Chapter II: Part 2

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