the benefit of the reader likely to become
too absorbed in the narrative surface, so to speak. It would also be
well to emphasize, on the other hand, the fact that the anonymous
author was if anything over-precious in the technical brilliance of
his stories: he seemed to wish, by ringing from them a pure, glassy
artificiality, that their perfection as stories should make them as
trivial and false-true as stories, so that they held the moral more
obediently. There is therefore little or no hint of moral in any of
the stories, the sincerity of the narration in every particular being
the best guarantee (according to the principles of his writing) of the
presence of the skeletal sense beneath it. We might, for the purpose
of analysis, call this obsession with fictitious fact an obsession
statistical. And we might likewise call (for the same purpose) the
style of the book the style of curiosity. The effect of this style on
the reader is indeed an effect of curiosity--curiosity in the general
usage of the word. That is, it makes the reader first inquisitive of
the course and conclusion of the narrative, then suspicious of the
philosophical import of the narrative, and finally resolved to track
down angerly (as our Elizabethan might have said) the chief mystery
of each narrative, namely the anonymity of the author: as indeed the
police of his time were angered into doing (without success). The style
of curiosity, itself, however, was of a different order of curiosity
from this. If you will look out this word in any full contemporary
dictionary you will find that while the current meaning is this precise
_effect_ of curiosity, the two first (and previous) meanings have a
more particular application:
(1) Scientific attentiveness; technical nicety; moral exactness;
religious fastidiousness. Obsolete.
(2) Honest or artistic workmanship; generous elaboration; charitable
detail. Obsolete or archaic.
And such, in fact, was the style of curiosity: so that the effect of
curiosity on the reader had in it a touch of quaintness; which is
the reason why, in fact, the anonymous author seemed to his critics,
censors and readers to be imitating the style of all the well-known
writers of the time and yet to be clearly not among them.
Perhaps I can best illustrate this obsession statistical and this
style of curiosity (both in origination and effect) by a direct
transcription. It is to be found (by those fortunate enough to lay
hands upon the book itself) in the story (untitled) about the man who
could not help stealing his friends’ matches though his father was a
prosperous match-manufacturer, though he had a generous allowance from
him and though he had no interest in the match business:
‘He paid his fare exactly, having the scale of fares off by
heart (more thoroughly than the conductor) and having always
in his pocket such a variety of small coins as should make it
unnecessary for him to be given change in his fares, purchases
and contributions to charity. He sat on top, on the left, in the
fourth row from the front, by the rail, a habit so strong and
methodical in him that he never thought (and was never obliged)
to sit elsewhere. He made a minute comment to himself upon the
flower stalls or stands along the route, concluding with the
generalization that the predominating colour among the flowers
sold by the lame or the ugly was mauve. He then went to sleep,
timing himself to awake a minute before the arrival of the bus at
the railway station. He rehearsed his itinerary, which was to miss
his train at the first change and so at the second change and so
to have to wait an hour there and two hours there and to examine
more particularly during this time the generalization regarding
lame or ugly flower-vendors. While asleep he followed his usual
practice of descending from the state of personality to the state
of thingality, and in this dreamy condition of passive matter he
enjoyed the same security that an apple has up to the moment of
its fall. And so upon waking he fell from the top of the bus--as
if blown down by a strong wind--and broke his nose, one leg, two
fingers, cut his left cheek beneath the eye and sustained an injury
to his back that left him upon his recovery with a permanent
thoughtful posture.’
From this short extract it will perhaps be clear how he teased his
reader with sincerity and how his statistical straightforwardness
carved out patiently a mysterious block of significance which was not
brought upon the platform of the story but which the reader found
obstructing his exit, as it were, when the curtain had come down and
he attempted to leave the theatre. It was this seemingly innocent
obstructionism of course that aroused the authorities to such a violent
pitch of antagonism to the book; and which remains to this day a
challenge almost impudent (so it sometimes seems) to the endurance of
all scholars, philosophers and simple lovers of knowledge. For often,
at our greatest moments of ingenuity and science, indeed, we find
ourselves suddenly uncertain of our premises and forced to begin once
more at the beginning, yielding our own philosophical curiosity to
the statistical curiosity of the author. It might therefore be wise,
before we entangle ourselves further in scholarly ramifications of
our own, to return to the document itself. In this sober intention
I mean to present, in as unmeddlesome and economical a fashion as I
am capable of, the conspicuous features of one of the most baffling
(though to outward appearance one of the most unaffected) stories in
the collection, _The Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_.
§4
He was an author. He wrote books one after the other. It was
impossible, we are told, to understand, say, the tenth book without
reading all the preceding nine. And it was impossible to understand
the tenth without the book that followed it. And whatever number the
book was, there was always one following it, so that the author was
continuously being understood by his readers. The chief character in
each of the books was always the same. Half of him was the author
himself, the other half of him was the only son of the author’s
mother. He called the first half I, the second half He. I thought,
wrote books, knew all about everything, did nothing. He knew nothing
about anything but could do everything. I was wise, He was happy. I
was careful to keep himself to himself so as not to have his wisdom
spoiled by He or He’s fun spoiled by his wisdom. I kept himself in his
study, He in the world. I did not permit He to share his study with
him because this would have been like denying that there was a world
outside of his study and, since he knew there was such a world, making
a ghost of himself. I did not want to be a ghost and yet he wanted to
remain in his study, so he supported He in the world on the books he
wrote in his study. This kept up the world, it kept up He, it made I
complete without his having to be complete, that is, to be both I and
He. Moreover, though I supported He in the world, he made no attempt
to track him, curb him or even share occasionally in his activities.
I was continually disciplining himself against such temptations: in
order not to corrupt his wisdom by making it a criticism of He and in
order not to corrupt the fullness of He’s pleasure by making it have
anything to do with sense. The important thing for I, inasmuch as He
existed and the world existed, was to keep them employed in each other,
so that he could be truly, wisely, actually, employed in himself. I
said: I am I, therefore I am true, I am not He, therefore he is false;
but He is He, therefore He is false-true so long as I encourage him in
falsehood. He could not, however, be false by himself--this would have
eventually made him true. To be false he needed something to be false
with, he needed the world, he needed other He’s. For a long time He
and the world conducted each other toward themselves with the closest
and strictest falsehood; so close and strict in fact that the world,
this conglomeration of other He’s, became a single close, strict, false
She. He and She went on loyally enjoying themselves in each other as He
and the world had done, until this falsificatory attachment became so
utter that it reproduced I in his study. It reproduced I, it reproduced
He and She. It did all this without giving to her only son’s mother a
grandchild.
And so, the story goes on, the books went on. And so we the readers
of the story (story-readers of the books described in the story)
witness how I told lies to his mother without committing a single
falsehood. For he sent his books to his mother in her province in place
of letters, saying: This is a true account of the doings of your only
son. And she read them lovingly as a true account of the doings of her
only son, whom she always thought of as He, taking I to be merely the I
authorial, which it was. And so I told lies to his mother and they were
not lies but a true account of the doings of He.
Now when the author of the story has trained his reader to understand
the author in the story who was one-half of the chief character of his
own stories, he begins without further explanation a long chronicle of
the experiences of the other half of the chief character of his stories
under the title of _Lies To His Mother_. We do not know whether these
stories are supposed to have appeared in the author-in-the-story’s
books as they appear here in the story: probably not, since there is
in them no mention of I, and I, we must remember, was one-half of the
chief character of these books. Or perhaps so, since it is not unlikely
that everything relating to I in his books was meant to be supposed to
have been described separately, as for example in the form of authorial
interludes between the passages relating to He. At any rate, for our
convenience it may be best to retitle the stories (a few of which are
here summarized) which the author introduces to us under the title of
_Lies To His Mother_, as _What His Mother Believed Of He_. It might
also be helpful for me to announce here that since further analysis
seems hopeless I shall add nothing to these summarizations; except
to say, perhaps, that they all confirm us in what we have already
observed of the temper of the anonymous author of the book that we are
studying: his statisticality, his curiosity and, we might now add, his
falsificality.
(_a_) That He one day drank water in such a way as to be drunk of it,
and in this condition found himself the hero of an Arabian Nights
Entertainment, bathing, with the privilege of a jokester, in the
women’s pool. And they would not let him come out for a whole day.
They kept him in the water a whole day, a whole long day, during which
they did many things to him, all of which are faithfully recorded in
the original, of which two may with propriety be given here: that they
would at intervals very slowly drain all the water from the pool and
then as slowly let it fill up again; and that they fed him on nothing
but fish, and would not give him drink, forcing him to water himself
from the pool. He was allowed to leave the pool at sunset, on the
promise that he would amuse them with tales for three days, which he
promised. For three days then He amused them with tales, two of which
may with propriety be outlined here: the first, of a man bewitched
in such a manner that he would do on every occasion the opposite of
what it was his will to do; the second, of a far-off city in which
the people were silent and their clothes spoke, and of how a quarrel
arose between two identical black lace frocks, as to which was which,
and of how in anger they tore themselves off their wearers, and became
confused in the broil that followed, so that their owners were also
confused and uncertain, when the frocks were put on once more, whether
their speech matched their silence.
(_b_) That He another day woke to find himself speaking a strange
language, in which everything was known and clear--as if all
difficulties of the intelligence were difficulties of language alone:
in this language He had but to speak to discover, as, for instance,
the word for _horse_ here not only stood for horse but also made plain
the quality of horseliness, what it was. He woke to find himself
speaking this language, he was a boy, he was in a classroom, he had
blue eyes (they were actually grey), his teacher was a remarkable
woman in a pompadour and a large hat who was fond of him, fixing
her gaze on his blue eyes when she entered the room and keeping it
there until she left; who knew everything and recited it without
pause, without sympathy, without antagonism, so that whatever she
said meant all and nothing--history, the uses of waste paper, the
traditions of pawnbrokers, anything, everything. Then He woke up
again to find himself no longer speaking the strange language but as
dumb, in his ordinary language, with dumb memory of it. So when He
spoke his ordinary language he found it all twisted of sense, which
made him abandon it: he uttered only expressive sounds, which others
disregarded as nonsensical, composed as they were of soft and shrill
shrieks, whistlings, bellowings and blowings. So He went mad and in his
madness began speaking his ordinary language again, all nonsensical,
but conceived sane by others because it was the ordinary language.
And so He was discharged from the madhouse raving and only by slow
stages came to regard himself, since others did so, as sane. The theme
of a language of complete intelligence, it is to be remarked, occurs
in two other stories in the book--in one there is even an attempt,
impossible to reproduce here, to give specimens of the language. To
all appearances indeed it is the ordinary language in which he (the
anonymous author) wrote, with perhaps an outlandish twist due merely
to an increase of his usual severity--the authorities explained it by
reading it as an imitation of the style of the most wilfully ingenuous
author of the time. But it might very well have meant something to the
author it could not mean to the reader, which is not at all improbable,
since to myself, after long study and, I may say, an application
it would be difficult to surpass, it meant only what it said--and
this only with the greatest imaginative stretch possible to me in my
liveliest moments of inquiry. The story, for the benefit of those few
who may have access to the book, is, of course, _The Whisper_.
(_c_) That He one day woke to find himself Professor in Time at the
University of Colour: he was addressing a class of old, old men on the
principle of greenishness. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘there are many
modern artists who will not use green at all in their pictures: it is
a foreign colour, an outside colour, an extra colour--the colour of
conclusion. Therefore the colour of haughty youth, which is final, and
of weird old age, which is beyond finality. The modern painter who
banishes green does so from ambition: he means to show that he can
give his pictures an effect of conclusion without making use of the
wittiness of green. Primitive people make use of green with religious
brutality to clinch any argument in colour. Flowers, on the other
hand, never use green, nor the sky; unless unwholesome--an eccentric
avoidance of a banal they-know-not-what. Earth-green is the symbol of
time overcoming time. Green is a colour of sophisticated crudeness
and of crude sophistication. A brute thing is in its heart of hearts
green, and a casuistical mind is in its heart of hearts green. The
grave mathematical most is green, and the silly poetical least is
green. The new-born baby is green and the newly-dead person is green.
And the extreme of tragedy is green, and the extreme of comedy is
green.’
At this moment the oldest of the old, old men got up and shrieked,
smilingly through his three teeth, saying: ‘I spent my whole fortune
in one night in music and food on a girl whose mother was a singer and
whose father was a chef. “Trrup,” she said, snapping her fingers, “you
are an old man, and I love a boy who blacks my boots.”’ ‘Trrup,’ he
shrieked, smiling through his three teeth, ‘I am green, I am green, and
this is my life’s story.’ And ‘Trrup,’ shrieked all the old men, ‘we
are green, we are green.’ Until He could not bear the noise and stopped
his ears with his fingers, and closed his eyes.
When He removed his fingers from his ears and opened his eyes, he was
sitting by his own fireside, and his cat was on the hearth-rug and She
was near him, knitting him a green jacket. ‘Trrup,’ said the cat’s
eyes, ‘what a fool you are to dream such sense,’ and ‘Trrup,’ said She,
‘what a dear silly you shall be napping in my green jacket.’
‘I,’ said He to himself, ‘must tell this story to my mother, it will
amuse her.’
And it was told, and it did, and she believed it of He, and everything
else that was told of him, and put another lump of sugar in her tea,
near the bottom of the cup, saying to herself: ‘Is it not so? Sometimes
I like Mrs. History, and sometimes I do not. Sometimes I pity her, and
sometimes I wish her worse trouble. And what does it matter, since she
is all this, and I am all that, and each of us always, no matter what
happens, a bit of herself? When I am angriest I am nearest to kindness,
and when I am clearest in my head I am nearest to confusion. Is it not
so? I am sure I never know what I am going to do next. For instance,
there are those wicked loves who follow a certain red flag: I am sure
I should forget myself and join them if it were a green one.’ For she,
taking after her own son, was also a liar.
§5
The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be
classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book
is the queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as
if it were but one story, the episodic variations seeming no more
than caprices of style--the same story told in different degrees of
earnestness and so in different personalities, as it were. The one
fixed personality of the group is the Queen herself; the others are
all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a photograph used by a
newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female bandit of the
moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the missionary’s
bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and a fixed
personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes
this anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a
fact: for the Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each
time false. Indeed, the whole transformation is merely a matter of
style. To illustrate: ‘As Maxine, the world’s sleeplessness champion,
the photograph had great momentary importance but did not know it
because it was part of a newspaper dynamic in which everything happened
with equal fatalistic effect, everything was accident, in the moment
succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing had happened. As
photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was permanently
unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its
unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident;
and as the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second
knowledge made it Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity,
this anonymous particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which
she was the only one and in which the world of many was only what she
called “the chaotic conversation of events.” So she resolved to put
her queendom in order, not by interrupting the conversation, which
would only have increased the chaos, but by having minutely recorded
whatever “happened,” whatever “was.” Nothing then in her queendom
contradicted anything else, neither the argument nor its answer,
neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar against whom it was not
proof: everything was so, everything was statistical, everything was
falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an anonymous
particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness, so she
was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.’
Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were
all pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and
came and went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of
their peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical,
so statistical indeed that they were statisticians. They went about
preaching the gospel of the communal ownership of events. They said:
‘Primitive man believed in things as events. As civilized man it is
your duty to believe in events as things.’ And the people did. And they
permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know what happened to
them and what they did with what happened to them as faithfully as they
reported their possessions each year in the great Common Book. In this
queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering, because
everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore thought
about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen.
As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms
of her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving
it, until she reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all
night while the others shone; until morning, when in her own small
chamber the curtains were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other
rooms of the palace there was daylight. The meaning of this is plain:
that in the anonymousness of the Queen lay her non-statistical, her
non-falsificatory individuality. She is the author, the queendom is
her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain, banal though chaotic
daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling more methodic
and so more plainly banal she separates in people the statistical from
the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She shows
herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.
For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the
queen-stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman.
They said that it was not improbable that the book was the Bible
of an underground sect devoted to educating female children to be
statistical queens. But this view had to be abandoned as unscholarly,
even ungentlemanly, because in nothing that the Queen said or did was
there any accent of disorder or ambition: she merely, with miraculous
patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of everything.
The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of
Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time
their suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with
whom the Queen fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to
the Queen it was thought that it might prove generally disrespectful
to State officials to pursue the matter further (as when, in the
story _Understanding_, suspicion was fixed on the character who
bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was stopped by
the authorities--the detectives even put on the wrong scent--as too
metaphysical and cynical).
It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on
me. I have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all
scholarly, my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with
an antiquity. Toward the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and
after that go on till I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say
_prevented_. For I am haunted by the obsession that the authorities
are still watching. They do not suspect the Queen. She was or is a
fixed personality, so anonymous as to be irreproachably a Character of
Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in anonymity; they are, as I
have suggested, personalities of style; they point to the probability
that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare go no
further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to
continue my task until--I am prevented.
One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears
outstanding, his grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had
been financial adviser to a charitable organization and had had much
general statistical though humane experience. He was gross but kind
and therefore in charge of all sentimental records: his grossness
assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy. He had the historical genius,
and several specimens of his work are given--though with a touch of
dryness in the author himself which makes it impossible to enjoy
them as we might have were the book without an author. Indeed, they
were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the
political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find
it difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the
book they are very interesting. There are several small extracts that
might be used here with complete propriety and even in a scholarly
way. And after all, the author wrote them down himself, did he not? But
he was writing and not reading. But am I not writing and not reading?
My position becomes more and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.
I shall give one of the Queen’s monologues, to tide us over this
difficult period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it
would have been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which
the book was built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions
must be asked of me, for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer
them; and the passage would then become writing; and I should have
produced a piece of naturalism. Here then is, shall I say, a variety:
which is not the anonymous author’s writing but we might almost say his
reading, and after that my writing but of his reading, which remains
reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands: the burden
of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also
the rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of
publication, the future of philosophy and scholarship and the little
children, for whom these contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.
And now for the Queen’s monologue, which the anonymous author did not
write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader’s part,
sense, I say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did
write. Furthermore, you will have to discover for yourself where it
begins and where it ends: were I to mark it off it would become writing
and so a piece of naturalism and so bely sense and give encouragement
to satire. I mean: restraint, statistics, falsification, is more
accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so truer. For the Queen’s
monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it down, is true;
had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from
writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a
subject of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the
difficult task of writing down the Queen’s monologue without turning
it into writing, and so defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on
you). The important thing is to defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity
as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed to falsification. It is
betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it is, is one thing
or the other--generally the other, it being for practical purposes
impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes
I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth
monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine
a woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her
heart heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again
and her heart is whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because
her heart was once broken and does he blush because he once broke it?
This would be satire. No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart
to break again, and he breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile
and turn away from each other, and this, too, is sense, but sense too
academic to survive the strain of academically enforcing itself. The
One Thing must be saved from itself, it must not be allowed to overwork
itself or go stale. That is why sense is one thing or the other and
generally the other: falsification to relieve truth, broken hearts to
protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is fancy and
fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies
it and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions
and lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And
what is satisfaction? Not the other things, that satisfy, but the one
thing, that cannot satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one
thing, equal to desire, and so to all the other things. Fact is _it_
not _me_; fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is the other
things. Satisfaction is _me_, which _it_ calls Queen. _It_ is a lot
of him’s, _it_ is a queendom, _it_ is desire speaking the language of
satisfaction, _it_ is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and
confusion of eyesight and costume, into which the Queen brings sense
through order. And what is order? Order is observation. Her first
publisher (or statistician) is a gross, kind Jew. Her second is a
subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he has the political
genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen anyhow:
they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say ‘Old Hassan Bey
smiling with Turkish teeth,’ and call on the first publisher to take
notice how smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and
he does nothing: he has the philosophical genius. His idleness and
talkativeness exasperate the other two into efficiency. His favourite
harangue is: ‘Let the people create their own order.’
‘But how, their own order?’
‘Let them think.’
‘But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only
differently--some will think more powerfully than others.’
‘Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create
order.’
‘But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order
created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of
the moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough.’
‘I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the
Queen not anarchism?’
‘The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she
creates _her_ order. That is why _it_ is _her_ queendom.’
‘But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?’
‘No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual
of her queendom; she is the _me_ of the _it_; she is the one thing,
her queendom is the other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is
desire, a lot of _him’s_. The more _me_ she is, the more _it_ it is,
and the more anonymous she is, and the more she and her queendom are
diplomatically indistinguishable. The domestic situation is of course
another affair. But to carry the distinction beyond the boundaries of
the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.’
§6
Therefore the time has come to close. I am discovered, or rather I
have discovered myself, for the authorities lost interest in me when
they saw that I would discover myself before I could be officially
discovered, that I would in fact break through the pages and destroy
the strongest evidence that might be held against me, that is, that
‘An anonymous book----’ etc. I understand now that what they desired
to prevent was just what has happened. You must forgive me and believe
that I was not trying to deceive, but that I became confused. I
over-distinguished and so fell into satire and so discovered myself
and so could not go on, to maintain a satiric distinction between
authorship and scholarship.
And what of the woman who loved an engine? I cannot say. And the woman
who was bewitched by a parallel? I cannot say. They come after the
place where I left off.
THE DAMNED THING
§1
‘Sex’ is crude sex, resembling other crude appetites which similarly
lose significance as soon as satisfied; and it is translated sex--sex
surviving the satisfaction of the appetite. As the first it applies to
the mechanics, as the second to the sentiment of sex.
The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in
sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to
be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society
into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant
local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome
receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged
instinct.
So much at any rate for the male child: parental care nurtures
masturbation into love and marriage. Sex may stop short of love at
lust. It may be anything it pleases, so long as it satisfies the
standard measurements for social impressiveness.
The female child has a different history. She shares a short period
of sexual casualness with the male child, at the end of which she
immediately becomes a candidate for the recipience of masculine love;
while the sexual training of the male child is intensified at this
point. This difference accounts for the so-called early maturity of
the female child. For at the time when her male contemporary is only a
first-year man she is already a graduate without benefit of education;
and her proper mate is therefore a graduate.
Although intelligent people are generally aware of the equivocal
background of love and marriage, they nevertheless go on marrying for
the relaxation and social ease that comes of doing what every one
else is doing. Any other course would be socially unintelligible; and
explanations are indecent. Imagine a man and a woman both undeformed by
sex tradition and that an intimacy exists between them. The intelligent
major part of their intimacy incorporates sex without sentimental
enlargement: it is an effect rather than a cause. And it is eventually
absorbed, it undergoes a diffusion, it is the use of an amenable
physical consciousness for the benefit of mental consciousness.
But traditionally sex would be the cause not the effect of such an
intimacy. The conventional language of love could scarcely express
it otherwise; the only diffusion recognized would be the verbal
substitution of commendable emotions for gross passions. When the
lover said ‘I love you’ it would be socially impossible for him to
mean: ‘Our personalities have an intense and irresistible sympathy. I
am so conscious of you and myself together that sometimes my sexual
glands are stimulated by the very thought of you.’ It would be
impossible for him not to mean: ‘My sexual glands, by the ingrowing
enlargement of my sex instinct since childhood and its insidious,
civilized traffic with every part of my mental and physical being,
are unfortunately in a state of continual excitement. I have very
good control of myself, but my awareness of your sexual physique and
its radiations was so acute that I could not resist the temptation to
desire to lie with you. Please do not think this ignoble of me, for I
shall perform this act, if you permit it, with the greatest respect
and tenderness and attempt to make up for the indignity it of course
fundamentally will be to you (however pleasurable) by serving you in
every possible way and by sexually flattering manifestations of your
personality which are not strictly sexual.’
The diffusion which modern society calls love is the colouring of sex
with sentiments which have no connection with sex, sentiments which
are not served by sex but serve sex, by making attractive to the
finical civilized mind an instinct naturally repulsive to it. They are
literary. Sex, in the imagery of Stendhal, is the naked branch which,
when introduced into the salt mine, comes out covered with crystal
formations: love is the imaginative crystallization of naked instinct.
The naked instinct is the monstrous male instinct. The crystallization
is an aphrodisiac for the female, in whom sex is comparatively casual:
the sparkling branch creates in her an appetite for love equal to the
male’s tremendous sexual offering, which she would otherwise shrink
from accepting. By this stratagem the male himself does not seem to
the female to be touching her; in love virginity remains spiritually
undamaged. It is like the doll in a recent Oxford smoker. Whenever the
doll was touched, the young person of the piece, who had a psychic
connection with the doll, was affected, though untouched herself,
so the nun conceals carnality from herself by washing herself in
dollish instalments. Love is Masoch’s stately and marble-like Demon of
Virginity (‘the deeply rooted fear of existence every creature feels’),
a lewd and prudish Shepherdess.
The only courses possible in sex then are love and marriage, misconduct
and perversion. Misconduct is masculine brutality, the male’s refusal
to dress up the overgrown branch; and feminine indelicacy, the female’s
willingness to accept the overgrown branch in spite of its unromantic
nakedness. Perversion varies in character. It may be mere animal-like
sexual levity. Or the biological cynicism of the species. Or it may
occur in the male when love and marriage or ordinary misconduct seem
insufficient to his exaggerated sex instinct, which can only be
satisfied by an instinct as exaggerated as his own. Or it may occur in
the female as a feministic improvement on man-made sex, nevertheless
imitating it in its mechanism from an irrepressible sexual nostalgia.
Or it may occur, as also in the male, through deprivation of normal
sex life--though more rarely than in the male, since her sex instinct
is less demanding. Active Lesbianism is a form of sexual derangement
resulting from the female’s mistaken effort to become sexually
equivalent to the male: passive Lesbianism is a romantic substitution
of the feminine branch for the masculine branch in the forced absence
of the latter, the crystallization remaining the same.
There is an intellectual side to masculine homosexuality that is never
very strong in Lesbian alliances. Homosexuality in men indeed is more
often intellectually induced than in women: it is ascetic, whereas
women are not sexually fanatic enough for sexual asceticism. The
disgust of homosexual men with civilized heterosexual love becomes a
disgust with the crystalline aggressiveness of the female body. If a
woman is attractive to a homosexually minded man it is because she
seems what he calls ‘pure and virginal’--aloof, that is, from her
sexual uses. The disgust is really with the aggressive male sexuality
which is responsible for the crystallization. Wherever there is great
cynicism about sex, in Islam, say, or in France, homosexuality is
connived at as an intellectual supplement to heterosexual life. The
classical type of homosexuality was far less exclusive and severe than
the modern type: it was sophistication rather than specialization.
Whether or not homosexuality is found a satisfactory intellectual
supplement, it is at any rate so that it is easier for male than for
female mentality to escape from socialized sex. Woman has been too
much under the necessity of self-preservation to lay down the weapons
of feminine personality and risk the disarmed independence of sexual
impersonality. She is the object, or prey, of male sexuality, and
her strength lies in the pride and in the obstacles with which she
conditions her capture. Much modern feminism is only a sentimental
enlargement of this pride, only a shrewder insistence on her value as
a prize. For the most part the feminist still has the mentality of
the recipient in sex demanding compensation for the indignity of her
position; feminism is an unnatural preoccupation in woman with her
sexual self.
Woman’s case is nearly hopeless, then. Man is just a little better off:
his position affords him the relief, if he is intellectually capable of
taking it, of sexual suicide.
§2
Often we spend hours disposing of some small thing not worth five
minutes’ thought. We have had it a long time, it is occasionally
useful, some one has given it to us, it would be a pity to throw it
away, it has become quite a part of us, and so on. And yet it is in
the way. Yielding to the tyranny of the trivial hanging-on thing
is adaptation. Outwardly we seem to make the thing adapt itself to
us. Actually we are adapting ourselves to the thing--a grotesque
adaptation. Such a thing is sex, the small physical thing; such an
adaptation is the ceremony with which it is decently installed in the
opinion.
With sex there seems to be nothing between masturbation (throwing
the damned thing out) and romance (grotesque adaptation). Even
the scientific attitude is romantic: the implied title of every
learned book on sex is _De l’Amour_. The cases in such series as
Havelock-Ellis’s books on sex belong to romance; they are the
scientist’s storification of sex. After the reader has grown used
to the laboratory manner of the scientist he continues to read from
sentiment not science; and the author himself continues, like any
romantic author, only from the growing morbid fascination of the
subject--a tediously energetic mind unhinged by the baffling triviality
of sex. Every psychologist of sex is a psychologist of sex because he
suffers from a sex-fixation. He is the principal case of his work.
Masturbation is reckoned disgraceful only because it debases sex
to less than what it is; the damned thing is passionately shoved
out of sight instead of granted pious functional importance in the
household of the mind. There is much less disgust felt toward venereal
disease than toward masturbation simply because the former is a large
subject, the latter a small one. The campaign against masturbation
in homes, boys’ schools and sex books is much more intense than the
campaign against prostitution. Masturbation cannot be sentimentalized.
Prostitution, ‘the oldest profession in the world,’ has an honoured
ritual of obscenity and an equally honoured ritual of commerce.
So great is the importance of accepted sex symbolism--the authorized
poetry of sex--that any departure from it is classified as a
perversion, as ‘erotic’ symbolism. ‘Normal’ symbolism does not even
go by its name: it is love. It is not recorded among the cases of
erotic symbolism that so-and-so continually wrote of women’s lips, or
so-and-so of women’s breasts. But several pages (fine print) must of
course be devoted to a few notorious cases (French) of foot symbolism,
and of course to the national case of China, a horrible example
to the Western sexual mind of perverse symbolism. Lip-worship and
breast-worship are normal because they are generalizations: the kiss
has become so poetically diffuse in meaning that it does not represent
the precise local excitement which is its actual sexual rôle, but a
vague spiritual lippishness; the breasts, likewise, are officially not
part of the sexual apparatus, but the semi-divine sensual equivalent of
that heart-bosom-and-chest sentiment into which humanity has glorified
mean sex-feeling.
‘And up the rosy pathway to her heart
The uncapped pilgrim crept.’
--_Byron._
Foot-worship is unnatural because it is local and particular; it
connects sex with a physical triviality. It is nearly as disrespectful
to romance as if the sexual parts themselves were worshipped.
Sexual energy, if left alone, would adapt itself instead of forcing
adaptation, be diffused instead of diffuse. The social mechanism
for disposing of sex makes sex as large and complicated as itself,
intensifies its masculinity. Its femininity reduces merely to an
abstract, passive principle of motion in the great moving masculine
machine; without separate social personality. The social self is
the sexual self, and the sexual self is the male sexual self: the
dramatic pleasure which woman feels in sex romance is masculine
pleasure; in witnessing sexual embrace on the screen or on the stage
she adopts the emotions of the male. Her innate sexual impersonality
if not philosophized, would wreck the solemn masculine machine;
it is therefore socially interpreted as mechanical receptiveness,
metaphysical unconsciousness, social helpfulness. In self-defence
woman becomes sentimentally attached to this rôle: the sexual machine
so elaborately concentrated on her confers on her an indignity loaded
with prerogatives. Slavish sex modesty is converted into sex vanity.
Militant (feministic) woman can do no more than piously emphasize
the negative, obstetrical instrumentality of female sex; pretending
that motherhood is a rational social end instead of a bigoted natural
idiosyncrasy.
This grotesque of socialized sex comes of the stupid attempt of
intelligent man to make nature intelligent. Society is the genteel
human version of nature. It is based on the assumption that man is a
product of the refined integration of nature by time and that it is
therefore a superior, evolved nature. A constant forced transference
thus takes place from the slums of nature into the respectable terraces
and squares of society.
But the very existence of society, of an improved nature, proves
rather that man is a product of the refined disintegration of nature
by time; that society is in fact a defensive alliance by conscious,
contradictory nature against unconscious, consistent nature. And
man stands in deformity between them, a creature part social, part
natural; but also something else, himself. What is social is unreal.
What is natural is unreal. What is himself is also unreal; but unreal
intrinsically, not from deformity.
Reproductive sentiment, for example, is an emotional screen to conceal
how little we belong to nature. For were we to appreciate this little
we should soon appreciate how little we belonged to society. Sex is
even more separate from reproductive instincts in human beings than in
animal beings. Society therefore strengthens the sympathetic connection
between them, this last crucial bond with nature.
But what is this sex that society has raised from a state of nature
to a state of respectability among the intelligent passions? A myth
in which people half believe to keep up appearances of which they are
half ashamed. Only in the private consciousness is it not a fraud; and
here, an eccentric mark of physical loneliness, a sort of memory of
belonging; when actualized, a momentary extinction of consciousness,
as it means momentary consciousness to beasts that belong much to
nature. As a public ceremony sex is constantly in need of artificial
stimulation; its technique is scarcely more than the technique of
costume. It persists through the illusion of numbers, which perform a
gross sex-masque, a lascivious fancifying of nature.
Sex is the tribal totem through which society sues Nature for
protection and recognition, and through which Nature is ritually
flattered. To the Church sex is the essence of flesh. Man is afraid to
admit that he lives largely outside of nature, that his body is only a
soul, a myth. Instead, he uses the myth to re-establish flesh; God is
the authentication of the body.
Sex is the chief religious mystery of man, his most theatrical
exhibition of reality. Parents lie in wait for their children, to
change their little sexual sillies into portentous symbols. Either
they significantly do not ‘tell’ them but work their transformations
by a dark force of silence and suggestion; or they significantly and
poetically ‘tell’ them. Is the child expected not to see that what is
perhaps pretty in flowers is rather ridiculous in people, who for the
most part have other interests besides seed-making and seed-scattering?
Or to treat as religious truth the crazy information that baby comes
out of mother? Unprompted, it finds this just a third-rate curiosity.
If it hears its mother shrieking in labour it will report without
malice but without sentiment that mother squealed like a pig.
Naturally without a sexual conscience, it is gradually bullied into
superstitiousness, reverence or horror of sex. Shelley, on being read
the passage about Geraldine’s breast in _Christabel_, saw a vision of
a woman with eyes instead of nipples. The child’s sight is poetically
twisted to see the nipples either so or as sacred knobs of coral. The
only way a child can be initiated into socialized sex without deformity
of his comic sense is through obscenity, the cynical and painful adult
version of the child’s sexual insouciance.
Psychology is the modern church of sex, provoking an obscene Tolstoyan
piety. Havelock-Ellis says: ‘We must, as Bölsche declares, accustom
ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a
beautiful flower’; and quotes the following account of a totem mystery
from Ungewitter’s _Die Nacktheit_: ‘They made themselves as comfortable
as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and
socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually,
as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more
and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing
drawers and the women only their chemises. In this “costume” games were
carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some
of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the
grass, and the intercourse was delightful [sic]. We felt as members of
one family, and behaved accordingly [sic].’ And Havelock-Ellis himself
again: ‘The nose receives the breath of life; the vagina receives the
water of life.... The swelling breasts are such divinely gracious
insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs at them
and sucks; the large curves at the hips are so voluptuous because of
the potential child they clasp within them.’ The juvenile delinquent of
the streets reacts to this no more obscenely by singing ‘Mother caught
her titties in the mangle.’
Lofty reverence of the female sexual organs conceals a fundamental
disgust with them. Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of
bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble
uses. She thus has for a him a double, contradictory significance;
she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance. The
sex totem is made in her image and embodies for him the conflict
between suicide and immortality. Man himself is unreal. On woman he
gets physical reality. She is his nature, the realistic enlargement of
his own small sexual apparatus. She is the morphological supplement
of his phallus. Through her he can refine, ritualize and vary his
monotonous and trivial appendage. She is the means by which he adapts
himself to what he is unable to assimilate mentally, to the absurd
physical remnant which pursues him in his pilgrimage to extinction and
which he appeases by turning aside to reverence. Sex is a perfidious
intellectual digression into physical reminiscences.
How does woman play her part as the sacred animal of the sex totem?
With ease, since she is quantitatively more sexual than man, more
literally sexual; therefore more impersonally sexual. Sex in woman
is unemotional, constitutionally well-blended--apart, that is, from
the ritualistic education in love that she is subjected to by a
masculine society. Sex in man is emotional; it is segregated; it is
the last touch of nature in him that haunts and torments him and that
he propitiates with pompous and evasive rites. Although, like man,
woman is largely not of nature, what nature remains in her satisfies
itself without pomp or pathos. That civilized woman is slower than
man in arriving at sexual climaxes is due to the fact that her native
sexual ease had been perverted by man’s tortuous psychology into a
self-stupefying philosophical passivity.
Woman, indeed, is so nearly complete in herself, except for the
phallus, that it is difficult to see how it happened, if one sex
must instrumentalize the other, that she rather than man became the
auxiliary apparatus. Phallic worship in man is not pious but politic
(unless he is homosexual, which is another matter); an institution for
advertising the phallus to woman, hypnotizing her with it, protecting
her from the knowledge that she holds the strategical sexual position.
It is perhaps fair to say that as a consciousness man is woman’s
equal. As a physical apparatus he is a clumsily devised gadget. From
the point of view of their fertilizing powers there are millions and
millions more men alive than necessary. With proper husbanding of
sperm (an economy already practised with prize bulls and stallions)
one man might conceivably maintain the world-population if a somewhat
smaller figure than the present were agreed upon as more reasonable
and if birth-control were somewhat relaxed. All propagandist display
of physical and mental superiority on man’s part, all Rabelaisian
gizzard and brain tickling, is an attempt to detract attention from his
obviously incidental character as a physical apparatus.
But it is unkind and even irrelevant to over-press the point. What
is relevant is that we are in a state of semi-conscious transition
between nature and nothing, and the more conscious we grow, the nearer
we are to nothing. In this passage sex comes quietly along, obligingly
diminishing itself except when man, in panic of annihilation, whips it
up and tries to ride himself back to nature upon it. But the passage
continues, his hobby-horse is a phantom.
Panic of annihilation, resistance to sexual diminution, is a social
emotion. Resistance to sexual enlargement is a personal emotion, the
fear of a more brutal kind of annihilation. Sex brings shock; to some
rudimentary forms, simple death; to human beings, intricate death,
death of self, death of death. Homosexuality is an oblique escape from
the violence of this shock. Polygamy and polyandry distribute the
frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are
always hungry for company: to dilute sex. This hunger for dilution is
one-half of parenthood; the other half is the regressive hunger for
solidarity.
This natural difference between creatures intellectually like is the
real perversion. Man is a poetic animal; what is natural in him is
pathological. Poetically he is unisexual; when he attempts to make the
nature in him poetic he becomes bisexual or homosexual not poetic. It
is impossible that through sex nature should approve of man or man of
nature. The only way to prevent sex from being a greater source of
discomfort than need be is to recognize it as an anomalous hanger-on
in man’s journey away from nature and to make it reveal its presence
by behaving naturally: bringing about a literal diffusion of physical
nature in human nature instead of a monstrous hermaphroditism or a
monstrous monomania.
§3
Sex as a petty eccentricity of the individual can be easily disposed of
by the individual. As a social symptom it assumes large metaphysical
proportions; it becomes a crux between matter and mind. It demands
legal control, giving society an excuse for power; economic control (as
a medium of exchange), giving society an excuse for motion; ceremonial
control, giving society an excuse for language, manners, communication.
That is, it gives society an excuse for society.
Society keeps control of sex by so embroidering it with sentiment that
the individual scarcely realizes that he is serving society instead
of society him. Every one knows, in the abstract, for instance, that
monogamy is an economic expression; yet individuals participating in
monogamy would be horrified at the suggestion that they were confirming
an economic expression. Marriage is not an economic expression, but
a ‘sacrament.’ Havelock-Ellis says: ‘Since marriage is not a mere
contract, but a fact of conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free
participation of both parties is needed to maintain it.’ And not only
is the economic significance of monogamous marriage concealed by an
argument of spiritual significance, but by a biological argument
as well. Havelock-Ellis further says: ‘Monogamy, in the fundamental
biological sense, represents the natural order into which the majority
of sexual facts will always naturally fall, because it is the
relationship which most adequately corresponds to all the physical and
spiritual facts involved.’ (Compare Shelley’s argument that polygamy
was a biological necessity because the noble horse was polygamous.)
There develops, as a counterpart to public sex, not private sex but
academic sex, sex the tradition rather than sex the practice. Sex shows
itself proudly as an art. It _is_ art. And as it is the male not the
female who tends to express himself traditionally as _man_, art is male
art. It is therefore foolish to point out that there have been very few
great women artists: why should one look for women artists at all in
male art? Art is to man the academic idea of woman, a private play with
her in public. It is therefore foolish to point out that many artists,
perhaps the best, are homosexual. They are not homosexual. Art is their
wench.
By man’s abstractness of mind is meant his personal anonymity; he is a
public creature, only mathematically existent. By woman’s concreteness
of mind is meant the individuality (man calls it ‘reality’) he
recognizes in her and which he attempts under cover of love, to
steal. Woman wears clothes, man wears a social uniform. Woman is
individual-power (brain); man is mass-power (brawn). Therefore man,
though individually a negative force, is as a unit a positive force;
defeating woman as a unit, since the fact that she is individually a
positive force makes her collectively a negative force. Here is the
secret of man’s power over woman and of a woman’s power over a man.
The mysterious ‘reality’ of woman is responsible for her mysterious
position. The only way to correct this position is for her to make
a mystery of man, to flatter, cajole, bully him into individuality.
Feminism’s great mistake is in concentrating on woman rather than on
man. Concentration on woman can only increase the mysteriousness of her
position.
The antithesis between intellectual and intuitional faculties is
really an antithesis between conventionality and unconventionality.
Mrs. Willa Muir, is a short essay on _Woman_, says: ‘Unconscious
life creates, for example, human beings: conscious life creates, for
example, philosophy.’ Human beings are not created by woman’s intuition
(Mrs. Muir should know this), but by the fertilization of the female
ovum by the male sperm. What is meant is that philosophy springs from
the conventional male mind; but that human beings spring from the
unconventional female body; and that the female mind is therefore also
unconventional.
The male mind is conventional because the male body is a mere
convention. The female body is unconventional because it is
individualistic: man gets somewhat socially and vaguely just children,
woman gets personally and precisely _a_ child. The female mind is
therefore unconventional because it is individualistic, that is,
because woman is physically an individual to a degree to which man
is not. Therefore man is intellectual, woman is intuitional: man is
unconquerable monotony, woman conquerable variety. He has a formal,
vacant simplicity, she has an informal, experimental complexity.
Therefore, since he cannot be entrusted with creating human beings and
she can, she must not be entrusted with creating philosophy, which is
all he can be entrusted with. She is not good enough to be entrusted
with creating philosophy because she is intuitional: she is too good to
be entrusted with creating philosophy because she is unconventional.
It is fair to generalize about man because he is a generalization,
unfair to generalize about woman because she is not. Man is male,
man is ‘the sex,’ not woman; woman is temperamentally unisexual, a
person; for this reason perhaps a mystery. Her sex play is literal,
hard, matter-of-fact, truly theatrical; the rest is unconventional,
a mystery. With man, all is sex; he cannot easily grasp the dualism
necessary to any real individual sense. His play is symbolical,
realistic; it is ‘the reality,’ protracted by a tiresome, childish
patience that never wears out. Woman, to save herself from boredom,
is obliged to enliven the scene with a few gratuitous falsetto turns,
which he interprets as co-operation. Even at his boldest man cannot
get beyond a conventional anarchism. He cannot see that he is on a
stage and therefore he cannot see that it is possible to get off; so
that his performance is continuous. And he will perhaps never learn
that anarchism is not enough. His fine phallus-proud works-of-art,
his pretty masterpieces of literature, painting, sculpture and music,
bear down upon woman’s maternal indulgence; she is full of admiration,
kind but weary. When, she sighs, will man grow up, when will he become
woman, when will she have companions instead of children?
LETTER OF ABDICATION
I have done all I could for you, but the only consequence is that you
are the same as always. I had the alternative of ordering a general
massacre, but I should then have had to go away anyhow. It is simpler
to abdicate. It certainly makes no difference to the situation whether
I leave you behind dead or alive. Therefore I will leave you behind
alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of telling you what I
think of you. You will not listen any more than you would if you were
dead, but I should not address you if you were dead. Therefore I will
leave you behind alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of
telling you what I think of you.
You are not gay. You are sticky instead of rubbery. You represent
yourself with priggish sincerity instead of mimicking yourself
with grotesque accuracy. Because you are photographs you think the
photographs are originals. You think seeing is being.
You do not know what you are. I will tell you, though it will not
make the least difference to you, since you do not know what you
are. You are a conceit. You are what you are not. You are a very fine
point of discrimination. But since you do not discriminate, since you
are not gay, since you think what you are is what you are, therefore
you are not: this indeed is why massacre was unnecessary. You are
blind, from seeing; you cannot appreciate the identity of opposites.
You are feeble, from a loutish strength of doing; so that you cannot
surpass doing, let doing instead of yourselves do; so that you cannot
repose. You are cowards, afraid to be more than perfect and more than
formal; so that you are only what you are; you have the perfection of
mediocrity, not the irregularity of perfection. You are superstitious;
you will season the dish with salt, but you will not taste salt
itself. You are ignorant; not only do you not know what you are; you
do not know what you are not. You are lazy; you will do only one thing
at a time; you will act; but you will not act and not act. You are
criminal; what you do is all positive, wicked, damaging; you make no
retractions, contradictions, proofs of innocence. You are without
honour; over-sincere; hypocritical.
I will tell you a story which is in my mind at the moment and may
therefore have some bearing on the question. There was once a woman
whose mind was as active as her body. And there was once a man who was
constituted in the same way. And the combination of them produced a
child which was all mind and no body. And no one knew about it. She
was, naturally, a woman. Her parents gave her no name but referred
to her in a historical manner as ‘The Deliverer.’ Whenever anything
went wrong in any part of the world she put it right because she was
all mind. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When
they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The
Angel.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became
all body, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, drove her out.
And no one knew about it. Her parents gave her no name but referred to
her in a historical manner as ‘The Destroyer.’ Whenever anything went
right in any part of the world she put it wrong again because she was
all body. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When
they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The
Beast.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became
all mind, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, took her in
again. And no one knew about it.
This is the story which was in my mind and which may have some bearing
on the question. The point of it is, I think, that we are all in an
impossible position; which you handle by making less, myself more,
impossible. For example, it is unlikely that the story that I have
just told you would ever have occurred to you. Or if it had, you would
have broken down in the middle and called it the end. You stop half-way
round the circle in order to spare yourself the humiliation of missing
the true end, which is not perceptible in the ordinary way. Indeed if
it is not perceived, it makes no difference, the circle goes round and
round upon you. On the other hand, it makes no difference even if it
is perceived, except the difference of perceiving it, which makes the
position, as I have said, more rather than less impossible. So do as
you like.
But I shall abdicate if you do, and since you do, I abdicate. You are
all asleep, because being awake means being dreamless, and you can only
be awake by dreaming to be awake, by dreaming to be dreamless. You turn
your back on your own non-existence and are therefore non-existent.
When you love, you turn your back on what you love. When you sweep,
you turn your back on the dirt. When you think, you turn your back on
your mind. Well, keep looking the other way so that I can kick you
where you deserve to be kicked. And you will not turn on me but flatter
yourselves that you are having spasms of profundity.
Anyway, this is how it is, little wise-bottoms. There is Cleopatra,
Rome, Napoleon and so forth on one side, and there is the future on
the other side, and there you are in the middle alive. There is that
great churning, that continuous tossing up and making of a middle,
that bright ferment of centrality; and it is you. My o my o my o, what
a thing! But when it was Cleopatra, Rome, Napoleon or any of them of
then, or when it will be who it will be, my o my o my o, what a thing.
It was not, it will not be you. And what was you and what will you be?
You was and you will be dead. And why? Because you are alive now. But
come a little closer, darlings, that I may kick you a little harder.
Listen: if you was dead and if you will be dead, each of you, then you
must be dead now, each of you, you must be dead and alive. Now o now
o now o, pumpkins, don’t cry. For just think: there is that great big
live middle and it is nice and warm and it is you. But it may also be
it. And what would become of you then out in the cold if you didn’t
take yourselves in, if you weren’t also you, if you weren’t each of you
dead as well as alive? And what difference does it make? None whatever,
pets, except the difference of a difference that makes no difference.
I will argue further against what I am arguing for. The you which is
you is only you, and not only dead but invisible. And you can never be
this you unless you see the you which is it and every one hard round
the circle to the end, where you can no longer see, and are you alone.
And the result, if you do this? You will be so alive that you will be
deader than ever; you will have achieved the identity of opposites; you
will have brought two counter-processes to rub noses, the you which you
are not, which is you alone, and the you which you are, which is it,
every one, not you--and much good may it do you, except to make you
deader than ever. And the result, if you do not do this? You will save
that much life from death, and much good may it do you--enough to wipe
your nose on, when it runs with nervousness at the thought that you
will have to die anyway.
Yes, I once knew a woman who spent all her time washing her linen, in
order to be always fresh and sweet smelling. But as she was always
washing dirty linen and thus making the linen she wore dirtier than
it might have been if she had washed less, she smelled of nothing but
dirty linen. Any why? Because she was over-sincere and a hypocrite. She
got stranded in the fact of clean linen instead of moving on to the
effect of clean linen, which is the end of the circle. And you are all
like that.
And again. Believing it to be you alone and that you are only what you
are, think what a small, mean, cosy, curly, pink and puny figure you
cut when you set out to be it at a party of it’s, naked as in your own
bath. Whereas, ladies and gentlemen, if you understood the identity of
opposites, your nakedness would be an invisibility which you would
have to dress large, from the point of view of visibility. And to
this it-ish rather than you-ish exterior you would add an even larger
and looser-fitting social skin, a house in most it-ish order, a most
it-ish interior, in fact. But you do not understand. ‘Boo-hoo!’ you
cry. ‘What, hide our naked hearts, paralyse our heroic breasts, sit
upon our grave bottoms, swallow back our great acts?’ ‘Hush-a-bye,’ I
reply, ‘there is enough going on for you forrard without your great
acts: drinks free, if you will only drink, scenery on view, if you will
only look, music keeping step for you if you will only supply the feet.
Instead of spending money on what you can only get for nothing. Life,
lads, is a charity feed the fun of which is in everybody pretending
to be a swell and everybody treating everybody else like a swell and
everybody knowing everybody is a fraud and no matter. No matter because
of death, in which each may be rich and proud, and no fooling. And
your great acts? When you are bursting with fraud and charity and can
stand no more, sneak aft and do your great acts, like private retchings
and acts of death. If they will not come on, repeat to a point of
mechanical conviction some formula of dreary finality, such as, “The
fathers of our girl friends are lecherous,” or “Philosophy is teetotal
whisky.”’
But you are all sluts, your efforts are not biggish, and so your fine
points are only untidy and trivial. If you would neatly calculate, you
must calculate grossly the whole pattern of it, which is the making
of the middle; you must conceive first tremendously, then accurately;
you must grasp the general initiative which is it not you. From this,
if your application be fine enough, the fine points will resolve
themselves. But remember you are no fine small point yourself; you
are more and less than one; you are the littlishness of biggishness;
you are no fine small point but a fine small point of discrimination.
My o my o my o, what a thing, poor beastie, to be but dainty when
you would be statistical. The best of you are the worst of you: they
over-discriminate, put their hand to their chin, stand upon taste, pick
the highest and most delicately scorched plum, and then choke over the
stone, dying the death of an æsthete. For what is a single plum, too
fine for the eye and not fine enough for the throat?
I might advise you to think; but you are over-eager, all for gain. And
thought is just a power of potentiality; as you are of it; as death is
of life; without gain. You would make potentiality where there is none,
in order to have more thought than is possible; you would turn the
future into a bank, as you now do the past, from greed of time.
Or I might say: ‘Have shame.’ But you would only expose yourselves
a little more outrageously and hang your heads a little lower. You
would not understand that only truly abandoned boldness breeds truly
abandoned decorum. Your interpretations are ignoble and indecent.
You begin with contradictions instead of ending with them; efface
them instead of developing them. As, for example, with sex: you seize
upon it at the beginning, tease it, worry it, transform it, until you
think you have ironed it out thoroughly, whereas you have only ironed
yourselves out thoroughly. While if you had not seized upon it, you
would have found it at the end of the circle, had you reached the
end, an achieved confirmation of the impossibility that makes things
possible.
This is one of my favourite subjects; if I were not abdicating I might
discuss it elaborately, for your good. Since I am abdicating, I will
discuss it simply, for my own good; for it is one of my favourite
subjects. The balance of interest in man, I should say, is with the
making, with it, with life; in woman, with the breaking of the making
into the you which is you alone, into death. Woman is at the end of the
circle, she has only to rearrive at herself; man has first to learn
that there is an end, before he can set out for it. And the learning
he scorns as childish and the setting out as a deathbed rite. Woman
he counts passive because she is at the end, and inferior because,
being there, she turns round and starts all over again, to rearrive at
herself. He adores her when she remains passive, that is his inferior;
and despises her when she becomes his equal, that is, his superior.
Well, they are worthless, both orders, when they are no more than
they are. And when they are more than they are they are of no use to
anyone but themselves; which is right but sudden and perhaps too mean
for these mean times. For myself, I might confess to you, now that we
are parting, that my happiest hours have been spent in the brotherly
embrace of a humbug, not from want of womanliness in me or humbuggery
in him, but because I was queen and needed repose. Ah me ah me ah me,
what is this all about?
And such stickiness. How am I better than the rest of you? Because I
have converted stickiness into elasticity and made myself free without
wrenching myself free like a wayward pellet of paste. And what of
so-and-so, your popular idol and my late consort? He was a strong
man, powerfully sticky but not elastic; when he moved, he carried you
along with him, he could not have moved otherwise, freely. And so he
had great moments but not free moments. He was terribly alive but too
terribly, never more than alive. He was merely monstrous, without
the littlishness of biggishness. And what of so-and-so, my sometime
lover? He was indeed a darling but an insufferable fop, washing away
the stickiness till there was nothing left of him. And many others were
darlings, of a sticky gracefulness and rhythm. But send me no more
candidates, their embraces are either too heavy or too feeble; and I
am light, hollow with death, but strong, of a tough, lively, it-ish
exterior.
That is the trouble. You have no comprehension of appearance, what it
is. Appearance is everything, what you are, what you are not. But your
reach is sticky, not elastic; and so you get no further than reality, a
pathetic proportion. Appearance is where the circle meets itself, where
you live and do not live, where you are and are not dead. Appearance is
everything, and nothing; bright and uppermost in a woman, to be sunk
darkly inward; dumb, blind, darkly imbedded in a man, to be thrust
brutally outward.
No, I am not confused, my blinking intelligences, but understand too
clearly, and that is the trouble. I am unnecessary to you and therefore
abdicate. Nor do I deny that blinking is sufficient for your purposes,
which are sincere rather than statistical. Or that it would be for
mine, for that matter--if I had purposes instead of queenliness.
Which is my weakness, if you like--the tiresomeness of insisting upon
the necessity of what is not necessary. I admit all; I am not wise
but insistent, I am an unpaid hack of accuracy. I was queen from
tiresomeness, and I abdicate from tiresomeness. I am not enjoying
myself.
But perhaps you would like to know a little of my history, before I
retire finally. My mother imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight;
and to make it worse she wore a stocking round her eyes whenever
possible: at home, a white stocking; abroad, a black stocking; and
occasionally, to depress circumstances completely, a grey sock of my
father’s, fastened at the back of her head with a safety-pin. From
which, our house was full of small oval rugs made by my mother out of
the mates of the stockings which she wore round her eyes and which
she was always losing. And these rugs made by my mother were not well
made, because she imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight. From
which my mother, whose character was all dreariness, acquired in my
mind a hateful oddness. From which, I resolved to outdo her in oddness,
so that I not only imagined that I suffered from good eyesight: I did
actually suffer from it. And with this effect, that by the time I was
of age I had no more than one rug, and this was very large and square,
and it was well made, and not by me, though I suffered extremely from
good eyesight. I lived far away from my mother, having no connection
with her except to insist that she live far away from me; and my rug
was composed of many small squares; and the pattern of each square
was different; and yet the whole harmonious because the stuff was
provided by me--the finest silk and velvet rags that I could command
from others, and which I sorted and returned to them to be made into
squares, a square by each of them. And so each who made a square was
my subject. And so I became Queen. Perhaps now you will understand
me better. But I am determined to abdicate, however you dissuade me.
Before I was in reach of your praise, and liked neither your praise nor
lack of it. It would not improve my feelings to put myself in reach of
your pity. It was not for this that I told you my story. I told you my
story to make my abdication irrevocable.
Yes, even now, it is painful to leave you. Not because I love you but
because I am still untired; and after I leave you there will be no more
to do. I shall indeed be more untired than ever. For while I was with
you I worked hard (as you will not deny) and achieved a certain formal
queenly tiredness from being unable to tire myself out no matter how
hard I worked. But now concealment will be impossible: my insistence,
that before I tried to make pleasant to myself (and to others) by
trying to interest it in your affairs, will in the future be plainly
horrible, as everything is horrible if sufficiently disinterested, that
is, insistent. But the horror of my insistence will not be known to
you, because I am abdicating. Nor am I to be dissuaded. The stroke that
puts me in reach of your pity puts me out of reach of it as well.
I have said more than enough to satisfy my contempt of you. But I once
loved you; and I have not punished myself sufficiently for that. What
do I mean when I say that I once loved you? That I knew that being
alive for you and me meant being more than alive. But you were afraid
to admit it, though I was willing to take all the responsibility upon
myself. Then I tried pretending to be just alive, I became for a time
a partisan of timidity, in order to show you that being just alive
was just pretending to be just alive. But when, aside, I reached
for your hand, to press it, you dishonourably misunderstood me, you
put me in the loathsome position of flirting with you. Then I tried
extorting from you everything by means of which you lived, to show you
that when you did not live you still lived. But again you wilfully
misunderstood me and over-exerted yourself to supply me with what you
thought to be my needs and what you assumed to be yours; and stubbornly
refused to not live; and were disappointed when I did not applaud
your inexhaustibility. And then once more I tried. I loaded you with
favours in order to show you that nothing made any difference; that the
most as well as the least that you could endure by belonged to being
just alive; that you were more than alive, dead. But you repulsed me
with praise and gratitude; as you would now with pity and ingratitude
if I permitted.
Then I said: ‘I will leave them alone. I will content myself with being
queen. Perhaps if I play my part conscientiously, at no time abandoning
my royal manner, they will admit everything of their own accord,
like a good, kind, though stupid, timid people.’ But my grandeur you
interpreted meanly as the grandeur of being just alive, instead of
grandly, as the showy meanness of being just alive. You watched me act
and admired my performance, but credited me with sincerity rather than
talent; you refused to act yourself, paralysed by the emotions of an
audience. My challenge, my drastic insistence, made you if anything
more timid than you already were. You were hypnotized with admiration,
you were, from the vanity you took in watching me, less than just
alive. The men behaved more disgracefully than the women because to be
a woman requires a strong theatrical sense: requires of one who is more
than man to be less than man. For this reason I took many lovers, to
humble back as many as possible into activity. And this brought all of
us to where we were in the beginning. And so I abdicate, leaving you
once more to your heroism. With it you were intolerable to me; without
it you were not only intolerable to me, but you would have eventually
become intolerable to yourselves, especially after I had left you.
You know only how to be either heroes or cowards. But you do not know
how to outwit yourselves by being neither, though seeming to be both.
‘What,’ you say indignantly, ‘would you have us be nothing?’ Ah, my
dear people, if you could you would all shortly become Queens.
But perhaps it is best that you cannot. For if you became Queens you
would in time find it necessary to abdicate, as I have; and you would,
like me, be left extremely unhappy, of having succeeded in yourselves
but failed in others.
Yes, it is true that I concealed from you the colour of my eyes. But
the distance at which I kept you from myself was precisely the distance
between being just alive and being more than alive. I was giving you a
lesson in space, not a rebuff. Since we are at the end of things, you
may come close to me and look well into my eyes; but since you have not
learned your lesson, you will still remain ignorant of their colour.
Good-bye. I am going back to my mirror, where I came from.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Mr. Lewis takes a fierce, acquisitive joy in being right: as
if it were an honour to be right, and his unique honour. But many
people, alas, are right, only with more quietness and less joy than
Mr. Lewis. To be right (to see wrong) is properly a sad, not a joyous
mental condition. To be right in Mr. Lewis’s manner is to become a
self-appointed destroyer of wrong; and so to make oneself a candidate
for destruction, in turn. To be right in his manner--so righteously
right--is to be God; and so to chasten every one into wrong.
[2] The adultishness of the individual-real is an abhorrence (as Mr.
Lewis shows it to be) of intellectualism (organized fear) in the
up-to-date White mass, which to Mr. Lewis is sentimental Bolshevism,
Bohemianism. But such an abhorrence of intellectualism in the
up-to-date White mass, if one is not careful, becomes (as in Mr. Lewis)
an adultish championship of intellectualism (organized bravado) in a
privileged White few (as any _system_ of individualism must mean by
individualism the individualism of a few)--a sentimental Toryism, in
fact, Academianism. And in what few? The few, of course, swept aside
by the time-current; the few, indeed, who might be truly individual
were they not organized into a system of individualism. Mr. Lewis’s
Toryism would be perhaps apt if he were trying to be only politically,
not philosophically right as well. But in the circumstances his satire
is as irrelevant to his right, which is philosophical, as Swift’s
would have been, had it been philosophical, to his right, which was
political. The only satire relevant to a philosophical right is a
satire like Blake’s: Blake’s faith showed the people who were wrong
to be enemies, it was not a system organizing himself into an enemy.
Mr. Lewis does not like Blake because he said that the roads of genius
(right) were crooked: Mr. Lewis believes that the roads of right should
be systematic, that the person who is right should be an enemy, a
righteous, sentimental Tory rather than a sad though angry spirit.
[3] The symbolism of the individual-real in its scientific aspects is
best explained in C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ _The Meaning of
Meaning_. In this confused mixture of philosophy, psychology, ethnology
and literature it is just possible to distinguish between what is meant
by ‘bad’ and ‘good’ symbolism. To begin with, the assumption must
be made for both varieties of symbolism that words mean nothing by
themselves. Bad symbolism is apparently the use of words for collective
propagandist purposes which distort the ‘referents’ (original objects
or events) of which the words are signs; good symbolism makes language
not an instrument of purposes but of the ‘real’ objects or events for
which it provides a sort of mathematic of signs. Words in this reformed
grammar are thus not vulgar stage-players of images; they are certified
scientific representatives of the natural objects, or constructions of
objects called events, which man’s mind, like a dust-cloud, is assumed
to obscure from himself. To Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards language is
ideally a neutral region of literalness between reality and its human
perception. Signs (of which language is this precise mathematical
grammar), being the closest the perceiving mind can come to reality,
must for convenience be regarded as reality itself; the more faithfully
they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent
reality. There is no evidence anywhere in this book that perception
is properly anything other than a slave of reality. Disobedient
perception--language by itself--is an ‘Enchanted Wood of Words.’ There
is no hint that individual perception, instead of making a separate
approximation of the general sign conveying the object, does in fact
where originality is maintained experience a revulsion from the object
or event concerned. No hint that the very genesis or _utterance_ of a
sign is an assertion of the independence of the mind against what the
authors call the sign-situation. Or that the mind is a dust-cloud only
when perceptively organized to define reality. Or that language is only
an Enchanted Wood of Words when the dragon Reality is searched for in
it. Or that words are literal man, not ‘main topics of discussion,’ not
literal perception or the science of reality.
The conclusion of this study, if one has patience to extract a
conclusion from this science-proud collation of verbal niceties, is
that man has no right to meaning: meaning is the property of reality,
which is to be known scientifically only through symbols, which in
turn are to be regulated as to interpretation by limitations on the
use of symbols, called definitions. ‘But in most matters the possible
treachery of words can only be controlled through definitions, and the
greater the number of such alternative locutions available the less
is the risk of discrepancy, provided that we do not suppose symbols
to have “meaning” on their own account, and so people the world with
fictitious entities.’
But what, then, in this stabilizing of the scientific or symbolic use
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’
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