Chapter VI: Part 6

[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’